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.