The Palm Tree

Posted on November 26, 2014 by SusanG

I really want a palm tree in this scene. There are a few different styles of palm tree that I could use. I think I’ll go with the ones I remember from southern California. They aren’t the tropical style that the leaves are really long and droopy. The leaves on these are rounder, the fronds still droop but the leaf looks more like a big fan. Hmm. How to model this.

Once I decided which type of palm tree I wanted I had to work out, how I was going to model it. Fortunately, I am not animating this scene because I think it is going to take a long time to render just one view. I think I’m just going to have to model the leaves for the palm tree, individually. It sounds bad, and probably not efficient. However, I don’t recall these types of palm trees having that many leaves so it may not be so bad. The trunk now, that will be another story. For now, I need to figure out how to create these leaves.

As I said the leaf for this palm tree, and I apologize to those gardeners and horticulturist that might be reading this, I do not know the name of this variety of palm tree, anyway, the leaves are fairly round. A good shape to start with might be something circular. I don’t need a lot of geometry for thickness but I need to make the fronds and the stem that comes out from the tree so I need a fair amount of segments around. So I started with a cylinder. I did basically the same thing I did with the pine tree. I selected the faces or polygons around the edge, or the thickness, and I extruded them by polygon. What I did different was this time Instead of selecting the faces all the way around I selected a little over half of them to extrude. Then I extruded the face that was halfway in between those and extruded it. This gave me a basice shape. Which you can see from the bottom leaf in this picture.HolidayCard_1116a

 

You can also see how they are sort of creased in the middle. I did two things to get this. Initially I selected one half of the object and rotated it so as to get some bend. Then I selected the edges through the center of the leaf and the stem and used the soft select tool and adjusted them down. That served to add to the creasing effect.

Once the fronds were extruded I needed a bit more geometry to work with so I added some edge loops to each one that way I could bend them and shape them more easily. From there it was a lot of fiddly work. I would select a frond up to the edge loop close to the body of the leaf and then rotate it to give it some bend. Then that same selection would have to be transposed, moved up or down or sometimes a little farther out so it was longer, or even side to side. Then I would deselect that farthest from the end, close to the body of the leaf edge loop and theside edges that connected it to the next farthest edge loop and I would do the same thing. I did each frond this way.

While I tried to be smart about making the leaves, I wasn’t as smart as I could be. I did make the base leaf and then copy it to create another one. And I decided to make only about 3 or 4 different leaves and then just duplicate them for as many as I want. However, I did do all the tweaking and fiddling on the fronds on each leaf. They all started with their fronds sticking straight out. If I had been a little more efficient I would have created the first one complete, then copied it and adjusted the fronds here and there and then copied and made another. I think it would have been less work. That’s not what I did.

I created the trunk of the palm tree also from a cylinder. I did the samething with it as I did with the Christmas/Pine tree to create the bits that stick out. On the palm tree that bark type stuff that sticks out is I think from when they trim the leaves off. They cut them back only so far and just leave the rest. Anyway, it makes for good character. So I got the bits extruded and then angled them up. I also did some rotating on the end polygons to give a better angle to the bits. When I applied turbosmooth they were a bit too pointy and I wanted them a little more rounded or squared so I added extra edge loops all around to get that.

HolidayCard_1119b

I did that for the top, where I will attach the palm leaves and the base of the tree.

Then of course I needed to see what it was going to look like with the leaves on the tree so I moved all of them that I had modeled over to the trunk and rotated and transposed them into spots where they were sticking out from the stumps at the top.

It’s looking pretty cool to me. I kind of excited about it now. I have one more leaf to finish tweaking and then I will need to start copying them and adding them until I have just the HolidayCard_1116eright amount. I don’t think it will take too many palm leaves but a few more will help.

The palm tree has been taking the longest to get modeled. Partly because of interuptions and partly due to the fiddliness of the process. Sometimes that happens and it can be a challenge to not give up and go a different direction. But staying course and working towards the vision I have for this piece is paying off. I am really pleased with the way the palm leaves are turning out.

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One Wall Ready

Posted on November 22, 2014 by SusanG

So for the office I decided it was going to be easiest to just take one wall at a time and block in the stationary items for that wall. As with a lot of things I do, this sounds easier than it is. A little warning, it requires a bit of math.

