Fuel truck

This is a render of the truck showing how far I have got with the modelling. The front of the truck still needs to be finished and the headlights created and the door finished off. As well as this I still need to add the final materials add more detail.

I added smoothing to the front of the truck and adjusted the creasing of some of the edges to decrease the smoothing applied to these sections.

I decided to remove the door from the truck cab mesh so that it was a separate object. this would make it easier to model the truck and would allow me to animate the door opening if necessary.

Wheel screenshots

I didn't post any screenshots of how I created the truck wheel model at the time so I am posting them here. Above is the section of rim that I created for the wheel.

I used the rotate tool to rotate the section around so that the it was next to the original section while holding the shift key.

This brought up the clone object panel and I inscreased the amount of copies to 9 to create the full circle.
This is the final object after I had used target weld to join the vertices at the edges of the sections together.
Above is a render of the rim for the wheel. It has some slight bumps around the edge, as I think that the orginal cylinder that I used didn't have enough sides, but this are less noticable with the tyre in place.

Here is a screenshot of the tyre mesh this was created using a tube primitive.
Above is a render of the tyre with out the rim in place. Below is a screenshot of the final tyre model.

Jet fuel truck

For my third model for the assignment I am creating a Jet fuel truck. I set up reference planes with some images that I found. These images weren't very good as they are not exactly straight and I could only find images of the side and back of the truck so I had to use them as best I could.

I started modelling the truck from primitive shapes like a cylinder and boxes. I then began modelling more detail into the box for the base of the truck by extruding, moving the vertices around and adding swift loops. I attached the cylinder to the boxes and used target weld to weld together the points that I wanted to join. I deleted half of the mesh and then added a symmetry modifier to mirror the other half of the truck.

In object properties I set the objects to transparent so that I could see the reference planes through the model.
I added a mesh smooth modifier to the rear of the truck but this smoothed all of the mesh. I selected edges that I wanted to keep from being smoothed and adjusted the crease setting to 1.
When using the mesh smooth modifier I had a problem where vertices would stick out of the mesh I had to reapply the mesh smooth modifier to solve this problem.

To model the cab I started with a box and by extruding and adding loops I created the shape of the cab.
The front of the truck is proving difficult as I am having to model from reference images that I have found rather than using the reference planes that I had set up.

This is the truck so far, I have put the wheels that I modelled earlier in place so I could see how the mesh needed to be modelled around them.

Crane - finishing the model

Here is my finished crane model, this is my second model for my trailer. I took the parts that I had modelled earlier and when they were in place I grouped them together.

I used cylinders that I extruded for the ropes for the hook of the crane and modelled some railing and supports where the top and base of the crane met.

I modelled the cab from a cube using inset and extrude to create the window. I attached another cube for where the cab joins the crane and welded the vertices.

I modelled the counterweight for the crane from a box and then used chamfering to round off the edges.
I created a ground plane so that the crane had something to stand on and so that there was something to receive the shadows. I used soft selection to model some bumps into the plane and added a noise map into the bump map to make a sand/dirt type of material.

I added materials to the crane. I used texture maps for the pipes and the crane and used architectural materials for the glass on the cab and the concrete on the counterweight. I am quite happy with the materials that I have created as when looking at the crane from a distance they look ok but if I have enough time I may change them later as the crane I will need a close up in my animation.
I set up a daylight system to create a sky and quickly add light to the scene. Below is a render of the crane at a different time setting. Setting up the lights in the scene improved the look of materials and made the model look more realistic.

Cameras

The tutorial this week was to learn how to set up cameras in a scene. There are two types of camera target and free. Target cameras have a target which the camera focuses on, that can be moved around but the free camera does not. I added a camera using ctrl+c but cameras can also be added from the cameras menu.

When a camera has been created, one of the viewports can be changed to the camera view. Inside this viewport there are tools that can be used to adjust the camera settings. These are dolly camera, perspective, roll camera, field of view (FOV), truck camera, orbit camera. More camera setting can be adjusted in the modify panel.

I created a basic scene using a plane, a sphere, a cone and a cube and adjusted the camera settings. I used the dolly camera and orbit camera to move the camera intp to the place that I wanted it.

In this first image I used a 35mm lens type and adjusted the camera with the perspective tool. I enabled DOF (Depth of field) in the camera settings to blur the shapes further from the camera. I adjusted the target of the camera so that it was set inside the cone so that it would be in sharp focus.

