Sci-fi Ship, Week 2

Following on from the previous week, I continued to build the Space Ship. The build was very successful, and I learnt a lot from it. (Always good).

I decided I wanted to push a few more details with this model, including wires, a more natural cloth (though somewhat stretched), and decent topology.

This spin around render is of my final build:

As previously mentioned, I learnt a few things from building this. I will cover a few of the important ones below.

Firstly, I learnt a bit more on how to use the line tool, and how this can be used to make wires. The only downside is that although you can change the number of polys going around the circumference of the wire, I couldn't seem to find a way to reduce the length segments. This meant I had to manually delete the ones that weren't needed.

Secondly, I explored how to use the cloth modifier. This was great to simulate gravity on a cloth. I had to do a lot of tweaking afterward to make it look more stretched. It was great to find out that 3DS Max has presets for different types of cloth too! So I was able to pick "Heavy Leather" and get good results out of the box.

Finally I learnt another lesson with topology. Originally my plan was to put this into zBrush to get some funky detail on there. Though once I put the model into zBrush, I discovered that an uneven polygon distribution meant uneven detail across the model. Though I did watch some tutorials on re-topologising a high poly model to low. I really want to give this a shot next assignment. I'll probably do the whole thing in zBrush and just fine tune the outcome in max.

To help get some more renders from my model, I researched how to add a decent wireframe to the model. This was done by assigning the Mental Ray renderer, and using a Composite material. 1 material with the base colour, and 1 material set to 'wireframe'. A very simple trick and produced the following images.

Once again I was unable to take the model to a finished piece, even though I worked on it a lot longer than the required out-of-class time. My aim for the next task is to get a high poly (lots of detail) model and get it turned into an efficient low poly model. Now that I've learnt what's required from a low poly model (by correcting a thousand mistakes), I think working backwards should be a lot easier.