B-E-N-D-E-R, Beeeennnnndeeerr! In 3d!

[on:]

I recently acquired 3DSmax 2009 and have been attempting to learn its amazingly detailed secrets. Seeing as I love Futurama, I looked to the DVD's to find some subjects to help me learn. The most obvious choice is bender! Hes mostly primitives, but has enough face detail to make use of a good number of basic modeling tools.

This is the first model I've tried on MAX so far: Benders head! I'm working on the body now, but there's a good chance ill redo the head soon as I'm done. I thought of a better way to do his visor a little too late...



I took the background images from the "how to draw bender" feature on S4 disk 4, they were not quite a dead on front / side view, but worked as a good guide. I managed to make the pupils, eyelids, eyes, antenna and teeth line things all separate for future animation, whenever I get to the rigging chapter   



Hopefully Ill have the body up tomorrow. If anyone happens to be proficient in any way with 3D modeling id love some pointers! Also if someone knew how to get a proper line render for the cell shading I'd greatly appreciate it!



ANGRY EYEBROWS   

[Reply #1 on:]

that's actually very good.  Are you planning to render the rest of his body?

[Reply #2 on:]

That's really, really good.

[Reply #3 on:]

 

Originally posted by soylentOrange:
that's actually very good.  Are you planning to render the rest of his body?

Thanks!

Just copied the ref images off the DVD, I should have it done today. It shouldn't be as hard as the head. If I'm done early enough ill go back over the head and make it a bit cleaner now that I know the general steps / order.

Might try to set up the animation rigging too... but no idea how complex that is yet.

[Reply #4 on:]

Good stuff... Bender's a good thing to model.  Some of the other characters are more difficult to create in a 3d environment and look good... Fry's hair is a good example.

[Reply #5 on:]

Bender Take 1 done!

Hes missing his arm / leg rings... but I'm going to have to fight the ink material a bit longer for them.

[Reply #6 on:]

Got it!

[Reply #7 on:]

Wow, those are really good, way to go

[Reply #8 on:]

Robot Devil on the way, body almost done and starting head, should have pics tomorrow.

I started reading the animation rigging chapter in the 3DSmax bible, and I more or less totally botched the bender models chances of becoming mobile. I'm trying to set the hierarchy / scaling right on robot devil to hopefully animate him.

How tall do you figure he is? Just to give him scale to Bender mk2 / whatever comes next. I'm thinking almost 7 feet...

[Reply #9 on:]

That's pretty damn awesome, TBH.

[Reply #10 on:]

Robot devil model done!

Haven't done his cell shading textures yet, I'm trying to see if there is a better way to get the arm rings than the cheap way I did it on bender.



With the standard max ink / paint, I see why they do separate colour / line passes for the show now... the paint is fine but the ink is annoying.

[Reply #11 on:]

You've put great effort into these renders, and it shows. Quite good work!

[Reply #12 on:]

Thanks a lot!

I'm slowly learning new tools and better practices to go about the models, after some reading I think ill take a crack at Calculon. If he goes okay ill make my first "real" project the planet express ship, and her crew! (The thought of modeling Leela's pony tail is already frightening me)

I really enjoy technical programs like 3DSmax / AutoCad. I can't "art" for crap, but something about the cold hard math running the rendering engine agrees with me.

[Reply #13 on:]

 

Originally posted by aknightofni:
Thanks a lot!

I'm slowly learning new tools and better practices to go about the models, after some reading I think ill take a crack at Calculon. If he goes okay ill make my first "real" project the planet express ship, and her crew! (The thought of modeling Leela's pony tail is already frightening me)

I really enjoy technical programs like 3DSmax / AutoCad. I can't "art" for crap, but something about the cold hard math running the rendering engine agrees with me.

A man of math, eh? I'm the exact opposite. I'll have nothing to do with that numerical nonsense. Unless I have to. Just take Leela's ponytail one step at a time. The action figure should help if you have the Leela one, and remember, it's basically a cylinder with spikes on it and a few curves...

[Reply #14 on:]

Me and calculus / algebra get along very well.

Anything that attempts to leave the realm of Physics / Math is immediately categorized as "Artsie stuff" and best left to "Artsies". I laughed so hard at my friend who took English as his elective, Engineers really can't do the whole expanded literary analysis thing.

