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As discussed in previous posts, 3ds Max is a surface modeler. That means that materials on the surfaces of objects don’t take into account the thickness of the object. V-Ray has a clever tool for this that allows all kinds of fun, realistic effects-Translucency. V-Ray Translucency isn’t documented very well, and there is virtually no information on the internet about it. Today, we’ll take a look at how it works to make realistic glass.

First, lets set up the scene.

-3ds Max 9 SP1
-Floor: V-Ray plane with a Checker diffuse. Tiling 1 x 1 and black & white squares:

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A client approached me with a need to produce an animation in Line Drawing format. I didn’t understand what they meant. They meant that all shapes are simply oulined, and the shapes themselves have no materials assigned to them. In fact, the entire environment (background) was to be the same color as all the objects, giving the scene a floating kind of look as the camera circled the scene.

This seemed to be really hard! How could I disable shadows, shading, radiosity-everything-and still make the shapes discernable? The more I thought about it, the more possibilities arose. Unfortunately, 3ds Max gives the user more than one way to do somethnig-often many more. I wanted to find the easiest way to do it.

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For the last of this 3 part series, we’ll build on part 2 by making our trees (or anything else) look at the camera-by rotating those trees in only the Z axis.

This method works equally well for trees or any other object you want to have face the camera (or another object), but only pivot on the Z axis. For example, you can buy collections of photographs (with alphas) of people. You would always want the camera to be facing the flat part of any image, but with people or trees you only want those low poly objects to rotate about the vertical, or Z, axis.

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“I made a torus primitive and want to detach a section of it. When I select splines or quads and detach as element or copy, the detached part won’t select by itself; the whole torus is still selected. How can I make the detached section a completely independent object?”

You mention both splines and torus primitive. Splines and the menu that torus’ come from (primitives) are not the same, so I can’t be sure which you mean. Maybe you mean both? You mention editable spline, which only splines can be converted to, yet you also mention “quads”, which may mean a polygon (mostly 4 sides) in an editable mesh/poly, which is really just 2 faces. Forgive me, therefore, if the following has no application to your project. Feel free to fill in the blanks.

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Hi all

These days I’m working on interactive 3d walkthrough so we
requirment is to render the plan or surfaces from one side only (we r
using direct x tech. to render the scene) .So as a 3d modeler my duty
is to make sure that plane or surface should render fron the required
side only (so i used the flip command to ) and sometimes we need to
render from bothsides without using force two sided where the problem
arises ,can anyone help to sort it out

I don’t know anything about “direct x tech”, but if you are using 3ds max, you can use 2 objects back to back if you like. One thing to keep in mind is that when you create 2 objects that are supposed to represent both sides of a single object, you need to find a workable way to keep them together in the right orientation. Depending on what you are doing (still, animation, etc.) this can be done with combinations of constraints, hierarchies or even compounds.

Another approach that keeps the object count low is to use the handy-dandy “Shell” modifier. With it you can do things like specifying 0 for inner and outer shell thickness and effectively turn any object in 3ds into an object that can be seen/rendered from both “sides”. Used in excess, this increases the face count, so be sure to keep that in mind.

There is only one drawback to the method I am suggesting as compared to Mike’s. If you plan to apply a different material to each side of a plane, say, that has a shell modifier applied, you can’t do it with a “Top/Bottom” material or a “Multi/Sub-Object” material. The same material is applied to both “sides”. This is true, by the way, even if you cut up/divide the object as an editable mesh/poly.

So now you have 2 approaches to choose from, based on your needs.

Hope that helps!