Getting Started

Today we had our first practical session.

It's been about 4 years since I have last used any 3d design software, I dabbled in a bit of Maya in an old job...

The interface when at first glance is quite intimidating, as there are lot of buttons, with ambiguous icons.  First discussed was the layout of the screen, and what some of the buttons do on the main toolbar, located under the File, Edit, etc tool bar.

From my lecture, and practical, the most necessary buttons I shall be using are: undo, redo, move, rotate, scale, and snapping.

Something else to keep an eye on is that unlike Unity, where in 3d space, x is horizontal, y is vertical and z is depth, in 3ds Max when creating a shape, it appears the z is the vertical and y is the depth.  That is due to the grid (you can see on the bottom right window of the picture above) lays flat in the space so that the x and y axis follow the black lines in the centre of the grid, and by doing so the z axis appears to rise upwards.

The four-view port layout

We were set an exercise to create a maritime steering wheel in 3ds Max, using primitive shapes.


I first set about this by finding a suitable image and then trying to recreate it using the primitive shapes, to get a feel for 3ds Max.

I quickly noticed that it can be quite difficult to line up shapes together, using the four-view port layout makes this much easier.

(Nautical Ship Wheel, n.d.)

From this screenshot, I have the four-view layout, trying to line up the pole onto the central ring.  If were not to use this layout, just using perspective may look like I have it laid up correctly, but hen from another angle it wouldn't marry up.  Having to keep panning the camera around to line things up would have taken so much longer.  Using the four-view layout the top screen and left screen made this so much more accurate, and quicker for me to line each shape up precisely.



[Nautical Ship Wheel] n.d. [online] Available at: < http://ancientpoint.com/imgs/a/h/f/u/i/ship_wheel_18inches_nautical_ship_wheel_boat_steering_wheel_maritime_decor_gift_3_lgw.jpg> [Accessed 05 October 2015]