3DS Max Exercises 1.1 - Wheel

Ship wheel

My first exercise in 3DS max was to create a ship wheel. This allowed me to learn about primitive shapes and techniques for symmetrical cloning. I plan to document important parts of the process to evaluate and refer back to later for any useful techniques.

Looking into the primitive shapes available, the cylinder and tube options for the handles and wheel respectively seem the best choice:

To quickly produce the 8 handles perfectly positioned in a circle, I have found an option where you can clone an object a number of times based on the angle and position you have dragged it to:

  

Issue: Though this technique has duplicated the cylinders perfectly 45 degrees apart, there is no gap in the centre for the inner tube. 

Solution: The rotation and placing needs to work around a central pivot which needs to be set on the first cylinder:

Issue: The tubes intersect with the inner circle, which may cause clipping issues and is ineffective as these polygons will never be seen but are still there:

The auto grid feature allows an object's surface to be used as the home grid would be. This means the handles can be placed accurately around the vertical surface of the inner tube and clip minimally:

I optimised the model by reducing the height segments on the handles and used the 'compound objects' tool to cut away the part of the handles that is hidden by the outer tube. I used the boolean subtract tool to cut out the shape of the outer tube on the handles. 

The end result is shown below in both 'wireframe' and 'realistic' view:

Review

Problems and solution summary:

• Handles cloned and rotated around end point of first shape. Solved by placing first handle one grid space away from the centre and changing the first handle's pivot to the grids centre
• Some polygons on the handle intersect the outer tube. Solved by making a duplicate of the outer wheel (which is deleted in the process) and cutting that out of the handles

 Good parts:

• Polygons hidden inside other geometry are deleted for efficiency and to avoid potential clipping  
• Unnecessary polygons from height segments on the tube were removed for efficiency
• Cloning of handles allowed for accurate placing around a pivot. This would be useful for cloning wings in a star wars ship

Improvements:  

• Accurate scaling on the y axis for the height of the a tube as there is no grid snapping for this option
•  Outer wheel and inner wheel could be similar thickness