I started out by just modeling a basic shape and the size of the items I needed. So I started with the wall that has the door to the hallway on it. I needed an object for the lightswitch plate, the outlet, the door and the door frame since it sticks out from the wall and takes up space around the door so it limits the usable wall space. Also, I had to add something for the base board. It took sticks out from the wall. Not that that should matter a lot, but it is .25 inches so it counts.

The room is laid out around the center point of the grid that I’m using for reference. What this means is that if my wall is 142 inches long and I want something at one end of the wall, the measure I use is half that. Hopefully this picture helps explain that.GridWalldemo

What made this a big deal was that when I wanted to place something correctly I had to think about how to get the coordinates. So if the door is 32 inches wide and I need it to sit so that the edge closest to the wall behind it is 4.25 inches from the wall I had to calculate how far from the center of the room that actually is. So that wall is 142 inches long, I divide that in half and get 71. Then I subtract the 4.25 and get 66.75 so that takes care of the distance from that wall. Now I need to subtract half of the width of the door. The door is 32 inches, divide by 2 and that gives me 16 which I subtract from 66.75. And so the center point of my door needs to sit 50.75 inches along the one axis, from the center point of the room along that same axis.

So that is a lot of numbers explaining basically what it took to get the blocked in parts of the wall in the correct places. It was a lot of fun, even if it sounds really complicated. It was sort of like a puzzle.

But I got all the pieces in for this wall. I have not applied any materials to the different objects yet. But at least they are different enough that you can see what is where.Office2014_1104a

I want to be able to show the door open so in addition to blocking in the door with a basic box, I needed to cut out the opening for the door. Since I made the wall of a basic box I didn’t give it a lot of extra segments to the different sides so I needed to add some edge loops to create polygons where the door goes so that I could then remove them and make a big hole.

In this image of the room so far I chose to hide the door so you can see that there is now the whole in the wall for the door.Office2014_1104b

So the room is progressing. It’s time to start the next wall. I’m not sure yet which one that will be. For certain the next one will be a bit more difficult to get to the stationary items to measure for their placement.

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Computer setup and Getting Started

Posted on November 18, 2014 by SusanG

I did need to do a bit of computer setup in 3DS Max for the office modeling. As I was looking at my office and thinking about the different things I need to put in it and things I need to measure, I decided I was going to be best off if I set up everything to use inches. That way I can take my measurements in inches and just translate them and know it’s to scale.

I couldn’t remember where to do this so I poked around and first I found, under tools Grids and Snaps and then the Grids and Snaps settings…GridnSnap

I figured the Home Grid was what I wanted. It was and it wasn’t. This is not where I set my units. This though let me set how far apart the grid lines would be. So I set the spacing as you see here.

I still needed to set my units. That I finally found under Customize. It was there plain as can be as Units Setup…

UnitsSetup

I actually set it to US Standard and used decimal inches. Since I will be adding lights to the room as well I set the Lighting Units to American. Now that’s all set time to get modeling.

So the room is 144 inches by 155 inches. About 12 feet by amlost 13 feet. It’s a good size room really. And the walls are about 106.5 inches tall so a bit over 8 feet closer to 9 feet high. Not bad. Now I need to build them

The nice thing is that for this, no I don’t actually need to frame them and sheet rock them and all that. I just need boxes of the same shape and size. I also need a floor and a ceiling. It will make things easier.

I put in two of the walls and then decided to do the floor and then ceiling. When I added the floor I decided to move it so it is just below the grid so I can see the grid as I’m working. Also, since the floor is the size of the room I adjusted the walls so they sit at the edges of the floor. So those boxes sit corner to corner. For the ceiling it was just a matter of making a copy of the floor and transposing it up to the height it is supposed to be.ObjectonGrid

I added the other two walls to finish out the room. Now I have a box. Ok. Nope. Not very exciting this way. But it’s a start. I will have to hide some of the walls as I work so that I can see where things go. Looking through the wire frame can become confusing at a certain point. So this is it so far.

Office2014_1102a

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One Tree Done and Now For the Next One

Posted on November 14, 2014 by SusanG

I finally got the last few layers of the pine tree completed.

