House Project

3ds Max is a three dimensional editing program that works by creating basic objects and shapes, then editing them in a separate subobject menu. You then take these objects and animate them using keyframes, and finally use rendering to export your work.

When designing our house, the first step is to make the outline/base of our house to put furniture in. This only requires the use of basic shapes, so we will use the standard primitives tab on the right side of the screen. I made 6 boxes for the walls, and a plane for the floor.

After we make the structure of the house, we need the furniture and objects to put inside. However, most furniture cannot be easily or well made with just basic objects. This is where subobject editing comes in. This feature allows you to edit the surface of an object, bending/forming it into shape. To use this feature, first you must adjust how many surfaces there are to edit on the 2nd tab on the right. Then, right click the object and convert it to an editable mesh, and you will be able to see all the ways you can edit your object in the 2nd tab on the right. Above is a picture of me using the "face" edit along with the "extrude" tool to create a handle for a spoon by selecting faces and dragging out.

When making doors and windows, you first need to remove the section of wall where you are going to put those objects. To do this, you use the boolean tool, found in the compound objects section of the object creation. To you this tool, you select the object you want to remove a section of, the hit boolean, then add operands, and click the object you will use to hollow out the section (should be positioned inside the wall, and the correct size of the space you want removed). Then with the second object selected as an operand, scroll down and hit "subtract" to remove that section from the wall. Now that you have your space, you can easily add your window or door, however the doors require a special setup.

When you initially create your door, it will only be able to rotate on its center point, which is not what we want. To make your door rotate on a specific point, we will need to use the link tool in the top left. With this tool selected, click and drag from the door to the rotate point, then the rotate the rotate point to get proper door movement.

When you first create an object, the base texture is just a static color, which won't due for most pieces of our house. To apply materials, press the icon in the top right (shown above), and it should open the pop up menu also shown. Standard is the material base we will be using, and below it are listed preset materials to get you the textures you need. Once your material/base is selected and attached, you can change the diffuse color of different parts to change their color, as well as other settings like tiling for some materials and glossiness.

When animating, we will be using keyframes and physical cameras. Phys cameras can be accessed and made by clicking the camera icon on the right menu where we get our blocks. Keyframes can be used by first hitting set key to tell the program you are animating, then using the big plus to make keyframes. To create the animation, move the camera's view to change where its looking while also moving the camera, setting keyframes and changing frames on the bar pictured above.

To render out your completed animation, hit the icon shown above in the top right to open the render settings window. Set your "view to render" as your phys camera and change the time segment to active time segment. Then click save file and select where you want to save your animation to, then render to finish and export your completed project!