Software Trials - 3DS Max

Creating a Lamp Post

From what I had learnt from creating a shovel from using basic shapes and a bollard from using the lathe tool, I combined both of these techniques to create a Lamp Post. I also used two other techniques which are to duplicate and rotate objects and to cut out inserts from an object to create panels on the Lamp Post to enable light to be shone.

To create the post of the Lamp Post I followed Steps 1-10 of the Bollard blog, but here they are again to recap.

Step 1 – The Post:

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.

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. Also from the Map Material Browser I select Bitmap and drag this Node onto the View Port. This opens a dialogue box to the image that I want to assign to the Plane, the press OK.

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 post in the image I click at the top centre of the post 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 post 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, choosing the X-axis, I right click on the down arrow. I then follow the same procedure for the bottom centre vertex.

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 I right-clicked on both the X-axis and the Y-axis to. I then uncheck Effect Pivot Point by clicking on the sub-selection.

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 Post.

Step 9:

Initially the post 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 after highlighting the vertices.

Step 11 –The Stand:

To be able to see the reference image again I right-clicked and selected Show Hidden. I then went to the create panel and created a new Shape with the Line Tool. I traced around the reference of the stand before editing any vertices that I felt needed to be corrected. To be able to turn the line into a mesh, so that it could be textured later, I then went to the Modify tab and selected my spline and added the Sweep modifier to it. This created the desired shape.

Step 12:

Now that I had created one of the four stands I simply Cloned and Rotated the first then a pop up window appeared where I selected the amount of times it would be cloned. This also offset the angle also creating an array. I achieved this by selecting my first stand, right-click and select Clone. This clones the object in the same place as the original. To move this I need to use the Rotation Tool and while holding Shift. I can access this by pressing the shortcut key which is E. I then rotated the stand by 90 degrees.

Step 13: The Light Box

I created a simple box by going to the Create tab and selecting Box. Once I drew the shape I went into sub-object mode and modified it by selecting the vertices as the bottom of the box and scaled it down. To scale it down I used the shortcut key R to bring up the Scale Tool and from here I was able to bring the vertices in a little to make the box a little narrower.

Step 14:

To take out the inserts, in Sub Object mode I selected the polygons I wanted to edit and then went to the Modify tab. I then chose Inset. I can then scale down this new Inset by using the Scale Tool and Bevel tool, by pressing R, and scaling down the size of the new polygon or the Bevel settings in on the modifier tab. Once I have done this I then select the face and delete it. This created 4 holes in the mesh that were where the glass would have been blasted away, alternatively I could have kept the inset polygons and textured them with a transparent material to simulate glass.

Step 15 – The Top:

To create the top of the Lamp Post I used the Line Tool to outline the shape. I then used the Lathe Tool to create the model and any additional changes were made using the methods I had used earlier when I created the Post and the Bollard previously.

As the Lamp Post is now created I then unwrapped and textured them. See the blogs on Unwrapping and Texturing on how I achieved this.

After I had textured the objects I then linked them together by selecting the stands, light box and top objects individually and linking it to the post and clicking on the chain link icon in the top left of the interface.

Lamp Post Annotations