Overview

Having never used 3D studio Max before, I found creating these scenes a difficult task in the beginning but with some guidance from tutors and other students in the class, paired with online tutorials I got there in the end. I feel I created quite good scenes for a first try and enjoyed using this programme and look forward to the animation side in the future.

Final January Scene

I started this scene with a large plain which I inflicted noise onto to create the snow effect. I then added the previously created snowman, trees and lantern which were all made from primative shapes. I rendered different textures to the objects, smoke to the trees which I made stipply like pine trees and a snow effect to the snowman and plane below him. I then adjusted the omni light to reflect a true shadow and added the snowy background in the distance using a simple flat plane.

Final July Scene

I firstly created a large plane form the primative shapes menu which I used noise to give texture. This became the sand which I then added smoke and played with the alterations to create the sandy texture. The sea was also created using a plane which I made transparent and slightly reflective for effect. The umbrella was created using half a sphere which is explained previously in the blog. The chair, also made previously, was inserted and and a directional spotlight was added to cast the correct shadows. I changed the amount of shadow and the colour of the light to a soft yellow to brighten the sand and give the scene a warm glow.

Final April Scene

I created this scene by making a spline for each of the three leaves using the line tool, I then added the bitmap of the leaf within the created shape. Using soft selection, I bent each leaf to a unique shape to interact with the design. I then added the droplets to the leaves which where spheres form the primative shapes menu, which I rendered transparent with a little self glow and added refraction. The tree trunk and branch were constructed from cylinders which where then distorted using the noise function and rendered with a bark bitmap image found on the internet. The background image of the forest was one I found on a google search which I blurred slightly using gaussian blur in Photoshop to give a perspective feel to the final image. This image was placed in environments to show over the whole document.

This image shows the water droplets on the leaf. To create these I used a simple sphere which I made transparent, added refraction and used the melt fuction to make the shape appear as a droplet. I feel it will work well in the final image.

For creating my april scene I chose to use a close up of leaves with water doplets in a new forest environment. I orihinally began designing the leaves using alpha channels which is shown in the image above. Although it appears to work, due to the plane which the leaf bitmap is on, there are no true shadows cast on the leaves when a sufficient light is added. To correct this I use splines to create the leaves by tracing their image using the line tool and placing the bitmap of a leaf onto the surface. This method worked well with the shadows and look identical to the alpha channels method.

Heres a lantern I create for the January scene, I created it using simple shapes and I added an very opaque omni light with a slightly yellow tint to give a candle look to the object. On the right is the wire frame and on the left is the finished product.

Heres a screen dump of my July scene in progress. I created the umbrella using a sphere, cut it in half then reduces the segments to 18, i then selected every other edge and pulled them in to create the umbreela shape. The previously created chair is also added to the scene.

Heres a chair which I created using standard shapes found in the primative shapes menu and rendered the wood effect hich is found in the textures menu. I plan to use this chair in my July Beach scene to cast an effective shadow on the sand behind it.