Week 5

WEEK 5- UV MAPPING 

 Today we learnt a range of lechniques within 3DS Max such as the Boolean tool aswell as how to texture map 

to learn how to texture map we started off with a simple cube and started to apply textures to it using the following file:

At first we just simply applied the texture using the material manager which didnt really seem to work so we had to use the unwrapuvw modifier to control where each section of the die was going. we used the UVW editior to control exactly where the map was going we had to do this for each polygon which could be quite time consuming if the shape had a lot of polygons. 

one of the issues that i faced within the UVW editor was that the texture didn't 'snap' to a point so it was quite difficult to get 100% accuracy when moving the map around.

 

 

 The finished die:

 

We then got taught how to use the Boolean tool, which simply aids th eformation of compound shapes and allows you to form unique effects quickly that could probably take hours to formulate in sketchup. To experiment and learn this tool we did a speed modelling task and created a bllock of swiss cheese, here is mine:

 

I found this tool very easy to use and can see it becoming very useful during my future projects.

We then learned how to use the displace effector so we created a plane and placed a picture of our choice in the displacer to create higher and lower sections of the plane in line with the colour usage of the image we chose for my image I chose the following:

 

 

 

Which formulated this Displacement map: 

At this point I remembered the terminology Jared had mentioned in a previous lecture the term 'bump map' was said which seemed very similar to the displacement map so I decided to look up the difference between the two and turns out that although they are very similar the difference is that a bump map only alters the surface of the shape whereas a displacement map actually alters the geometry of a shape which is something I found quite interesting. 

We comparing 3DS Max to Sketchup I still think that 3DS max is the better of the two as theres a lot of options in 3DS Max that can be applied to shapes that would otherwise take an extrememely long time to form in Sketchup.