Week 1

This week I was introduced to the 3D modelling program, 3DS max.

I spent the first few minutes getting used to the interface and then I made a ships wheel. I used a torus for the outside ring, a tube for the small inner ring, 3 columns for the spokes and lastly modified 6 shorter columns to form the handles.

The ships wheel that I made

After I had finished the ships wheel, I moved onto modelling a house. For the walls and floor I used rectangles to shape them, then the connect, inset and extrude tools to cut out the windows and door. for the roof I used a pyramid shape and then the connect, inset and extrude tools to cut out the window on there, then altered a few vertexes to straighten the sides and line the back of outcrop up with the roof.

The house I designed, with one of the walls cut
out so you can see inside a bit more of the inside

As you can see in the 2 pictures above, I have included the poly and vert count. Even though the house is a much larger model, the steering wheel has a much larger poly count. This is because most of the house is made up from flat surfaces which don't need many polys. the steering wheel however is made up from a lot of curved surfaces, and to get them looking smooth they need a lot of sides, which can increase the poly count a lot.

With the wheel, if I was making that for part of the game and the character wouldn't get as close as the picture above is then I would've had a lot less sides on it, which will save a lot of polys making the game run faster and as the character wouldn't be that close the player won't notice the difference.