We've been working with 3DS Max, a 3D modelling program, for a good while now. I personally love its versatility and variety of uses, and lucky for me, we'll be using it all year. Recently, I've been working on a personal project, where I have taken a hand-drawn character concept, and am trying to make a printable 3D model of it. So far it's gone well. I've pulled up a reference image in the program, and have been working on blocking out where all the limbs and body parts go, making sure to keep the proportions consistent. I then moved onto adding in detailed armor and body parts, which I'm still working on. This part will probably take the longest, but it's also the most fun. I just get to sit back, and model out nice-looking pieces of armor. It's cool to see it all coming together, but I still have a long way to go. Hopefully, by the end of this little project of mine, I'll have a good-looking 3D-printable mini.
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A little more than a year ago, I built my first PC, which I am now typing this blog post on. I had designed it to be able to play games, but not be overly expensive, and after a lot of deliberation and watching hardware reviews, I settled on the AMD Ryzen 3 2200G as my CPU. The driving force for this decision was it's affordability- It was less than a hundred dollars, but with that hundred dollars, you not only get a low-to-mid tier CPU, but a low-to-mid tier GPU as well. With the money I saved, I could use it as a starting point for upgrading the PC later. Looking back on how I got all the parts for christmas, my dad asking me a few weeks earlier "Are you sure you want this CPU?", I do wish I had gone for something like the Ryzen 5 or better. But, I can't complain- I saved a ton of money myself, thanks to my parents, and I have a perfectly fine PC, even with it's caveats.
First and foremost, I only used the CPU's integrated for a while before upgrading to a beefy graphics card- the RX 590 Red Devil. Even without that, the CPU can run games like Dark Souls 3, Enter the Gungeon, and even newer games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice on middling settings. It may be slow, but it can still handle some big games, even Cave Story somehow, with all of it's intense graphics. But in all seriousness, the AMD Ryzen 3 CPU is a fine piece of hardware- I wouldn't be looking for an upgrade if it wasn't becoming outdated so quickly. A quick note to the one person out there reading this that's also looking to build their first PC- your first build doesn't need to be flashy or massive. It can be, but my tiny Ryzen 3 CPU has been doing just fine so far, and while it's not exactly a nine-core Intel Processor, it can play plenty of games just fine. Compound Objects are a subset of tools in 3DS Max that are used to combine or create two or more objects into one. Examples of this are Boolean and Proboolean, which are used to combine two shapes in some way- Be it combining them, removing one's volume from the other, or removing the intersecting volume. That in itself is incredibly useful, but my favorite tool of the few that we've used so far has to be the terrain tool.
The terrain tool isn't as versatile as something like Boolean, but what for what it is, it is amazing. You create contour lines using 2D splines, and then use the terrain tool to create terrain shaped to those contour lines. It's perfect for something like a video game scene, or to just create a mountain if you're bored. The tool has options that affect how it's shaped, and how smooth it is. The simple fact that it uses contour lines makes it so much more efficient and easy to use than it would be otherwise. You can make the walls sheer and flat, or gradual, much like a hill. You can choose to add more polygons, cramping computer resources, but making it slightly smoother, and possibly some weird geometry. All in all, the terrain tool is one of my favorite things to use in 3DS Max. It's sheer efficiency and ease of access makes it simple to pick up on the spot, and while it's not super versatile like Boolean, Blobmesh, or Scatter, it was made to do one thing, and that thing is to make terrain, which it does indeed do. In Summary...
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AuthorHi! I'm Thomas MacDougall, a sophomore at DSA. Here you can check out my thoughts and recent activities. Please note that the views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools. Archives
March 2020
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