Hopefully I will have Calculon pics tomorrow, Been doing a lot of reading before I started him.

[Reply #15 on:]

wait, you mean their is something other than the realm of physics / math?  No way.  I dont buy it.

[Reply #16 on:]

If you're modelling complex figures you need to look up how to extrude and tweak basic cubes. Box modelling it's called. Gets you away from being stuck with just primitives and it's very versatile. 

[Reply #17 on:]

Sounds like my blind wandering around MAX is headed in the right direction. Ive been using mesh modifiers on primitives so far, benders mouth and visor were cut / extruded from a cylinder. Robot devils head started as a box and I just started cutting / moving vertexes until it looked right.

I hadn't even gotten to the primitives section when I started Bender, the first 10 chapters are dedicated to the interface / tools / organization of a scene. Now I'm into the modeling techniques.

A big thing for me right now is reading up on how to approach a model more organized, what should be made as a separate object, how many segments to start with, getting hierarchy / groups right. Deciding when it's appropriate to go sticking things to other things is important too, for now I'm leaving as much as I can detached until I go over how rigging works.

Also I'm trying to gather good reference pics for the planet express ship. Front / Left / Right / Back I got right off one of the DvD features, but Top / Bottom is proving more difficult.

[Reply #18 on:]

nice job on the robot devil

[Reply #19 on:]

Calculon is on hold for now, I've been doing a ton of reading and am putting it to use on a 3D Avro Arrow model!

On the list of important objects to model in max, Canadian engineering legends just slightly ousts Futurama :P

After finishing my Arrow I should be ready to take on the Planet Express Ship. Right now i'm just deciding where the more advanced modeling techniques fit in, and if its worth learning NURBS modeling for the ship or not.

[Reply #20 on:]

I was watching the DVD special features trying to get some ideas for modeling the planet express ship when I came across a decent wire mesh view:



I couldn't help but notice the wires... curved. They are not using straight lines going from vertex to vertex. How is such blasphemy possible! From working with editable poly's ive had a hell of a time making anything remotely round / smooth without the object becoming distorted to hell...

After some reading I am reasonably sure they are making use of NURBS modeling, basically a super powerful way of drawing curves and letting the computer math out all the fiddly vertexes / polygons. I was wondering if anyone had any experience / advice for playing with NURBS splines. I can see how they would make modeling a smooth PE ship simple, but there are so many damn options for controlling the curve I'm a bit lost.

I did make this hairy ball of glass though. Why? Because I can. And to see if my computer would catch fire. It didn't, but only just.

[Reply #21 on:]

First step to the PE ship, huzzah!



Screw NURBS for now... I need to learn working with editable polys first.

[Reply #22 on:]

PE WIP pic:



Have to add the portholes, turret, engine vents, tail lights and engine still! Then ill see about cutting the cargo doors / ramp / landing struts out... depending on how clean the finished wire mesh is.

I just threw on the textures for that WIP pic, so they are rather unkempt.... Ill spend a good deal of time on the final ones.

Pretty good learning experience so far, and its been amazing fun to work on!

[Reply #23 on:]

It seems you've done quite well on your attempts! I love the little ball thing. So cool looking! Also, your Planet Express ship is turning out marvelously.

[Reply #24 on:]

Wow that is awesome. The PlanEx ship is getting along well

[Reply #25 on:]

Thanks!

I just finished an epic 24 hour battle for my computer... managed to save it without dropping the reformat nuke.

On the plus side, its running better than when I got it after scrubbing out 40 Gb of files, cleaning all the registries, removing some 15 questionable bits of software (one sepcific Trojan took about 8 hours to kill), defragging both drives 100% and redoing the graphics drivers... huzzah!

So I think I'll get back to the PE ship tonight, just do something easy like the portholes or something... God I'm tired.

[Reply #26 on:]

nice job with your 3d bender and robot devil.
the px ship is looking great.. keep up the work!

[Reply #27 on:]

Not much, portholes and some body fixes, body got a bit out of shape by the fins.



More or less finished, just have to add the door to the other side, and cut out the slots for the ramp / landing struts / cargo bay / torpedo tubes. I don't think I will model any of the hideaway parts for this version, just get the outline to show. Too many little iffy spots to tweak by now, but far as I'm concerned getting the outside done is good enough for try 1!

