The techniques I've been using to make simple house models in 3ds Max have given me a few thoughts. In order to save time, I've been using the extended primitives for house features such as doors and windows. I'm starting to wonder if I would have been better off making my own. In the Wild West Ravine project before this, I made my own simple four and six pane windows using little more than box primitives and boolean techniques, possibly in less time than it's taking me to fix these pre-made windows. There are a huge number of parameters, and editing is difficult because it often requires repeated small changes to each one for the desired result rather than inputing each value once. Making windows myself requires, surprisingly, less fiddling around. In addition, the pre-made windows are clunky even with reduced depth values, with the frame sticking out beyond the thin walls of the houses we're modeling, and unfortunately most of the detail is lost when the depth is reduced. This is not to mention that many of the options look the same, and certainly don't look like most windows I've seen in real life. They also consist of a huge and often unnecessary amount of polygons, something that's better off avoided. The pre-made doors have a similar problem of being clunky and having too many parameters, for a result that, in this case, could be easily recreated with a couple of box primitives and simple boolean. Overall, these extended primitives are decent at best and don't really suit the project. The Attach function, however, is incredibly useful because it allows for selecting each element separately, making texturing much easier and allowing for more detailed editing even after the objects are combined. This combined with some of the other tools can be incredibly powerful. For example, I duplicated the model I had for a house, deleted the windows, patched up the holes, shrunk it with the scale tool, and voila: two of the little structures that pop out from the roof (my lack of knowledge about architectural terminology is showing itself here). All things considered, this has been an interesting project so far. So, to summarize:
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AuthorI'm moving on to my 4th (and final) year as a Game Art & Design student at Durham School of the Arts. I'd like to call myself an artist, but I'm a programmer at heart. Archives
February 2020
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