3D Environment

By Dan Farrer

Planning
For my planning I created a mind map to give me ideas
on what I wanted to do for my environment. After
creating it, I decided to choose to do a castaway scene.
I also created a mood board of different castaway
buildings to get ideas of what mine could look like. I
took different ideas from images and put them into my
environment.

Software Interfaces
I used a fair amount of different tools within 3Ds maxs interface. The
main tools I used were the Object tools to create the different shapes
which were needed for the buildings and environment itself. I changed
some of the shapes into editable polys so I can edit them to create
different shapes. For example, for the roof of my building I changed it to
an editable poly so I could create the point on the top of the roof. I used
the Boolean tool to be able to cut shapes from the original shaped to
make the shape different. I used the Boolean tool on the plane part to
cut out parts of it to make it look like it was ripped apart. I created
multiple models on different windows and then merged them into one
single scene. This enabled me to be able to create my models without
worrying about my other models getting in the way. I used the viewports
to make the models the right size and I helped me put the models in the
correct place on the scene.

Virtual Cameras
For my environment I have put on a couple of standard
physical cameras to get different rendering views of my
scene.

Lighting Techniques
I used a lighting effect to make the scene look more
effective and to make shadows. I made a fire within the
scene and put a lighting effect on the fire to make the
fire look like its giving out light and to make it look more
like a flame. I changed the colour of the light to give it
more of a orange glow to make it look how a fire would
be. I was also able to create a smoke looking glow to it,
to show that its a burning flame.

Texturing Techniques
For the texturing I used a mix between both the built-in
textures and I created some of my own, either using
pictures or designed them through photoshop. Within
the 3Ds Max material editor I changed some of the
colours of the materials used to be able to make it fit
inot the scene. With the water I was able to change the
wave height using the material editor.
For my buildings I used the UV Unwrap tool to get the
map of the shape so I was able to make the textures fit
correctly.

Rendering
For the rendering I use the NVIDIA Mental Ray with the
Activeshade as Default Scanline Renderer. Using the
NVIDIA Mental Ray gives me more built in Textures to
use.
The output size that I use is 1920x1080. The Image
Aspect is 1.7778 and the Pixel Aspect is 1.0.