From the course: 3ds Max 2017 Essential Training

Sculpting with Conform Transform - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2017 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Sculpting with Conform Transform

“

- [Voiceover] The final technique I wanna share with you in the free form modeling tool set is using the conform transform brushes to push and pull a surface in a very intuitive and interactive mode, and in some regards, it could even replace the push and pull brush. Let's take a look. I'll select my landscape, and the first thing we need to do is we want to conform to the grid. We wanna choose draw on grid. Previously up here, we chose to draw on a surface. From that pull down list, you wanna switch that back to draw on grid. Then we simply choose the move conform button here but very importantly, for some reason the conform amount here has to be a value of 0.1 or you'll get very strange results. We previously set that to 1.0. Let's change it back to 0.1, and under these conditions now I can just click and drag to sculpt that surface. Wow, how cool is that? And not only that, but it's preserving the details here. If I move this region up here, we can see that it's preserving that kind of rough fractal landscape shape. The thing to keep in mind with this tool is that it is completely view dependent. That means that the effect of the brush depends absolutely on how you're viewing the object. For example, if I'm looking at the object from a side here and I click and drag, I can pull those polygons directly up. We can tumble and orbit around and see there's a little bit of crunchiness there but basically, we're moving directly upward there. All right, but if we are oriented this way, if we're looking straight down on the surface and we do that same operation, then we're going to stretch those polygons in a different direction because we're looking at it from a different direction. All right, I'll undo that with control Z. Likewise, the distance to the object is really important. The scale or size of the brush in the view relative to the scale or size of the object in the view will have a great deal of influence over the end result. If I'm zoomed way out or dollied way out here and I click and drag, I will get a very large effect. Created a big mountain there. If I zoom in and dolly in and do the same thing, I'm getting a very small effect just because my brush size is much smaller relative to the object on the screen. That's a very neat tool, and I think you can use that to great effect and it'll sort of speed up your workflow a bit because you won't have to worry so much about all the push pull settings and so on. There's no reason not to use these other brush tools in combination with the move conform. I can click on relax soften and then just clean up some of this mushiness or maybe flatten out this big peak here. Make my brush a little bit larger with control and shift, kinda fix that up a bit. But basically, those are the main tools in the freeform modeling tool kit. As you can see, there are other tools. We don't have time to cover all of it, but the sculpture tools are a welcome addition to the 3ds Max tool set, especially if for example you're an architect and you need to have a background landscape. And that concludes the chapter on freeform modeling.

Contents