subdivision surfaces - 3ds max Modeling

subdivision surfaces - 3ds max Modeling If we disable that modifier, then we see the original polygon mesh. I'll re-enable OpenSubdiv. And if we want to see the actual level of detail, we can disable the Isoline Display switch here, and now that's the actual level of detail of this model after it's been subdivided. If we change the number of iterations here, we will increase or decrease the level of detail. At an iteration level of zero, we see a mesh that's identical to the original polygon mesh or control cage. And as we increase the iteration's value, we get more detail on the surface. All right, let's go back to basics and start from just a box so that we can get some key concepts around subdivision surfaces. I'm going to reset 3ds Max from the File menu, I'm not saving any changes, and just create a box from the Create panel and go into the Modify panel and set its length, width, and height all to 100 centimeters. Back out a little bit. Looks like I've got selection brackets. With the J key, I can turn those off, and turn on edged faces with F4 once again. And now we've got a simple cube with only six faces and we can verify that by looking at this statistics in the viewport, press the 7 key on the keyboard, and it says we've got 12 polygons. So that counts each one of the triangles, so each one of these quadrilaterals is composed of two triangles, so six sides times two is 12 polygons or 12 triangles. Now let's add the OpenSubdiv modifier from the Modifier List, scroll down a little bit, OpenSubdiv, and it has a default iteration value of one. And now we have 24 polygons instead of 12. We've actually doubled the number of triangles. 

3ds max 2020 subdivision surfaces - 3ds max Modeling As we increase the iterations, we'll see that number jump and now we've got 96 triangles. If we want to see the actual level of detail once again, we can disable Isoline Display. And as we increase that value once again, we're getting more and more detail. And with an iteration's value of four, we already have over 1,500 polygons. We went from 12 to 1,500. Usually, you want that iteration's value to be around two or three for most applications. All right, now we understand how that works. We can disable the statistics with the 7 key once again. One of the most key considerations with subdivision surface modeling is quadrilateral polygons. You want to have quads everywhere if possible. Try to avoid polygons with more than four sides and try to avoid triangles if you can. I'll show you an example. Just go over to the Create panel and create a standard primitive cylinder. Click and drag, drag up to set the height, right-click to exit, go to the Modify panel and add an OpenSubdiv modifier. And it looks quite odd at the top and bottom. And this is not really a good situation. If we turn Isoline Display off, we can see that it's actually quite ugly geometry. As we increase the number of iterations, we can see that this is going to be very difficult for us to work with if we want to actually shape this in a model. So I'm going to go into this cylinder parameters and make a couple changes here. Most notably, I'm going to set the number of sides to a multiple of four and that will make it easy for me to divide the cap of the cylinder into quadrilaterals. All right, so we can see this is happening. Let's disable OpenSubdiv and set the number of sides to 16.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Constraining sub-object transforms

3ds max Polygon Modeling Constraining sub-object transforms Click attach again to finish the operation and we still need to weld just as we did before we need to weld all those vertices so we can go into vertex sub-object mode and actually just select all of the vertices just to be safe, maybe get in really close, make sure we don't get any undesired effects and then once again open up the weld caddy. We can do that from the modify panel here. Here's the options button and we have the weld vertices caddy and we got a value .001 meters left over from the previous operation and that's probably fine, I don't see any problems. We can go ahead and just click okay. And all those open seams have been welded. We can double-check that by going into element sub-object mode and just click and you'll see that the entire object is a single element. Alright, we've completed the chair base, exit out of sub-object mode and then also change the name because it's no longer a single leg. We'll call it chair base and that's how to use the sub-object constraints in editable poly and it concludes our chapter on polygon modeling.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Refining geometry with SwiftLoop

3ds max Polygon Modeling Refining geometry with SwiftLoop  And because we're instancing these objects, you'll notice that the other object, the other chair legs, also have that detail added. Alright, very cool and very easy. As long as you have clean geometry with all quadrilaterals, then the Swift Loop tool is going to be very useful to you for refining that geometry. When you finish, you want to click the button to turn that tool off, or right click to exit the tool, and that's how to use Swift Loop in Editable Poly

3ds max Polygon Modeling Welding vertices

3ds max Polygon Modeling Welding vertices . So in the left view or any view, I can press the seven key, and I can see how many vertices I have in the seam right now but drilling down even deeper, I want to visualize the number of vertices on the selection, not just in the seam. And that's done through the Configuration dialog. Let's exit out of weld vertices. Go into the viewport configuration, click on the plus sign on any viewport, go to Configure Viewports and Statistics and we want total plus selection enabled. Click OK and now we can see that we have 64 vertices selected. And then we'll go back to our weld, Shift + click on Weld and maybe maximize this left view, Alt + W, we can see that we're welding vertices that we don't want to, so let's reduce the weld threshold. It's down to .003 meters. 

