Modeling Adventures

One Hundred Fourth Post: Modeling Adventures

Once I designed a ship. I drew it in its front and side view and then imported my sketch into 3DS Max. From there I extruded the sides and did an intersection, which forms the shape where the shapes intersect. This left me with an interesting shape, but however, the shape formed did not truly represent the shape I drew.

It is not uncommon to have variations of a model when converting it to 3D, but I want a model that represents the shape I drew because it is just a more interesting version. So it is back to the drawing board. I am going to try to apply my newly learned modeling skills into modeling the ship. I am still going to keep things basic so that if all works according to plane I will have modeled a simple ship in about an hour. (Actually it will probably take more than an hour.)

The thing here to remember is while making 3D models it is easy to forget to experiment with the tools and let the artistic side show do to the fact there are so many commands, settings, and formatting to learn. I have said in the past that I am trying to learn the “Torque” game engine. It has a pretty high learning curve. It takes numerous steps to convert a 3DS Max file to Torque’s .dts graphics file. This is what I am learning now. It is easy to add a basic shape, but there are other things such as “collision” and “animation” that makes things more complicated.

Making a game is a challenging task that even takes a team of professional two years, but designing a level or adding a graphic is something that anyone can do once they learn the basics. And that is basically where I am at: learning the basics. But isn’t that how all things start.