3d studiomax/lightwave ~ nermin · pdf file3ds max 2.5 or lightwave 5.5, since the tools used...

IntroductionHumankind has always been fascinated by theawesome power of nature and the creaturespopulating this world. Just thinking about thevast variety of the creatures that are living inthis world, I find it impossible not to be in-spired by some of the designs of the creaturesof this world and not try to create some of myown.

Creating a sea monster3D Creature Workshop ~ issue #2

3D StudioMAX/LightWave~ Nermin Bajagilovic

© 1999 Komodo Studio


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Creating a sea monster

Sea monsters have been around for quite a while. As amatter of fact there are literally hundreds of reportedsightings of the sea monsters. According to the legendssea monsters have swum around the margins of the knownworld since the beginning of the time, from the largeMidgard Serpent, which grew so large that it circled theworld entirely, to the Kraken, Leviathan and the lesserbut still terrifying sea monsters. Even if the sea monstersare not yet accepted by science, they are still consideredby many people to be real. Whether you believe in thesea monsters or not I’m sure that you’ll find them mostfascinating, or else you simply wouldn’t be reading thistutorial, now would you? Well you’re maybe reading itanyway because you want to learn the techniques thatwere used to create some of the sea monsters for thistutorial. In any case stick around, there is something foreveryone in this tutorial.

ToolsAs you already figured out by the title and the introduc-tion, we’ll be modeling the sea monster. My choice of 3Dpackage is 3D Studio Max. I would like to point out thattechniques used in this tutorial are fully transferable toLightWave.

In order to get most out of this tutorial you’ll have to have3DS MAX 2.5 or LightWave 5.5, since the tools used inthis tutorial are only supported by these versions Max

and LightWave. Don’t worry if you don’t have those ver-sions. Yes you won’t have access to tools that I used butyou’ll still be able to complete this tutorial, you’ll just haveto be more creative in order to achieve the same resultsoffered by tools I’m using.

What tools are we talking about here? Well in MAX we’retalking about Slice, Face Extrude and Mesh Smooth tools,while in LightWave we are talking about Knife, SmoothShift and Metaform. Some of you may already know therespective tools provide the same results in both pack-ages.

TechniqueNow that we have established what tools and packagescan be used to get the most out of this tutorial, we’ll moveonto modeling techniques used in this tutorial. As someof you may have already guessed we are not talking aboutSpline or NURBS modeling here. What are we talkingabout then? Well, we’re talking about technique that bymost artists is referred to as a box modeling technique.This technique needs little explaining. Users that are fa-miliar with this technique can jump over this little intro-duction to box modeling.

By the end of this tutorial I guarantee you’ll be boxmodeling like you never did before. It will take little or nopractice before you become a “BoxGod”, err I mean


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master of the box modeling technique. Ok, sounds great!Let’s get on with it… tell us more about this technique!

Box modeling is a very simple and straightforward tech-nique. It’s a very “clean” and fast technique that allowsyou to start simple and add more and more detail as youprogress. Basically you start with a simple box or some-times a sphere and start extruding the faces in order toadd more volume to the model that you are creating.When you are done with the basic shape of your model,after all face extruding and point tweaking you end upwith low-res mesh that can easily be surfaced and set upfor animation. You can also add additional details to themodel and it will still be a low-res model. To further in-crease the level of details you apply Meshsmooth orMetaForm to your model and hopefully you’ll end up witha really great model that has an awesome level of detail.

So much for the introduction on box modeling technique,there is more to be said about it but I believe that you’lllearn much more by practicing it rather then reading aboutit, so let’s move on!

Design

If you read some of Bill’s books like 3D Creature Work-shop, you’ll already know that Bill’s mantra is “Get toknow your creature, walk in its shoes, live it’s life for a

day!”. This is one of the most important steps in creaturecreation. You may have great modeling skills but if youdon’t invest any time at all into creature design you mayend up with a creature that looks cool but totally lacksrealism. This rule applies even if you are trying to createfantasy creatures. The most convincing art is made bymaking sure that your creatures however fantastic in ap-pearance are functional in their own terms in one way orthe other. Many of your creatures are likely going to com-bine attributes from two or more creatures. Don’t be afraidto experiment with creature’s attributes, just let your im-agination run freely, but never forget that the creature inorder to look convincing has to look as if it might actuallyfunction in one environment or the other.

