GMax Fundamentals

[clintonman]

It's the ka-blam that gets m e.

Yeah, It's the awesome special effects that put it over the edge.

[clintonman]

Started the final project in the tutorial series. This one has a dragon on his first birthday. The model is about 3/4 done. The real challenge will be trying to UV map it. The tutorial uses pelt mapping, which GMax does not have by a long shot. The eyes and eyelids are made of spheres and half spheres with a FFD lattice applied to shape them into the dragons eye sockets. The dragon is just box modeling with smoothing applied.

[clintonman]

Dragon modeling is all but done. Just need to do a little cleanup and merge the 2 halves together. UV mapping is next.

[v3rd3]

Just a small point but your dragon sketch could be misinterpreted... perhaps a tad more detail would help.

[clintonman]

Just a small point but your dragon sketch could be misinterpreted... perhaps a tad more detail would help.

It's not my sketch. I'm following the 3DBuzz "Mastering 3DSMax: The Fundamentals" tutorial series. They supplied all the images for the model planes. Just curious, but what do you mean by misinterpreted? I didn't draw it so no need to worry about hurting my feelings. Even if I did draw it I would like to know what you think.

[clintonman]

UV mapping is not a good thing in GMax, but I found a workaround based on a Lightwave UV technique. The trick is to cut the model along the desired seams and then make a morph for it. The morph is the model layed flat in 3d space. Apply a planar map, morph it back to the original shape and weld the vertices back together. That's the plan I have to UV map the dragon. The image shows my proof of concept test with a simple rectangular mesh.
I tried the same technique in truespace but the uv mapper only see's the un-morphed mesh.

Edit: I was wrong. The technique does work in truespace. The trick is to apply the planer uv with the morph selected in the list, not the default pose. After the uv is applied switch back to default pose and morph back to the original shape(set the morph value to zero). Flatten history and Heal the vertices to weld them back.

[v3rd3]

A cheezy joke based on a youth misspent reading playboy cartoons.....

[3dfrog]

Wow great work here Clintonman. The dragon is my favorite one, very nice.

[clintonman]

Still going...
I finished the dragon geometry and fixed an oversight on my part. I forgot to give him some toes. Image shows the start of the manual morph based uv process. I just need to slice the pieces so I can lay them flat. I figure I'll select the edges with a soft selection and scale it out as the first step.

[clintonman]

Started the morph based UV unwrap. The soft selection hasn't worked as well as I hoped, but the technique still beats trying to use the GMax UV tools. Green is the mesh and white is the morph target of the mesh modeled to look like UV space. The head, shirt and horn on top of the head have been "unwrapped". Still several pieces to go.