As I worked on yet another bow for these presents I started wondering, where do I stop. Is this enough, maybe? With the different possibilities and ideas for the bows, I could go a bit overboard and keep making more. This would not allow me to get this card ready in time.
Originally, I wanted to have the card ready on December 1 since I will be putting it up on Zazzle. However, after reading something, and I forget what it was, I realized, that December 1 is a few days too late. So my current aim is to have it ready for Friday. I don’t know how that is going to go as I think the biggest challenge will turn out to be how much time it will take to render. I’ve done a couple of tests and don’t have all the pieces or lighting, and already it looks like the final image may be my longest render yet. I’m not quite there yet though. I still have to put it all together.
I finally finished the last bow, or what I will call the last bow, for this project. I could do a couple more but I will call this enough. I think it will work out just fine. Really, I probably have more bows and presents than I may need but I wanted variety.
The last bow I did get a little carried away with at first. I had one too many loops in the middle and it didn’t make it look right. So I removed it and fluffed out the other inner loops and that made it much better. Once I added it to a package I saw a couple of other areas that I could ‘fix’ and did really good to not go in and keep adjusting.
This bow is started from one of the base loops of the first bow. The shape was close enough that it cut some of the work in getting it right. However, it didn’t eliminate it. The loops look just a bit different and tighter since they sit on each other where that first bow is big and open and loose. There was quite a bit of tweaking to be done for each loop. So first I took the base and got it shaped the way I wanted and then I copied that and re-sized it
some to fit inside the first loop. This required not only the scale tool but also the rotate tool since I needed to make the second set of loops fit on top of the first. I really need to play with adjusting rotation points. I think it would make things so much easier. Anyway, the same process was repeated for the next loops. Each time I started by copying the loop I had just finished. That way I was already part way there with the rotation part and often the loop shape was closer to what I wanted.
Once I had all the loops in place I did go back and have to adjust things even more. I tightened up the space between the loops so they didn’t show big gaps. This sometimes required more manipulation overall to fix the shape and make it fuller and not as pointy. The whole process of getting this bow right required a lot of line manipulation instead of points. That made things go a little faster. Though probably not by much.
With the last bow finished I decided to add a few more present shapes. A couple got
ribbons and a couple didn’t. Again, the idea being to go for variety. So here’s all the presents with their ribbons, or not, and bows.
And it was finally time to start putting everything into one file.
First I saved each present as it’s own 3ds Max file. Then I had to go back into the file for the card from last year and save out the tree with it’s snow, to a separate 3ds Max file. I also saved each of the ornaments from that file to their own files. The snowman is already it’s own file so nothing to prep there. It did take me a minute to figure out how I needed to do this to get what I needed. The export option was only for external non-native 3ds Max files and that really wasn’t what I wanted at this point. At some point I may go back and make everything .obj files so they are more transportable but the reasons for that belong to a different post.
Getting everything into a new file turned out to be pretty easy. I just started a new file and then under import there is an option to merge from an existing 3ds Max file. That worked like a champ and I was able to get everything for each object, which really consisted of their locations, any modifiers, such as turbosmooth, and their materials, which was especially good for the snow and the ornaments. I did a quick test render to see how things were looking and it turns out that the tree and the packages are well proportioned to each other. That was lucky. The snowman is going to need a little scaling up, though maybe not too much. And the ornaments will need scaling down.
For the ornaments, since I will need a few copies of each, I am thinking of using instances instead of copies. This should work since I will be only adjusting placement and rotation once I get them scaled down. By doing that it should help with performance and file size.
At least that’s what I’ve read. But I’m not sure how it will work. It would be nice if I could do that with the presents as well, at least a bit. But think that may depend on if I can get different materials on the instanced items.
So here’s all the pieces in one place, minus the ground and the back drop. Next up, to get everything placed and staged to take that final still shot for the card. I’m getting close.
Don’t forget to check back to find out how it turned out and what I work on next. Remember, Sticks is waiting to be rigged and Greezbly is wanting me to finish up as well.