A mistake that most of us make is that we want to startmodeling right away; who wants to think about design,that’s boring you may say. Well it doesn’t need to be thatway, getting to know and understand your creature andthe world it lives in can be a lot of fun indeed. Sayingthat, we are now going to take a look at how we canmake sure that we avoid some of the pitfalls that are wait-ing for us on our way to make fantastic creatures. We arealso going to take a look at the process that I went throughbefore I came up with the monsters for this tutorial.

Before I started modeling the sea monster for this tutorialI gathered all the source material that I felt would help me


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with design, this includes not only the books and the im-ages on the sea monsters but the other creatures as well.Instead of going through all the material that I found I satdown and drew a simple sea monster. That was all thedesign I did for my first sea monster. I didn’t invest anyadditional time in design of my creature, just to show youwhat can happen to your creature if you decide to skipdesign process.

Now we are going to take a look at what bad design didto my first sea monster. Take a good look at the sea mon-ster in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

Now can you tell me inyour opinion what’swrong with this model?Does it look convincingto you? It may look cool,but do you think that acreature like this couldactually survive in a hardand competitive envi-ronment like sea. Welllet’s assume it couldsomehow survive in thesea environment, but itsure would have a hardtime doing so. Why,

what’s wrong with it you might ask, I don’t see anythingwrong with it, I think it could survive. Well if you lookcarefully you’ll notice that some of the proportions be-tween torso, neck, tail and fins are making it look awk-ward thus making it harder for it to be a good swimmer. Ifa creature like this is going to be able to survive in itscompetitive environment it has to be a good swimmer.

If you take a look at its teeth you’ll notice this sea mon-ster is a predator, which is just one of the reasons why ithas to be a good swimmer. In order to feed it needs to befaster than its food or else it won’t have a good chance ofsurviving. Not only does my creature needs to be able tofeed itself it also needs to be able to protect itself from theother predators, like sharks and other sea monsters. Againthe proportions are in the way. Its massive flippers, it’s

Figure: 1. Figure: 2.


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short tail are only making it hard for it to escape from theother predators that might want to take a bite of it. Oneother detail that’s making this creature less convincing isthat its teeth are growing at the wrong place, right out ofthe edge of the mouth, it seemslike there are no lips on this crea-ture. While this may happen innature by some genetic mistake,it makes my sea monster look lessconvincing.

Before we move onto themodeling side of this tutorial takea look at Figures 3, 4, 5, 6 and7. These monsters were madespecifically for this tutorial (theyare included as support files)and they were made after Idid the first sea monster. Asyou can hopefully see someof these monsters look moreconvincing than the modelwe are going to build in thistutorial. Why, because moretime was invested into de-sign. During the design Iused the source materialthat I found earlier. Input

from the other artists that have seen the first sea monsterhelped me to focus on the important things, while work-ing on design for the creatures you just saw. We’ll becreating a great base model that you can modify to suite

your personal interest. That’s thegreat thing about creating a solidbase model, it can be used overand over again with some sim-ple, or even complex modifica-tions.

If I were hired to work for someof the leading FX studios in Hol-lywood I wouldn’t last long if Iwasn’t able to create some con-vincing creatures. If you can’t pro-


Figure: 3.


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duce acceptable results before the deadline, your carreeras a professional 3D-artist is not going to be a very suc-cessful one. If you want your name to be recognized whenit comes to creating great and outstanding creatures makesure that you invest all the time you can afford into crea-ture design. Get to know your creature and it’s environ-ment better, walk in it’s shoes, live it’s life for a day and Ican guarantee you that your creature will look more cooland convincing than you could ever imagine it would.

Modeling

I’ll bet you thought we were never going to get to theactual modeling of sea monster. Yes we are finally hereready to model our little freaky friend. I have made this aseasy to follow as possible. There are about 50 screenshots that I will be referring to so that you can understandwhat is going on. I know it can get complicated some-times so hang in there.

Now take a look at the sketch that I came up with Figure8. This is the fellow that you and I are going to bemodeling. Artists usually import the original concept ofthe creature as a template to help them with modelingbut we won’t be using one since it isn’t always necessary,but you are free to do so if you think that it will help youto follow this tutorial.

One more thing, as I already said LightWave users will beable to follow the modeling section of tutorial as well. Soremember:

Figure: 7.

Figure: 6.


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(Max) (LightWave)Slice tool Knife toolFace Extrude tool Smooth Shift toolMeshSmooth tool MetaForm toolThis is the process that we’ll go through:

Stage 1:

We’ll make the basic shape of creature, no great amountof details here.

