Creating a room of complex shape in 3Ds max

If you need to create a room that is not just a quadrangular shape, but with smooth curved walls and rounded corners, this lesson is designed to solve your problems. I will tell you the way that I use myself and which I consider the most simple and effective.

For example, you have such a drawing.

There is no such room in the real world. I drew a drawing myself, just for example, in fact, it is obvious that the drawing can be anything.

You need to load it in 3Ds max in the top view window. So, run the program, go to the top view window. You can even expand it to full screen, first clicking on the projection window itself, and then on the Maximize View port Toggle button, which is located in the lower right corner of the interface.

After that, in the upper right part of the screen, find the button with the image of a hammer, the button is called Utilities. Click. A vertical row of buttons appears, click Asset Browser. A search box of the same name will appear in which you need to find a picture with a drawing. And after that just drag the image directly into the top view window. In the window that appears, remove the bird An environment map, and click OK.

The result will not be exactly what we need. The picture will be pulled, and it will not move away and come closer when the mouse wheel is turned. To correct the situation, in the menu bar, run the following command: View - View port Background - View port Background. In the window that opens, place the birds as shown below. After that, click Ok.

Often some unknown and incomprehensible effect takes effect, and the drawing becomes vertically stretched to infinity. I don’t know what it is connected with, but I know that in order to fix it, it’s enough to open the View port Background window once again, remove and re-install the Display Background bird. And everything will become as we want.

So. The next step is to choose a tool for creating any spline shape.
In the same row where the Utilities button was previously pressed, find and click the Create button. A new row of buttons will appear below, find the Shapes knob in it (spline shapes} Below will open a set of buttons for creating different standard spline shapes. Select the Line button. After clicking, you can start drawing a spline. To do this, click on the key points of the drawing, after which the line changes the angle. Circling the drawing in this way, close the spline. The program will ask if you want to close the spline. You want it. For clarity, look at the drawing below. I hid the drawing so that you can view the form on a dark background.

As you can see, I have not yet created rounding. We will do this now using the Fillet counter.

But first you need to select the top of the angle that we will round. Below the row of buttons in which we clicked Create, there is a so-called stack. This is an empty bright space, in which, in our case, there is only the dark line of the line. And to the left of the word Line is a black box with a cross. Click on the cross, and a sub-object tree of the selected spline will appear in the stack. Select the Vertex line from this list. Now you can select the desired angle, which we will round out. Chose?

Now below the stack, in the parameters of the spline, find the Geometry rollout, and in it the counter Fillet. Increase the value in the counter until the top becomes rounded as needed. By doing the same with the second rounded corner, click on the Vertex line again to deselect. Now the whole spline is selected, and not any of its sub-objects.

Copy the spline by executing the Edit - Clone command, and hide the copy. To hide it, just click on it with the right mouse button and select the Hide Selected line in the appeared menu.

Select the remaining form. It's time to create a room out of it. To do this, you need to apply the Extrude modifier to the form. To do this, you need to select the Extrude line in the list of modifiers. Above the stack there is a line Modifier List, and to the right of it, a button with a triangle. Click on it, and a list of modifiers will appear. Select the desired line.

The parameters of the Extrude modifier appeared under the stack. By increasing the value in the Amount counter, set the height of the room. It is also convenient to look at the perspective view window.

When this is done, you need to convert the resulting object into a grid so that you can work with its sub-objects. Right-click on it and select convert to - convert to editable poly.

The stack now has the Editable Poly line. As with the spline, open the sub-object tree and select the Polygon line in it. Now click on the uppermost ground, which in our case is the ceiling. It will turn red, so it stands out. Under the stack, in the grid options, find and click the Detach button. In the window that appears, click OK. Thus, the polygon was separated from the grid, and became an independent object. Rotate the scene to see it from below, and select the polygon of the floor. Separate him in the same way. Select the walls, and use the Hide Unselected command to hide the floor and ceiling.

Now in the walls you need to create doorways and window openings. The plan does not provide for them, so we will do it anywhere. Navigate to the vertex editing level in the sub-objects tree, and click the Quick Slice button. So you went to the creation of sections. To create a section through the grid, you need to click the mouse in two places, through these two points and the section will pass. We will create two horizontal sections, as in Figure 5.

So we designated the top and bottom edge of the future window openings.

But you still need to mark the vertical edges of the openings. This is done in the same way as the Quick Slice tool, only before you do this, you need to select those polygons in which there will be a window. Because if this is not done, the section will pass through the entire grid, but we do not need it. To make it clearer, look at Figure 6.

That is, we created new sections in order to be able to select a polygon on the site of the future window opening. Press the Delete key on the keyboard. Polygon will be removed. Repeat this process for all your planned windows and doors.

It remains only to set the walls thickness. To do this, first turn off the selection mode of polygons and other sub-objects, so that only the grid is selected. Then apply a Shell modifier to the mesh. Below, in the settings of this modifier, put 0 in the Inner Amount counter, and in the Outer Amount counter set the desired thickness of the walls, watching the changes in the viewport from the perspective. If necessary, execute the Unhide All command and set the floor and ceiling thickness.

That's all, thank you for your attention, good luck and enthusiasm!