Hey guys. I'm illy. I'm new here and I have just recently started learning how to work in 3D Studio Max. I'm not taking any classes or anything. Just picked up the 3DS Max bible and am looking for random tutorials online. I've only been tinkering with the program for a couple months so far. My hope is to gain the skills to one day get a job within the gaming industry as an environmental/level artist.

Anyways, i'll try and post things up in this thread frequently so I can get some good critiques and help from all of you talented folks within this great community. I'll be looking forward to getting my butt kicked around from you guys!

P.S. If any of you are willing to take a look at the 3DS Max models of any of these for a deep critique / tips and help, let me know and I will e-mail them to you. Of course, i'm sure most of you are too busy for that kind of help. But if anyone could, it would be deeply appreciated.

Here is one of the first models I tried to build completely. This is from a concept art piece of a building for Warhammer Online that I found online:



Here is the model I made for it. It's not fully complete as I did not know how to go about creating the small things seen above the doorway and I did not know how to handle doing the jutting concrete bricks/slabs on the sides of the building. Anyways, here it is:

This next model is of a ship concept done by a guy named Matt Elder. I just randomly found it online. Here is the original concept:



And here is my noobish model:

Next, I tried to model my classical guitar, just by eyeballing it. Anyways, I think that the poly/tri count is maybe too high, but I really got caught up on the little nuts, screws and things at the head of the guitar. I haven't even put the strings on it yet.

Next, I tried to eyeball-model a screwdriver I had lying around on my desk.

I needed more inspiration for things to model. Of course, I see tons of concept art and things that I WISH I could model, but i'm really not at that level yet. So, I just recently checked out the speed modeling section at the "Game Artist Forums" (http://www.game-artist.net/) and am grabbing random things from there to practice. These are in no way done with speed by me. They have taken me at least 2-3 hours to complete, each... minimum! SAD HUH?

Anyways, here are a couple of things I got through, the 'UAV' and the 'Mouse Trap'. Critique away please.

Tried the lighthouse today. Took me a lot longer than it should have i think. Based it off of the Cape Blanco Lighthouse.




And I have a few questions. First is about optimizing polys you can not see. If you take a look at the next image, it shows a portion of the lighthouse that is being covered by the small house on the side of it. As you can see, I deleted a few polys from the bottom part. Is that all that is needed to be done, or do i need to delete more than that by cutting the existing polys?



Another question is about a method that I used while modeling the windows at the top of the lighthouse. That section was a bit confusing for me as my cuts and extrudes did not seem to like each other and certain verts had to be manually moved one by one in order for it to look right. I did one window by hand, and instead of extruding and cutting the other 3, I basically made a copy of all the polys in the window and set them as another element. Then, i simply lined up the verts and edges in the next window spot and i collapsed the verts at all of the intersecting points. Basically just grabbed a chunk and sort of patched it somewhere else.

My question is, is this an OK thing to do? Is it something I should avoid doing? Also, why were the extrudes messing up and not moving certain verts out to where they should have gone? Is this issue common?

I have more questions, but i'll wait for an answer for this first.

hey illy, nice work so far. and u said you just started in max? good work. couple things. try to push for quads where u can. then reduce down to tris (but keeping the silhouette) for the final in game models. your models look pretty clean, but for instance, in your first piece, around the corner of the door you have a lot of clustering pulling off from corner to corner. that might cause some pinching. play with some smoothing groups. you'll need those, and it can show off any problems with your models. and with your lighthouse, that is fine doing what you did. you don't necessarily have to model shapes into each other, just have them cross through each other. and it'll work fine. in the concept of the lighthouse, did the house come into the lighthouse like that? or did it come close, and there was a divider between the two? or maybe just a small walkway with no roof? also small note on the ship, it looks a little off from the side viewport. it prob doesn't come to a straight end like that... most noticeably in the wings. take a look a cross section of plane (or bird) wings. their straight on bottom and curve on top, thats what produces the different air pressures that create lift.

Hey minimoose. thank you so much for your comments. I do notice that certain areas of my models have strange polygons as a result of connecting/cutting pieces that I need. After seeing many other critiques on other people's work, I guess I should really always aim for quads then. so, if you take a look at the lighthouse upclose shot of the upper level windows, you will see there is actually a 6 sided polygon that I THOUGHT I was cleaning up, but i'm guessing that was a bad 'noob' assumption. I had a mindset that if I could remove whatever edges I could, it would be better for the model.

As you mentioned, with the clusters above the door on my first model above, should I just get rid of some of the edges and make the door less round? What would be the best way to clean up some of the clustering?

Also, i'm a bit confused with the 'smoothing groups' suggestion you have given me. I see them in the polygon rollout menus, but what exactly are they used for?

And for the lighthouse model, yes, the house did go into the lighthouse like that. They were connected as one building. It's a real lighthouse that I used for reference, called the 'Cape Blanco' Lighthouse.

Thanks for the ship comments. I will try to rework the wings after taking a look at some real-life plane references.

