Book Image

3ds Max Speed Modeling for 3D Artists

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

3ds Max Speed Modeling for 3D Artists

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

Production of 3D art is an exciting medium, but the task of modeling requires intense attention to detail, so speed and efficiency are vital. This book breaks down speed modeling workflow in 3ds Max into stages you can easily achieve, with a focus on hard surface modeling and methods you can apply to your own designs."3ds Max Speed Modeling for 3D Artists" will help level up your 3D modeling skills. It focuses on hard surface modeling, and shows the range of tools and techniques in 3ds Max 2013.This book shows content creation methods aimed at 3ds Max modelers preparing to show their skill to the industry. The key feature of modeling that artists must exhibit is speediness while preserving technical accuracy. The author helps you follow set project guidelines while pushing creativity and outlines the entire workflow from concept development to exporting a game-ready model.The book begins with introductions for new users to the interface and modeling tools, and progresses to topics aimed at users already familiar with 3ds Max, who want to improve their content creation process. You'll also see ways 3ds Max content is used with other applications, like sculpting software and game editors, and learn features of speed modeling, efficient workflow, re-use of content, and tips on getting more done, more quickly.By the end of this book you will have learned key topics in modeling, ready to face professional level work with elan.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
3ds Max Speed Modeling for 3D Artists
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Finalizing the retopologized model


Suppose that you have manually reconstructed the head, used Cylinders as the base for the legs and tail and conformed those, and used WrapIt for the bulk of the body; you could attach the pieces together and use Quad Cap Pro on the borders between them to seal up gaps, and then relax the result using Conform Relax. The final check on the model is that its symmetry is okay and that there are no stray triangles or N-gons, which is easiest to do using Selection | Select by Numeric in the Ribbon. An example is provided in \Packt3dsMax\Chapter 9\RetopoBodyWrapItJoins.max (you don't need the WrapIt plugin or Quad Cap Pro script to open the resulting mesh).

As a final note, it is possible to automatically reduce the polygon count in a mesh while retaining its texture mapping using the Pro Optimizer modifier. Nice topology will generally be tossed out by this modifier, but it can produce a result very quickly. The usefulness of this might be to generate a very low...