[Reply #28 on:]

Very good job on the PE ship! It looks brilliant!

[Reply #29 on:]

I'm so jealous of you right now

[Reply #30 on:]

I wanna ask, what programme are you using and why are you not working with the Futurama 3D crew?

[Reply #31 on:]

3Dsmax 2009! (for the love of god don't tell autodesk)

I finish work tomorrow, and don't head back to university until the 1st, so Ill be doing a lot of reading and practice with Max. Got a looooonnnnnggg way to go before I can come up with something as good as Futurama's team! I hope I can get through all the necessary reading to do rigging, and see about starting some characters.

I have been working on some planet express ship layout sketches too. version 2 will include the interior! The first one was a good way to get familiar with the basic tools, but I've been looking at some much better ways of using them.

[Reply #32 on:]

As Fry would say, "neat."

I'd love to learn the layout of the PE ship.  It seems so much bigger on the inside ;-)

[Reply #33 on:]

great work on the ship!  If it weren't for the missing "Planet Express" logo on the tail fin, I don't think I'd be able to distinguish it from something the Futurama animators made.

[Reply #34 on:]

 

Originally posted by JustNibblin':
As Fry would say, "neat."

I'd love to learn the layout of the PE ship.  It seems so much bigger on the inside ;-)

It's probably been linked before, but this page makes a fairly good go at figuring out the layout of the ship.

[Reply #35 on:]

 

Originally posted by Archonix:
 It's probably been linked before, but this page makes a fairly good go at figuring out the layout of the ship.

Nice! I'm almost done gathering screen caps for all the rooms detail, but that is a perfect layout blueprint!

I'd like to scale all the next projects properly, and like working with the "real world" units, so I think ill start with bender at 6'3'' from his police photo and work from there.

[Reply #36 on:]

Wow. Neat.

[Reply #37 on:]

Congratulations aknightofni, you've just made an entire team of Koreans obsolete. Bravo!

[Reply #38 on:]

Lol, thanks. The Koreans can keep their jobs.

For now.

Its very, VERY rough work now, don't even think you can classify it as anything beyond playing with the tools yet. I just moved back to school, and the workload hurricane is about to hit shore. I have a feeling ill be a bit less distracted once I'm actually in learning mode again, and I really do want to try a serious take at this. I seem to take to the program well enough, just gotta put the solid effort in. Having all these artsies around might help too...

[Reply #39 on:]

Well I got back from EE today around 2, decided I should get all of my commerce work done. But before I started, opened 3dsmax and looked over my PE ship.

8 hours later... I have this:



Added the side airlock, railings leading to it, cut the cargo bay / hatch / torpedo tubes, redid the engine, redid the vents, redid the tail lights, tweaked the lower fins, did a bunch of body tweaks near the front and fixed up some of the main window too.

Diddn't actually make the provisions for opening any of the cuts, and diddn't add the landing strut seals either. I originally wanted to start modeling the interior of the ship as separate scenes, but quickly found the only way to get the layouts right to start was by having a model of the outside to start with... Unfortunately

 1) My reference shots are slightly misaligned, which I have no idea how that is possible as they were screencaps from the same 5 seconds of the DvD.

2) I have no top reference shot, and my DvD's are at home anyway. I dont remember seeing the top of the ship in the features anyway, and haven't found a good episode to get a straight top down view. Sadly this view is probably the most important for making the interior, as it sets the boundaries for the rooms.

3) I hate meshsmooth. 3DSmax has built in smoothing algorithms, which are designed to let you model with a minimal number of faces, then adds more and smooths the overall result. Great, except it likes to smooth everything to anything. Ever. You cant really tell it that an edge is "off limits", only tell it how much weight it should hold vs the others. Try to separate with smooth groups? works most of the time... until it just douches you and smooths around, or just starts spitting up glitches in the mesh. It literally made a black hole in the side of the ship at one point.

I need to learn a heck of a lot more about how the stupid thing works before I can use it to make an effective model, this one is so un-organized it is beyond repairing and continuing. So Ill start fresh later when I have the knowledge, and hopefully from there do the interior.

Now I guess I better do that stupid commerce...