I got the last few layers extruded out and was able to adjust them so that they have a bit better thickness than previously. Oh and the spacing. I got that worked out. It took quite a bit of adjusting things. Mostly I spent a lot of time selecting the entire set of edges that would make a loop, or full circle, and moving them up or down along the z axis or scaling them up or down along the xy axis. If I moved the loop up I had to scale it smaller and if I HolidayCard_1102bmoved it down I had to scale it larger. And the closer in under the upper layers that I went the more challenging it was to get it right. I couldn’t make too big a move up without first scaling the loop down. Otherwise it might poke out of the other geometry.

I also added the trunk of the tree. I had to extend all that back down. I had moved it all so that it was up in the tree. At some point when I did that the center point on the very bottom got way off center of everything else. I had to re-center it so that things would look right.

As I was finishing up and thinking about starting the next step I was looking at one of the wire frame view ports and thought it looked cool to see the tree in wire frame so I took a screenshot for you.HC_WireFront_1102a

The next item to go in is the Cactus.

This object, I know I want to start using a box. A rectangular box, but a box. Which I suppose is a little weird because I could use a cylinder pretty much, just as effectively. And I may end up making one that way to compare them. For now though, I have started the cactus using a tall box. I added some edge loops in the middle area where I knew I wanted to arms to branch off. I did this so I would be able to extrude a face off from the main trunk to add more geometry and create the arms. I had to make the extrusion and then I added another edge loop or two and then I rotated the face/polygon at the very end so it angled up a little. Then I had to move it up a bit. I did that in small increments a time or two and then added another edge loop and did the smale rotate and move procedure again.

In addition to the rotate and move bits, once I got the arm built I found the arm was a bit squished or deflated on one side so I had to do some scaling and even moving of actual edges to fluff out the arm.

I pretty much followed the same prodcedure for the smaller arm. Lots of move a bit, rotate a bit, move a bit, rotate a bit and add an edge loop here or there. Oh, and of course a bit of scaling and edge moving.

A look at things with turbosmooth showed that I needed a couple of edge loops on the main trunk. One edge loop towards the top to round it up a bit more and one really close to the bottom to make it more cylindrical at the bottom. HolidayCard_1102c

Without the turbosmooth modifier applied to the tree and the cactus they definitely are very boxy even with the tree starting from a cone.

It is tempting to use them this way, all rough and angular and boxy and such. I might do that by the time I get done, though that wasn’t my original vision.

For now, here is what they both look like with the turbosmooth modifier applied.

HolidayCard_1102d

 

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Starting on the Office

Posted on November 9, 2014 by SusanG

It is time to get started on the Model My Home Office project. It has become even more compelling than it was when I initially conceived the project. And since I just spent a day and a half working from home and finding the current setup totally inefficient for including the additional work space occasionally required for my day job the need and desire to move things around is becoming ever more desperate.

It appears there is going to be a lot more outside the computer prep work needed for this project, or at least more time consuming prep work. And there will probably be some inside the computer prep work. I expected the outside the computer prep work, at least to some extent, I’m not sure about the in the computer stuff. Though I don’t think the in the computer work will be nearly as time consuming as the outside the computer work.

For in the computer I will need to set up my grid system and display both the horizontal and vertical. I’m not sure if I’m going to need it three sided yet or not. We’ll see.tapmeasure_sm

The outside the computer prep work involves getting the dimensions of the room. You try this by yourself. I don’t know about you, my tape measure doesn’t always cooperate. No, I don’t have some fancy electronic measuring device. Just an old fashioned one inch wide auto stop 25
foot tape measure.

 

Adding to getting the basic room dimensions there are the niggling bits of where the outlets are along the wall, where on the wall the door is and how much of that space is taken up by the trim around the door, and where the window is and so on. Honestly, all of this would be so much easier if the room were totally empty. I could get to everything and have just those dimensions as well as all the height dimensions noted in probably 2 hours. Alas, no. My room is full and the walls are basically covered with furniture. Just to get the basic floor dimensions I had to snake the tape under a desk and I had to go behind a door. It’s going to be a challenge.

All of that so far is just going to be to get the room itself modeled. I still have stuff in the room. I need to get the dimensions on those things, even if they are rough dimensions. I have a lot of stuff. This is going to take a while.

Of course, trying to model enough of this stuff to rearrange the office may cause me to rethink the necessity or functionality of some of what I have. Then again…maybe not.

So at least things are starting to see progress.

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