Creating my calandar month July

How to create the sea

Firstly it needs to be converted into a editable object. This is done by right clicking on it, clicking convert to and choosing editable poly. I inserted a box onto the scene covering a small part of the plain. I edited it so that it covered a small piece of the plain, at a diagonal angle. I then imported a textured image of water, into Max and by selecting 'M' the material editor, I converted the box into the water texture. Now i wanted to make my sea more realistic, to do this I needed to make waves.
I right clicked on the box and converted it to an editable poly. In the properties I scrolled down and used the tool ''quick slice' this enabled me to slice up the box so I could edit it however I wanted. I sliced it up into roughly 12 odd random pieces. With these 12 pieces I used the Vertex selection and played around with the height of the sea making it look wavey.

To create the sand
I created a plain box and added a Map to the box. I wanted the box to be sand, I selected M Material Editor, to bring up the material editor and clicked on Maps. This brought up options of pre set maps I could use, I clicked on bit-map and selected a bitmap I had earlier saved which was the texture of sand.

To create the sun

I created a small Sphere, in the Material Editor (M) I selected a map of a sun affect. I dragged this onto the sphere. This gave me the basics to my sun.I then clicked on the sun and clicked on the modifier list to the right of the screen. In the large list, I selected hair and Fur. Once I clicked on hair and fur it added hair to the object selected.

The Hair And Fur modifier is the heart of the Hair And Fur feature. You apply it to any object that you want to grow hair from: either a mesh object or a spline object. If object is a mesh, the hair grows from the entire surface unless you make a sub-object selection. If the object is a spline, hair grows between the splines. There are lots of properties that appear for the hair and fur, there are also more settings such as hair root and tip colour. After playing around with these this is what I came up with

You can add as many hairs as you wanted by changing the hair percentage.

Palm Tree

I wanted to create a Palm tree as i thought this was very 'summery'. I looked at a few pictures of palm trees to get more of an idea of the trunk of the tree.

I created the trunk by creating a small square box, and i used the vertex to deform it slightly. I added the mesh smooth to give it a different affect:

The MeshSmooth modifier smoothes geometry in your scene by means of several different methods

I then used the rotate button and scale button to make each small cylinder slightly different. I stacked them on each other at different angles to give the impression of a slanted tree.

To create the branches on the trees I create one small rectangular box. I then used the soft selection tool on the vertex of the box to deform the shape. I created 7 of these and positioned them around the balls on the tree. I then edited each individual tree branch using the scale and rotate tools.

The Soft Selection controls allow you to partially select sub-objects in the vicinity of an explicit selection. This causes the explicit selection to behave as if surrounded by a "magnetic field.

Using The Bump Affect

I have now got the correct shapes for the tree base, this wasnt however the right texture that i wanted. I found a good tree texture of bark and put it as a bitmap image. This however was still not really realistic, so I decided to use bump

You can select a bitmap file or procedural map to use for bump mapping. Bump mapping makes an object appear to have a bumpy or irregular surface. When you render an object with a bump-mapped material, lighter (whiter) areas of the map appear to be raised, and darker (blacker) areas appear to be low. Above, you can change the settings once ticked to add or decrease the amount of the affect. For example, diffuse colour isticked and this is set to 67, I decreased this from 100 as further down I increased bump from 100 to 200. Increasing this meant that the bump affect was improved.

To make the balls on the tree I made three simple spheres and decided to use the 'Bump' setting which is in the map properties.

I selected 'Dent' from the map browser as my bump map image, and chose two brown colours. This gave them a much better affect, as it wasnt just oneplain colour.

Lighting is very important for the image. I spent many hours trying to decide where the lighting should go. I wanted it to be as if the sun is shining and a shadow is beign created from the tree. This was my final image.

Shaders

If your changing the the colour or a material for a shape you must use the material editor. You can get this by pressing 'm' or clicking on material on which is in the 'rendering; menu toolbar. The material box will appear which looks like this: Here you can see 6 spheres, you can apply your own shaders and materials. Below this there are a list of many different types of shaders, i will go through the most used ones with you

I am going to create a variety of shapes so you can see the different affects on different shapes. This will allow you to compare the different affects to each other

The anisotropic shader works perfect for metal materials, because it changes the shape of the specular from round to elongated. Here is my shapes, using the anisotropic shader:

Blinn - This is the standard Max default - This is a basic shader which can be used for most materials, it has a no anisotropy. Metal - This was in use until the Anisotropic shader was introduced, it is more simple in the way it works, there is a dimple in the specular graph, which means that the shader is useful for dull metal materials such as brushed stainless steel. Orin-Nayer-Blinn
This is much softer in tone than Blinn and produces a very soft feel to the material. It is ideal for organic materials such as skin, velvet, as it slightly absorbs light.


If you really want to get a good texture, you are best using an imported Map from your computer. These always give unique affects that you just cant get from the simple shaders.

Creating my 'December' month

The Room

Firstly I decided to create an empty room to become the basis of my month. I created an empty room, viewing it facing the corner.

I then found a material to use for the walls and used 'M' the material editor and selected the bitmap I wanted to be the wallpaper. Once the wallpaper was up on the walls, I decided to make my Christmas tree which i decided was going to be in the corner of the room.

Christmas Tree

I made the Christmas tree by using the Lathe tool. I first created half the shape of the tree with the line tool. once that was created I clicked on the Pivot panel on the tool bar at the top.

I had to make sure that pivot point was in the centre as this is the most important factor hen using the lathe tool. When the lathe tool was used this is what the tree looked like. I changed the colour of the tree to a dark green. I didn't however think this was a very realistic tree, so i used the hair and fur tool. I changed the settings from 20% hair to 100% hair and changed the maximum hair setting from 1000 to 7000, this means that there were considerably more hairs on the tree. I adjusted the colours of the hair tip and hair root to look like it was a Christmas tree. I really liked this affect

Fireplace and Table

To create the fire place and the table I used the Boolean option. This could be found by changing the drop down box to 'Compound Objects.'

To use the boo Lean you need to have two different objects. One has to be taken away from the other to create a Boolean affect. For both the fire place and the Table I created a square which was slightly smaller, and positioned it where I wanted there to be a hole.

I then completed the boolean.

This was found in properties by selecting the pop down box :

I selected Compound from the elements, and then selected Boolean.

I selected the smaller object that i wanted to be the hole, and then selected the following button:

If its not in the right place you can easily go back and the boolean'd object so that it is in the correct position. This is how easy it is to use the boolean.

I added the finishing touches of the textures by selecting 'M' the material editor and selecting the bitmap I wanted. I found lots of good textures and maps on the Internet.

I used as plain and inserted a picture of a fire to give the fireplace inside.

Presents and carpet

The presents were simple boxes made all different sizes and giving all different textures using the material editor. The carpet was just a plain, which is in the main properties on the right. A material was then added, which looked like a carpet. I then used the bump feature to change the texture of some of the presents. I also used Mesh smooth and selected classic affect and it softened the presents up.

Curtains

For the curtains I used a plain, and changed the material to a material I found on the internet.

Here is what I came up with as my final piece.

I really enjoyed doing December as there was lots to do. if i would have done a smaller scene maybe I would have spent more time focusing on realistic settings, I would have edited the textures more and used more of the different properties. I really liked using the hair and fur tool on the tree, as that gave it a very good texture. I also enjoyed using the bump tool and the mesh smooth as there made a simple boring object have more texture.