♦ head♦ mouth♦ tongue♦ neck♦ torso♦ tail♦ flippers a bit of point and face tweaking

Stage 2:

Adding details to the basic shape, like eyes, nose, ears,teeth a lot of point and face tweaking.

Stage 3:

The final touchup with a bit of tweaking and applyingproper mapping coordinates to the model.

Ok, let’s kick this pig!

Stage 1:We’ll start by creating a simple box. Number of segmentson length, width and height should be as in Figure 9.

Next we are going to adjust the basic shape of the box bymoving the points around so we end up with somethinglike Figure 10.

Figure: 9.Figure: 8.


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Now we’ll use the Slice tool for the first time on this model.It will be used to modify the mesh a bit, which will allowus to create a mouth. So add the Slice tool as suggestedin Figure 11.

What happens whenyou use the Slice toolis that it automaticallycreates the new facesand points for you. It’snot a perfect tool, sosometimes you’ll haveto weld the points thatit created. Take a lookat Figure 12. Now se-lect those points andweld them.

We’ll need to modifythe sur face of themodel a bit more be-fore we can start mak-ing a mouth so Add theSlice tool three moretimes as seen in Figure13.

Now we have enough of the working material so we canstart working on the mouth. Start by selecting the faces wherethe mouth opening should be, as shown on Figure 14.

To create the mouth hole you should extrude those facesinward as shown in Figure 15.




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Max users that don’t’ have access to Face Extrude modi-fier can use the standard face extrude supported by theEdit Mesh modifier. I choose to use Face Extrude since Ihave access to it and also because it gives me more con-trol of the faces that are being extruded. Usually when Iwork on the mouth I hide the rest of the model so that Ican clearly see whatI’m doing. So selectand hide all the facesexcept those that youjust extruded as shownin Figure 16.

To create the mouthhole you’ll need to ex-trude several times in-ward. Start by extrud-ing the selected facesand then tweaking a bitas you extrude. I’ve ex-truded three times andafter every extrusion Iedited the points a bitin order to create lipsand rest of the mouthshown in Figure 17.

Now we’ll make a tongue. This is rather easy, start byselecting the faces in the middle of the mouth hole wherethe throat should be in Figure 18. Now extrude thosefaces about 3-4 times and tweak them along the way asyou extrude them. You should end up with something likeFigure 19.




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So much for the head for now, let’s move on to the neck.You should start by selecting the faces at the back of thehead right where the neck should begin as shown in Fig-ure 20. Yes you guessed it right we are going to extrudethose faces in order to get material that we’ll shape to bethe neck. Extrude selected faces until you end up withsomething like Figure21.

Don’t forget to tweakalong the way. If youtweak now you’ll havemore time for otherthings later, instead ofgoing back and tweak-ing later when you aredone with extruding.

Now it’s time for torso.Select the faces at theend of the neck endextrude them andtweak along the wayuntil you end up withsomething like Figure22.

Repeat the same procedure for the tail, extrude and tweakalong the way until you have something like Figure 23.

Now that wasn’t all that hard, now was it? Now you’vegot a basic shape that you can work with. You may wantto save this model to a separate file. This mesh can later




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be used as source material for new creatures. It’s good tobuild a library of different body parts you can use later. Idon’t have a large library of body parts, I have a fewhands and legs but I’m for sure going to add more to mylibrary. Why, you may ask? Well first it’s time saving andsecond why should you build something you’ve alreadybuilt? It’s not a gooduse of time to modelthe same thing overand over again. Whatyou do is you add it toyour library and thenwhen you need it youjust load it and thenmodify it to suit themodel that you areworking on.

Ok, now let’s move on.We are going to addflippers to our crea-ture. This should beeasy to follow. First weneed to remove onehalf of our model. Yeswe are going to deleteit, so select the facesshown in Figure 24.

You may ask why are we removing half of the mesh now.Well you’ll have to trust me on this one. If we startedbuilding the model with just one half we would run intosome small problems when extruding faces, that wouldtake more of our time. That’s why we started with thewhole model at the beginning. Why are we taking it away




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now? Because we are trying to save time. If we kept theother half as we add flippers, eyes, ears, and teeth wewould just run into some problems that wouldn’t be thateasy to fix.

Now that you have de-leted one half of themodel, select the facesshown in Figure 25and use the Slice toolon them as shown onthe same figure. Nowselect the faces in Fig-ure 26 and “slice”them as shown on thesame figure. Now takea look at Figure 27 andslice those faces. Thereason we are slicingthis much is we needmaterial to work with.Since there are nonethere we create someby using Slice tool.

