My journey into 3D

The only 3d software I had ever really played with before 3DS Max was Google Sketch which when I used it wasn't very useful. So my first lesson started well with following a nice step by step tutorial on how to make a church... then we got thrown in the deep end and given the assignment of creating a Dalek. Many failed attempts later I created this guy.

I managed to get the main shapes down and it looked relatively like a Dalek. I didn't have enough triangles at this point to put circles all the way round but now that I look at it I realise how little I knew about so many of the tools. In this one I would have benifitted so much from knowing about the chamfer and inset tools. You see all the rectangles near the top going all the way round, I had to play around so much with the cutting tool to make them. Cutting is really unaccurute and as you might be able to see my rectangles arn't exactly straight. Then we have the base... I'm sure I wasted around 2 hours making it and all I needed to do was chamfer its edges but instead I spent my time repositioning each side over and over again.

                                            Just getting to this point was a milestone

Then we were given our next project, to create a wheeley bin. Things started off well but like the Dalek I still had no idea about the tools properly.

This is my bin and guess what I forgot to do.... chamfer the edges.... It would have made it look a lot nicer and less boxy but I just didn't know what Chamfer was.

The next week we had the great introduction to texturing and UV maps. I probably made around 10 different UV maps until I got introduced to my very helpful gurus and they talked me through it. First I had used the flatten UV map option, which is a big no no, until I created another few seperating out each part onto the map but my textures becoming distorted, until finally learning the most detailed parts need to have the most space at which point i created this texture sheet.

                                                      If only I knew of the chamfer tool!
I should have chamfered the edges but by this point and all the messing around with the UV template that I did, I didn't want to have redo my UV template and textures messing with the mesh and adding in the extra corners. You might also be able to see it but I used a bump map in certain places like the council symbol.

Now with an understanding of the tools I've easily been able to construct the mesh for my Guru project of creating a Camera.

Not only that but I think I'm getting the hang of UV maps. Theres only a few of the squares which are stretching underneath that I need to fix but its slowly coming together... now to create a house.