Building

This is the first tutorial i have attempted using 3D studio Max. I started by creating a basic rectangle, this would later be my building. I had to split the surface's of the rectangle into a grid creating more faces on the building. These faces are polygons, the basic building blocks of 3D studio. The basics of 3D studio are vertices, lines and polygons. 2 vertices make a line, 3 vertices create a full object, a triangle, which is a polygon. Any flat object with a surface area in 3D studio can be called a polygon.


After creating my basic rectangle i applied 3 different modifiers:


First I used an FFD(box) this allowed to shift segments of the building around, causing a sort of wobble in the building.
The second was the Taper modifier, this thinned the building out as it went up.

The last i used was the Twist modifier, this allowed me to twist my building.



The image below shows the final combination of these 3 effects, this a created a winding snake like building.

I then started to create the windows for the building, to do this a selected all the polygons and inset them then using extrude i pushed the inset polygons slightly backwards. this created frames around my windows.

A polygon is the face of a primitive or object onscreen, a polygon is built of a minimum of 3 vertices, and are the building blocks of 3D studio max

I then created the outer shell of the building, to do this I made a copy of the original building, but selecting the "reference" option under object, this allowed the clone to keep the same shape as the original, also any changes made to the original would also change the clone. I then deleted polygons from the clone to create a border for the building. I applied the shell modifier to thicken this border.

I then created some materials, for the windows I used a light blue and brought the opacity down to make it transparent. i used a dark silver for the frames and a metallic black for the outer shell.

I made regular saves as i went through this tutorial incase i had to back track, but the tuorial was pretty simple so i didn't have to in this case. After completing this tutorial i made copies of the file on my laptop, school network and portable hard drive so if there were any technical problems I always had a back up.