3ds max Polygon Modeling Welding vertices We'll bring it down even lower, let's make it .001 meters and press Enter and now we're not welding any vertices that we didn't want to. Good, so we have 64 vertices selected. Go ahead and issue the Weld command. Click on that checkbox and look over here, we have 32 vertices selected. And that's exactly the result we want. Those double vertices at the scene have been welded or combined and now the selection is half as many vertices. We'll go back to the four viewport layout with Alt + W, exit out of vertex mode, go into element mode and if we click on here, we'll see that we only have one element now. Very good, we can exit out of Element mode and that's how to weld or combine vertices to close up gaps in geometry.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Reflecting objects with Mirror

3ds max Polygon Modeling Reflecting objects with Mirror so I'm actually propagating those changes to the reflection. Alright, so I don't actually need to do any edits, it's fine as it is, so I'm going to undo that with the undo button up here and then exit out of sub-object mode, go up to the top level of the mirror, and we can just convert this to Editable Poly and then attach it to the other half of the chair leg. Right-click, Convert To, Convert to Editable Poly, and it's no longer a reference.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Reflecting objects with Mirror  It has no connection to the other object, and now we can actually attach the two together. If they were instanced or referenced, we wouldn't be able to make that attachment. Select the original object, chair base leg. We want to find the attach button. Here it is on the modeling ribbon. Click Attach, and then click on the other object. Now they're both part of that same object. We can click Attach again to turn that tool off. And, we have an open border here between the two. We're going to weld that later to close up that seam, but for now they're two separate elements within this one object. And, if we go into element sub-object mode, we can select one or the other elements, just to show that they are not connected, they're not part of the same polygon shell. Exit out of sub-object element, and that's how to use the mirror tool to reflect geometry.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Detailing with Editable Poly Chamfer

3ds max Polygon Modeling Detailing with Editable Poly Chamfer And because of these triangles, and especially because of the very skinny triangles at the corners here, the chamfer tool is going to have some issues. If you wanted to apply a chamfer on this back corner, then you would need to manually remove all of these interior triangle edges using the remove tool. And unfortunately there's no tool in 3ds Max that's going to convert this into quadrilateral geometry. 

3ds max Polygon Modeling Detailing with Editable Poly ChamferThere are a couple of modifiers such as optimize and quadify but they frankly just don't work and I don't recommend that you try to use them for this purpose. Those are more for decimating models and getting them to a lower level of detail. So, again if you wanted to apply a chamfer in the back here, you'd have to go around and manually remove all of these interior triangle edges so that all of the polygons that are being chamfered start out as quadrilaterals and then you'll have no issues. So, if we go back to the front, orbit around, we see that once again because these are all quadrilaterals, the chamfer tool worked perfectly there. That's how to use the editable poly chamfer tool.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Extruding a planar surface to a closed volume

 3ds max Polygon Modeling Extruding a planar surface to a closed volume And we're seeing a preview. And so what it's done is it's not created a new polygon. It's taken the existing polygon and shifted it backward and then it's created this new ring of polygons around that. But it's open. There's nothing in front here. We'll have to fix that. So okay this is what we want. We've got that so we can go ahead and click okay to complete the extrude polygons command and we want to flip the surface normals. Each one of these polygons has a direction and that is called its surface normal and we want those surface normals to be pointed outward so that when we view this from behind, it will look shaded. So let's see what that looks like. I'll tumble around or orbit around to the back. And we can se that these faces are pointed away from us because they're actually shaded black. So we want to flip all of those. The easy way to select all of those polygons is to select by element. Choose element sub-object mode and then click to select all those connected polygons and then click the flip button. You should do it from the modify panel here because I was having some issues with the modeling ribbon earlier so, just to be safe, we'll use the modify panel. Click the flip button and now the normals are reversed and if we orbit around to the front now, and exit out of element sub-object mode, now we see that the interior surfaces are rendering in black and this is what we want. The object is correctly oriented; the surface normals are all pointed outward and we can cover that hole just by adding a cap holes modifier