I was working on the pencil end of this logo and decided to try pulling the point out from the cylinder. While I was doing that I thought it would be cool to show you what it looks like when I’m working on it so you could see the shapes of the polygons. I thought this would be an easy thing to do.
What I thought this should entail was, setting a display option to render the solid object with the wireframe showing. Frustratingly this was not to be the case. Maybe it is somewhere in the program. I did not find it. I looked through the 3ds Max help as well as doing a search online. And while I found a couple of solutions, they were not the easy click one, two or three things and it works solutions.
So before I get too far, a wireframe is like the skeleton of the object. If you look at paper lanterns you can see the frame that the paper lays against to make it the shape it is. That is the same concept here. You build a frame out of wires, these are the edges, and then you lay paper or a material over the top to make it solid. But when you put the material over the top, you can no longer see all the edges you used to get the shape, only the shell.
I wanted to show you the shell and the edges at the same time.
I suppose that would be like moving the wires outside of the shell. And I found a YouTube tutorial on how to do just that. Though it wasn’t what I really wanted. The tutorial uses the method of cloning the object, and then making it just a little larger than the original. Give the original a solid material and the clone a wireframe one and then render it.
I will have to play with that method. I suspect it is actually a cleaner way of doing this.
For now, what I did was use a shell material with two standard materials and set one to solid and the other to wireframe. I then set the wireframe one to render and the other to show in the viewport. What this did was to create a wireframe of the object that you don’t see through. So it is similar to what I want though not completely. The wireframe renders the color I chose, however the object tends to be the same color as the background. Almost what I want. Not quite.
My current solution to that was to put a plane behind the object and set it to some neutral color and then render the view. I still get the same results but at least you can distinguish the item from the background of this site.
Clearly, this doesn’t really work either. But for now, it will do the trick to show you what the wireframe for this object looks like.
