Creating a Bollard
After using basic shapes such as the box and
cylinder in my last trial of using 3DS Max for the first time I then decided to
look into creating a shape using the Lathe Tool. This tool takes a Spline and
then using the Lathe Tool duplicates the Spline numerous times spherically to
create the shape. In the tutorial I learnt from an image of a pawn was used. I
however used the same principle the tutorial demonstrates but my choice of
object was a bollard. Here is how I created it.
Step
1:
First I need to create a Plane and then assign an
image to it so that I can draw around the shape of the bollard in the image. I
go to the Create tab on the right hand side of the interface and select plane.
I draw my Plane to the size I think is required. I then reduced the amount of
Polygons by lowering the number of length and width segments in the Parameters
menu.
Step
2:
With the Plane selected I then need to open up the
Slate Material Editor and to do this I press the shortcut key which is M.
From the Map Material Browser Panel I select
Standard and drag the Node appears to the View Port. View Port.
I then need to ‘wire’ the Bitmap (the JPEG of an
image of a bollard) into the Standard Node. To do this I drag from the Bitmap’s
node output socket and plug it into the Standard node Diffuse Colour input
socket.
I then clicked on the Assign Material to Selection
by clicking on the icon at the top of the Slate Material Editor and then
further across to the right I click on the Show Material in View Port.
Step
3:
Now the image of the bollard has been assigned to
the Plane I can now trace around the shape. I click on the Create Tab, then
Shape, then Line. To draw the line around the bollard in the image I click at
the top centre of the bollard and drag. Once I have got to the bottom centre of
the bollard I can right click to stop drawing the line.
Step
4:
In places the line wasn’t as close to the shape of
the bollard I would have liked so I needed to edit the line. As I did when I
created the shovel I needed to move some of the Vertices. I clicked on Modify
then Vertex and this highlights all the Vertices. I am now able to select individual
vertices so that I can move them ensure the lines are where I wanted them.
If some of the Vertices don’t have handles on them
this I can change this by selecting them, right-clicking and choosing Bezier.
On the bottom of the line, at the base of the
bollard I need to set them to Bezier Corner, and I do this by right clicking
and selecting the Bezier Corner option.
Step
5:
As I no longer need the reference image I can hide
it. To do this I select the image or plane that it is on, right-click and select
Hide Selection. The image will now be ‘hidden’.
Step
6:
I then select the line and chose Vertex from the
Modify panel. I then need to ensure that the top and bottom Vertices are
aligned. By pressing G I bring up the Grid so that I can align the Vertices. To
do this I select the top centre vertex and by going to the bottom of the View Port
Step
7:
I then needed to move the Pivot Point. I clicked
the Hierarchy tab and from the sub-selection I chose Effect Pivot Point. This
then adds larger arrows on the Move Tool and then going to the bottom of the View Port
Step
8:
I now want to select the Lathe Tool and I can find
this in the drop down menu under the Modify tab. As soon as I select Lathe the
line then changes to the 3D object of the Bollard.
Step
9:
Initially the bollard was mis-shaped and deformed.
This is because the Lathe Tool didn’t rotate in the correct direction and to
remedy this I clicked the through the X, Y, Z options and ensured that Centre
was selected.
Step
10:
Upon inspection of the model there were openings
at the top and bottom where the Vertices hadn’t welded together. To fix this I
select the Weld Core option.
As the bollard is now created I then unwrapped and
textured them. See the blogs on Unwrapping and Texturing on how I achieved
this.
Bollard Annotations
No comments:
Post a Comment