Creating the hub - 3ds Max Tutorial

- [Voiceover] In this video, we are going to look at creating the main hub section of our robot. And so, to do that, let's select the high poly version that we already have sitting in the scene, then down on the bottom of the Max UI, we want to click on the isolate mode toggle. And then, use the zoom extents all command, so that we get a clear view of the mesh in all three of our view ports. Looking at the overall shape that we have here, it is perhaps obvious that the base primitive with which we will want to start is a cylinder. And so, over in the create tab of the command panel, let's select the cylinder primitive option, and then, in either the perspective or top view ports, left click and drag to set the cylinder's radius first of all. And then, once we release the mouse button, set it's height with a drag of the mouse, and click to lock it in place. Making certain, of course, that we right click to exit out of the creation process at the end. Now it doesn't really matter where in the scene we have created this, because we are now going to use the keyboard shortcut of Alt+A in order to engage the align tool. Which, can also be accessed from up in our main tool bar. We can then click to select the high poly hub, make sure that x, y, and zed, or z, positions are all checked, and that we are using the pivot to pivot option. If we then click OK, we can see that this places the cylinder right into the center here, meaning that we can go ahead and start making adjustments to it. Something that I want to do before going any further here, is with the cylinder selected, open the slate material editor using the M key. And then, assign our already existing modeling material to it. To start with the changes that we want to model into our cylinder, let's jump back into the modified tab. And first of all, right click on the spinner source to set the height segments here to one. Which I always like to do straight away in a cylinder, because should we forget, we can end up causing ourselves all sorts of problems further on down the line. Now a radius of around about 15.5 centimeters should work well here. As we want to line things up with the inner, or core of the cylinder, not the extrusions that we have already added to the high poly version. The height value, we want to change to 15 centimeters. Which, in this instance, should align us nicely to the top, meaning, we have top and bottom aligned. And finally, we want to set the number of sides to about 20. Now we are setting these quite high because this piece will be a bit of a focal point on the model. And so, what we want to create, even on a low poly asset, is the sense that this is a genuinely cylindrical object. Rather than something that looks really faceted. And so perhaps breaks the player's suspense of belief a little. With that done, we can add our first edit poly modifier, and coming into edge sub object mode, press F4 source to turn on edged faces in the perspective view. We can select one of the vertical edges here, and then press Alt+R in order to ring the selection. Which is you can see in the front view, goes all the way around the mesh, because we haven't, up to this point, broken any of the geometries topology. Let's then come up to the loops panel on the ribbon, and shift click on the connect tool in order to bring up the connect tool's options caddy. Now basically, we are wanting to create the cuts that are going to form the shape of the top and bottom extrusions here. And so, let's set the segments value at two, and then increase the pinch to around about 40, or whatever works for you. As you can see on the reference mesh, the smoothing that we will be adding will eventually lift the extrusion up, but what we want to do here is match to this base line, like so. Remembering of course, to click OK once we are done. What we can do now is switch over to polygon's sub object mode, select a polygon inside the newly created ring, and if we hold down the shift key, you can see that we get a preview of the polygon selection that can be made. If I select the loop of polygon's running around the top, then holding down the control key in order to add to our selection, click a polygon down on the bottom. We can, by holding down the shift key again, click either to the left or the right of the selected polygon. In order to let Max the direction in which we want our second loop to run. Having selected the top and bottom rings, what we can do now is come to the bevel tool in the ribbon, and then shift click on it. We can set the bevel here to about one centimeter. Making certain, inside the bevel group, that we are set to work in local normal mode, just to ensure that we are extruding the same amount all around the mesh. We also want to make sure that our outline value is set to zero. After which, we can click okay. Next, we want to select the top and bottom polygons on the cylinder. Holding down the control key in order to multiple select, so, that we can hit the delete key. See at this moment in time, these 20 sided n-gons are not very game engine friendly. And so, as we say, we just want to delete them. Jumping into border sub object mode, we can then, in the top view, click and drag a marquee selection in order to grab both the top and bottom borders. And then, press R, so as to engage the scale tool. Holding down the shift key, let's scale along the x and y axis, until we match the hole in the center of our high poly version. This just ensures that our normals will bake down onto this flat area, making it much more game engine friendly in the end. Now we have added quite a number of polygons here, and so we may want to delete some, if, once we place the head that we will be adding here, we don't actually see them anyway. At this point, with our cursor hovering over the front view port, we want to hit the L key so as to switch this over to a left view. Because, what we want to do now, is a little bit of shaping on the geometry. Let's press one to jump into vertex sub object mode, and then marquee drag to select the central column here. In the top view, we want to alt click and drag, so as to deselect the verts in the center, and then move the selection up. And after deselecting the top section, move the bottom ones down, in order to match our reference geometry. And we can do the same for the side verts as well, although we do need to be a little bit careful when selecting these, as we don't want to select any of those in the center. We just want to be effecting the edge that we beveled. And then, push the inside verts even further, just so that they match the high poly geometry. With that, we can see that we have the general shape in place. If we have a look in our perspective view port, we can see that we are starting to match our high poly version. And so, in our next exercise, we are ready to move on to adding some detailing to the hub.