Figure 28 shows facesthat we are going toextrude in order to cre-

ate the flipper. As you see faces have been modified a bitso that they define the general shape of the flipper. Nowstart extruding and tweaking a lot along the way, untilyou create a flipper like Figure 29. It’s not a perfect flip-per, but you can certainly add more detail later if youdesire.




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Same procedure is used for second flipper. Take a look atFigures 30, 31 and 32. Before we move on be sure toselect each flipper and add the different material num-bers to them. I used 4 and 5 for the first and the secondflipper. Also select the mouth, then the tongue and finallyassign different mate-rial numbers to themas well. I used 2 for themouth and 3 for thetongue.

Stage 2:Let’s go back to thehead in Figure 33. Weare going to tweak andmodify it a bit so thatit looks more like apredator head. Afteryou modified it youshould have somethinglike Figure 34. Now weare going to slice it abit as shown in thesame figure. I markedwhere the Slice toolshould be placed.

Note: before you add the Slice tool, you may want toselect the faces you want it to affect.




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Now that you have added more material to the head youshould tweak and modify it again till you have somethinglike Figure 35.

Now comes the big challenge, we are going to make theeye. Okay, it’s really not as hard as you might think. It’srather simple. We ex-trude some faces thentweak them and ex-trude again and tweakand so on. Follow me!Select the faces shownin Figure 36. Now ex-trude those faces about4 times, until you havesomething like in Fig-ure 37. The eye is notcompleted yet. Weneed to extrude morein order to get thosedetails you expect tosee on the creatureslike this. So extrude thefaces about 3 moretimes, so you end upwith something likeFigure 38.

Now the eye must be completed? Well not yet, take alook at Figure 39, the perspective view (the picture hasbeen modified if you noticed that something was strange).This is what we get when we apply Mesh Smooth to ourmodel. Not a very convincing looking eye you may no-tice. This is not strange, since we didn’t do much tweak-




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ing on the eye after we extruded it. A bit of point movingand tweaking is all it takes to create the eye like thatshown in Figure 40. Don’t worry if you don’t get it rightfirst time. This needs a little practice. Nobody gets it rightfirst time, not even Bill, right Bill? ;)

Oh, yes I almost for-got, don’t forget to cre-ate the actual eyeballand try to place it in theeye socket and see if itfits the eye. If it doesn’tyou’ll need to shape theeye socket so it does.

Next we’ll do the nose.Everybody is havingtheir nose done thesedays so why shouldn’twe? It’s cheap and itlooks better. Jokingaside we are going toadd the nose to ourcreature. Take a lookat Figure 41. Can yousee the face where thenose will sit? Well, youguessed it right.

We’ll start by extruding the nose outward from the head.I extruded three times as seen in Figure 42, don’t forgetto tweak along the way. Next you’ll have to extrude in-ward about two times. Tweak and scale along the way, asshown in Figure 43.




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Ok, now that we have the eye and the nose, how aboutthe ear? We are going to add one. If you came all thisway you should already know what’s going to happennext. First we select the faces where we believe the earshould sit. Then we slice those faces as shown in Figure43. Then we extrude them once outward and once in-ward as you can see inFigure 44. So muchfor the ear, that shoulddo it.

Let’s see now some-thing is still missing.What could it be? Oh,yeah the teeth aremissing. How aboutadding some? Let’s dothat! As you will seethis won’t be that hard,it’s rather easy. Re-member what I toldyou, at the end of thistutorial you’ll be a proat box modeling.

Ok, now take a look atFigure 45. In order tocreate the teeth we

need to create some material to work with. Let’s do that,select the faces shown in Figure 45 and slice them twice.We are going to build our first tooth together, so selectthe faces in Figure 46 and slice them once. Now you’llhave to deselect the upper face and keep the lower se-lected. Extrude the selected face, it comes right out of the




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lip of our creature. Extrude about four times, so you endup with something like Figure 47. Now I leave it to you todo the rest of the teeth. When you are done you will endup with something like Figure 48.

Stage 3:Okay, this is the laststage. We are going toincrease details a bitand assign the propersurfacing to our modelso let’s get started andadd some additionaldetails to our model.We are going to sliceit so take a look at Fig-ure 49. In order to givemore determinedshape to the neck,torso and the tail, you’llhave to add two slices.This will give you morecontrol of how yourmodel’s body isshaped. Before youmove on be sure totweak the model a bit,

so those new faces and the points that the Slice tool cre-ated for you are sitting right.