Anyone else with crits, don't be shy. I need to get better quick! Thanks again Minimoose.

to fix the clustering, i would pull out those edges straight up, or straight to the right or left, instead of all to one point like you were doing. as far as smoothing groups go. what they do is basically smooth out the faces of your model. without them, when you where to cast a normal map, the map would carry over a hard edge for every polygon. i might have to get an example to show you what i mean. ill have to create one tomorrow. so you can see what it does, create a box in max, select all the polygons, clear smoothing groups and set them all to 1. what it will do is try to smooth out the edges on each curve. so you'll see kind of a black stretch in the materials. for every hard turn like that, you'll want to put the next edge on a different smoothing group

ok made this up real fast. here's a cylinder for an example.
1. no smoothing groups, youll see all the faceted edges, you might have seen this in some of your models where parts will show effects like this (especially if your adding and welding a lot of parts)
2. if i select all the polygons and set 1 smoothing group. it'll try to pull the edges around and show this kind of an effect.
3. start selecting edges where they turn, stuff that a single smoothing group wont handle and set it to a new smoothing group by clicking clear all, and then select a new smoothing group.
4. do the same wherever needed.

hope that helps

also you were mentioning some speed modeling and some projects you didn't think you could handle yet? what where those? a lot of times i can learn a lot more from tackling a difficult project than something i know i can do. plus you can post progress here and get help along the way. what where you looking at (interested in modeling)?

oh man. ok, thanks for that minimoose! i see how that's supposed to work. but on that first smoothing group example, it shows that i SHOULD put all of the sides of a cylinder (or round shape) on one smoothing group, right? let's also take the light house for example. take a look at the base section of the lighthouse itself. for the part that juts out, you would put the top facing polygons on their own group, the bottom facing polys on another, and then the flat ring of polygons on the same smoothing group as the rest of the lighthouse? maybe a picture would help:



also, for the cluster of edges, you said straight to the right or left. so, would this still be to all one point, or i should spread them out to separate vertices?

and about the speed modeling, here is a link to some of the speed modeling topics have i have been looking through: http://www.game-artist.net/forums/speed-modeling/

there are tons of other things i would like to tackle modeling, but i wouldn't feel confident enough until i get a better sense of the basics i'm still sort of struggling with. what gets me confused and frustrated most of the time is just the simple task of creating a certain shape and trying to learn the correct ways to do it. Whether or not to try and cut and extrude them from a shape i already have? should i be welding separate pieces together if my model is made up of different objects?

i appreciate the time and effort you have put in to help out minimoose. thanks so much and i'm storing every bit of it in my noggin.

yeah like that. nothing wrong with the way you set that up. i would do it this way though, cause you are limited in the number of smoothing groups you can use (30 but still limited). as long as the two edges next to each other aren't the same group, it doesn't matter if you reuse 1 and 2 for the entire object.


also as far as that first house guys, i was thinking about it like this.

ahhhh, i see. reusing smoothing groups on one object is fine, just alternate them basically. thanks!

i'll try that out on the first house also. would the best way be slicing planes to get exact symmetry around every wall and then reconnecting the vertices? should they be exact horizontial / vertical edges?

well easiest way would be to select two edges, and press connect. but if you want a line to be exactly straight, choose the vertices you want, and scale them to the x or y depending on where their located, that will pull them all into a straight line. very nifty little trick.

ok, messing with the smoothing groups has made a few errors visible on my lighthouse model. what the heck am i supposed to do with this?

what your seeing is the edge of the poly. that poly your looking at is a 5 sided, and you seeing that edge. what i would do is carry it up like this (yellow)

ok, i did as suggested. but it still is looking very bad. maybe something is really screwed with my model?

check your smoothing groups, it looks like maybe you have 1 and 2 activated for that part. if not that. im not sure.

alright. i tried a telephone. it took me WAYYYYY tooo long. and it's not even done yet. how long should a model like this take a person on average?



and i still can't figure out what's going on with my lighthouse model. it's driving me crazy!

About the lighthouse:
Try "turn" this edge.
http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bullevv5.jpg

Originally Posted by Minimoose

check your smoothing groups, it looks like maybe you have 1 and 2 activated for that part. if not that. im not sure.

this happens because you told him to add edges on a smooth/gouraud shaded surface, of course it will look edgier if you don't also change the curvature of the mesh, you could ad one smoothinggroup to the whole mesh it will still lok more flat in that area because he has more flat geometry.
Your whole advices are gameartwise pure nonesense, what are all these edges for?

they are neither supporting the shape nor the shading and this house is for sure not going to deform. The way he did it before was the totally perfect way for a gamemodel, it's a flat surface, why should "clustering" happen there?

@corv: thanks for the advice. i tried it, and it still doesn't work. i think i'm just going to delete that whole window and try to make it again. probably didn't like the way i did it.

@neox: thanks for the advice. so leaving the edges as they are is good for game art then. either way, i know both you and minimoose are trying to help, so whether someone's info is wrong or right, i appreciate anyone taking the time to post here.

thanks for the help guys!

didn't mean to sound rude, sorry :/

in gameart it's always a good rule to use only polygons that are needed (considering the system specs tho) so it doesn't matter what your polylimit is, always remove verts/edges/polygons that don't contribute to either shape, shading, uvsetup (splits for tiling etc) or deformation. In your case the whole wall is flat so those triangles don't affect the shading what would be the first case on a smooth surface so if you are goung to bend the wall a bit to achieve a more stylized look i'd agree to add more edges to support the shape and smooth shading, otherwise it's just fine what you did there