AUGIWorld Magazine September/October 2007

3ds Max Rocks & Rock Walls opulating a 3D scene with natural objects is becoming more and more important towards the overall success of a rendered image. It used to be that the design was the only focus and creating views that showed only aspects of the design were the primary concern. The “wow” factor seemed to come in a distant second. In today’s standards for architectural visualization, clients want to see the design in its entirety, right down to the last rock or rock wall in the landscaping plan. The paradigm has shifted from seeing part of the picture to seeing the “big” picture. In this article I will show you how to create two different objects that will help fill out your exterior scenes. The idea is to re-use what you have created by utilizing the modifier stack to allow for creation of random and unique objects from a single source object once it is created. Creating great-looking rocks depends on three things: scale, geometry, and material. All three of these attributes are closely related to one another and are interdependent as well. Generally, rocks that are smaller than your fist are not going to require that much geometric detail and can also utilize procedural shaders for their material. Large Armour rocks, which are found more often in exterior landscaping, require more geometric detail and benefit from photo textures. In the create panel of Autodesk® 3ds Max 9, click on GeoSphere and then drag in the top viewport to create one. Change the Radius to whatever size you need the rocks to be in the scene and change the Geodesic type to Octa. The number of segments can stay at the default for now; we will be adjusting that later. The power of creating a bunch of different, realistic rocks lies in the modifiers and how you use them. The first modifier we need to add is a Noise modifier. Check Fractal on and set the roughness to .25 to start. Next change all of your strength values to 25 for all three axis. You should have something resembling a rock. This will give you a good starting 20 P point to visualize what’s going on as you are making adjustments. Now if the rock isn’t detailed enough, you can go below the noise modifier and add segments to the GeoSphere. Keep in mind that we can fake some of the detail with textures, so a really dense mesh may not be required unless the rocks are close to the camera. Rocks Front view of base wall object In the Noise modifier the Roughness controls the sharpness in the edges of the rocks topology, but .25 would be as high as you should go for really rough rocks; otherwise you run the risk of destroying the mesh. The seed value will give you the option to cycle through and pick rocks that you like as well as make unique rocks after making copies. Adding other topology-changing modifiers such as Twist, Bend, Taper, and so on also allows you to incorporate more avenues for creating unique-looking rocks based on the original. The mapping is fairly straightforward and usually you can use a photo of a similar rock with your UVW Map set to box. If the rock passes in front of the camera you may want to unwrap the rock and paint it by hand in Adobe Photoshop. Perspective of the Greeble modifier Rock walls Rock walls, while not hugely popular, still show up in some landscape designs. The creation method illustrates the tremendous power of the modifier stack, which is why I included it. For this object you will need Tom Hudson’s free Greeble plug-in. In the create panel, click on the plane button and create a plane object in the front viewport that is the size required for the scene. Adjust your height and width w w w. A U G I . c o m http://www.AUGI.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AUGIWorld Magazine September/October 2007

Contents The CAD Manager Feature: A Good First Impression ADT and SketchUp Team for Presentations Accessing Values: Now or Later Finding the 3D in Map 3D: Surface Visualization Rocks & Rock Walls Autodesk University 2007 Preview The Missing Link On the Back Page

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