I’m sure you have been wondering how we’re going toassign the proper mapping coordinates to our model sothat the textures maps don’t stretch to much when we




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apply them. There are numerous of ways that this couldbe done. We are going to use a simple technique that willgive you an almost perfectly mapped model that you arelooking for. Take a look at Figures 50 and 51. In Figure50 you can see our monster looks quite different then thelast time we saw it. What has happened to it? Well I pulledout those faces and points so I could use planar mappingon the model. As you can see the mouth, teeth, tongueand the flippers are hidden from the planar mapping, soit doesn’t affect them at all. We are going to use a differ-ent kind of map for them.

Now what I want you to do is to start working on yourmodel, pull out those points until you have somethinglike Figure 50. Now you may ask yourself how are wegoing to get back to our original model that we see onFigure 51. Well, before you start modifying your modelyou should make a copy ofit. Don’t modify the copysince it will be used as amorphing target, so youcan get back to the origi-nal shape of the model.

Now once again take alook at Figure 51. Do yousee any difference betweenthe two models shown

there. Both have planar mapping coordinates, but onlythe model at the bottom has the right planar mappingcoordinates assigned to it’s surface. This is our modelthat we have modified, applied planar mapping to it inmodified state and then morphed back to the originalshape. The one on the top as you already may haveguessed has not been modified at all before assigning map-ping coordinates so is surface map stretches unnaturally.Now that was a nice trick wasn’t it?

Now let’s apply mapping to our flippers as well. Take alook at Figure 52. Just use cylindrical mapping as shownin the figure, no morphing required here. Now do thesame for the second flipper.

We are almost done with our model, we just have to mir-ror clone it in order to get the second half of the model.



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Let’s do that, make a mirror clone of your model andthen attach two meshes to each other. Don’t forget toweld the middle points of the model. If you don’t weldthem Mesh Smooth won’t work properly.

Before we Mesh Smooth we have to add the mappingcoordinates to the mouth and the tongue. I used box forthe mouth and cylindrical for the tongue. I didn’t use anymapping for the teeth, since it would be quite a job to addmapping coordinates to each sin-gle tooth. It’s up to you if youwant to add mapping coordinatesto each tooth.

Now we are definitely closing in.Let’s add Mesh Smooth to our lit-tle sea monster. We should havesomething like in Figure 53.

That’s it, we are done, well at leastI’m done weeks ago by the timeyou are reading this. Anyway herewe are. Our little sea monster justas I promised. I hope you had funduring this tutorial, I sure didn’t. Itwas a pain making it, but it wasworth it. My fingers are aching af-ter all this typing.

Wrap-Up

In this tutorial we took a look at the box modeling tech-nique and learned how to control it. We also talked a bitabout design and the role it’s playing when it comes tocreating convincing creatures. Hopefully we all came upwith convincing and cool looking sea monsters. Holly-wood is our next stop... Don’t hesitate to drop us a linewith the URL to sea creatures that you created after you

read this tutorial. I would be de-lighted to see some of the crea-tures that you come up with afteryou mastered this tutorial.

You can be sure we are going tosee each other next month andthe next month and so on to theend of time or space or tutorials.I feel like this could be the begin-ning of a great friendship. So besure to stick around and tell your

friends about us. We have moregoodies coming for you!

Have a good time!

Figure: 52.

Figure: 53.


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Artist s AcknowledgmentsFirst of all I would like to thank Bill Fleming for recogniz-ing my skills and giving me a chance to write for the3DCW. Thanks Bill! I would also like to give credits to allthe artists that criticized my work and thus helped me toimprove it. Thanks goes to Gilles Iung Lancrey(email:[email protected]), Adger (email: [email protected]) andall the other artists that didn’t write back to let me knowif I could use their name (you know who you are).

Biography

Real name: Nermin BajagilovicOnline name: CosmoI’m 22 years old and would like it to stay that way. I’velived in Sweden since I was 7. For me 3D started as ahobby, but as it seems now it’s becoming more than ahobby. I guess that I’m a freelancer now. Yeah definitelyI’m a freelancer now. My hopes are that one day I’ll reachthe sky and finally get that job as a professional digitalartist and get paid for my work. That’s all folks!site: http://www.morfish.nuemail: [email protected]

[email protected]

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http://www.morfish.nu

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3d studiomax/lightwave ~ nermin · pdf file3ds max 2.5 or lightwave 5.5, since the tools used...

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