The second image is the same camera set up as the first but the DOF has been turned off.
The third image camera set up is the same but I have used the perspective tool to change the perspective of the camera. The shapes in the background look as though they are closer to the cone in front.

The fourth image camera set up is the same an I have again used the perspective tool to change the perspective of the camera. Now the shapes in the background look as though they are further away from the cone in front.

Beginning the crane model

One of the models that I am creating is a crane I have been modelling the crane in separate sections and will put them all together to create the final crane.

I used cylinders to make the struts and rotated them into place. I used a cube for the top and bottom of the main arm of the crane and modelled more detail into the bottom section. I modelled half of the crane and then used a symmetry modifier to make the other half.

I added temporary materials so that I could easily change them later without having to assign the materials to all of the sections later when there would be lots of different objects in the way. I deleted the end polygons so that I would be able to weld the section together.

I used clone to copy the section that I had created for the amount of times that wanted and attached the sections into one object. I then used the target weld to join the vertices of the separate sections together.

For the main support section I used the same method of creating a section and then cloning it.

Here is a hook for the crane. I drew out the hook in illustrator and then imported it into 3ds max and used an extrude modifier to create the shape. I adjusted the shape of the hook so that the edges were curved instead of being flat.For the hook section I used two symmetry modifiers to mirror the mesh in two planes so that I only had to model a quarter section. I started with a box and modelled from there.

I modelled the pulleys by starting with a cylinder and using the extrude and inset tool. I created the hole in the middle by extruding both sides inwards and joining the vertices in the middle. I used a symmetry modifier so that both sides would be exactly the same.

I had trouble making the cage to carry the pipes. I used a cube and used the inset and extrude tool to extrude the middle section inwards. I then had to adjust individual vertices, add extra loops and weld vertices to create the correct shape. I used symmetry to mirror the other half so I only had to model one side.
I used tubes for the pipes and added an image as a material. I cloned the object to create the group of pipes.

Truck wheel

This is the wheel what I have modelled for the jet fuel truck that I am modelling. I used a tube for the tyre and added a tyre tread bitmap image for the diffuse and the bump map in the material.

It was quite difficult to get the image to wrap the right way around the tyre. I used the uvw map modifier set the mapping to cylinder and adjusted the setting for image rotation to change the way that the image would be applied so that the image wrapped around the tyre. I increased the tiling of the image so that it wrapped around the tyre.

The image didn't map exactly right and as it also displayed on the faces inside the tube but as you can't see this because of the rim it doesn't matter. The texture also displayed lines on the side of the tyre but I think that it looks ok.To model the rim of the wheel I started with a cylinder and deleted part of the mesh so that I was left with 1/10th of the circle. I modelled the bolt and holes in this small section, leaving the pivot point at the center. When I had finished modelling this section I used the rotate tool to clone the section around in a circle to create the whole wheel. I rotated the cloned section so that it was next to the original part that I had made and by increasing the amount of copies to be cloned I created the rest of the wheel. This required a bit of trial and error to get the wheel to join. To create the full circle the mesh had to overlap a bit, I fixed this by joining up the vertices where the sections of wheel met.

I used a mesh smooth modifier to smooth the shape of the rim. This caused some problems as I needed to at some extra loops to sections that I wanted to keep with a hard edge such as the bolts as otherwise these were also smoothed. Adding materials to the rim caused some problems as it was difficult to select the middle section of the wheel. The rim of the wheel is quite high poly so I will use this wheel for closeups and may have to model another wheel using a simple cylinder with an image texture for the long shots.

Lighting

This tutorial involved lighting a pumpkin model that was provided for the tutorial. An omni light was added inside the model to create the effect of a candle inside of the pumpkin.

I changed the intensity and colour to make it look like a candle and turned on the shadows and adjusted the density so that they were not so dark. I added another light behind the pumpkin and added an atmosphere and a volume light to make a smoke effect behind the pumpkin, this light was changed to a green colour to make it look spooky.

Here two lights were used one blue and one red, these were placed above the objects. All of the objects in the scene were changed to a white material. The cylinder was excluded from the effect of the blue light and was the only object included to be effected by the red light. The cylinder is red as it has only the red light shining on it if the cylinder wasn't excluded from the blue light it would be a purple colour. This shows how lights can be used to only effect certain objects with the scene.

This tutorial involved setting up a daylight system a sky was added to the scene and architectural materials were used on the objects. The render had to be changed from the default scanline renderer to Mental ray before this could be done. This was a quick way to light a outdoor scene produced a good result.