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Figure 5.27 shows the resulting chest with a variety of gems.

FIGURE 5.27

A treasure chest full of gems quickly created by altering object parameters

Using Architecture Primitives

If you wander about the various departments at Autodesk, you run into several groups that deal with products for visualizing architecture, including the well-known product AutoCAD. This product is used by a vast number of engineers and architects to design the layouts for building physical structures.

Along with AutoCAD is Revit, another very popular package that would be considered a close sibling to Max. AutoCAD Revit is used to create visualizations of AutoCAD data and, like Max, deals with modeling, rendering, and shading 3D objects. In fact, many of the new features found in Max were originally developed for Revit.

Using AEC Objects

Included in the features that have migrated over from the AutoCAD world are all the various architectural objects commonly found in buildings. These objects can all be found in the Create⇒AEC Objects menu. The AEC Objects menu includes many different architecture primitives: Foliage, Railings, Walls, Doors, Stairs, and Windows.

Foliage

The Foliage category includes several different plants, all listed in the Favorite Plants rollout and shown in Figure 5.28. The available plants include a Banyan tree, Generic Palm, Scotch Pine, Yucca, Blue Spruce, American Elm, Weeping Willow, Euphorbia, Society Garlic, Big Yucca, Japanese Flowering Cherry, and Generic Oak.

Caution

The various foliage objects are large models that can quickly slow down the scene if multiple copies are added to a scene. For example, a single Banyan tree has more than 100,000 polygons. Adding several such trees to your scene can make it quite slow. •

FIGURE 5.28

The Favorite Plants rollout shows thumbnails of the various plants.

At the bottom of the Favorite Plants rollout is a button called Plant Library that opens a dialog box where you can see the details of all the plants, including the total number of faces. The winner is the Banyan tree with 100,000 faces. Using the Parameters rollout, you can set the Height, Density, and Pruning values for each of these plants. Also, depending on the tree type, you can select to show the Leaves, Trunk, Fruit, Branches, Flowers, and Roots, and you can set the Level of Detail to Low, Medium, or High.

Tip

After some time, the Foliage set starts to feel rather limited. You can use the Help⇒3ds Max on the Web⇒Download Vegetation menu to access the Autodesk Seek website. This site holds a repository of architecturally related objects, including a huge selection of plants and trees. •

Railings

The Railings option lets you pick a path that the railing will follow. You can then select the number of Segments to use to create the railing. For the Top Rail, you can select to use No Railing or a Round or Square Profile and set its Depth, Width, and Height. You can also set parameters for the Lower Rails, Posts (which appear at either end), and Fencing (which are the vertical slats that support the railing).

The Lower Rails, Posts, and Fencing sections feature an icon that can be used to set the Spacing of these elements. The Spacing dialog box that opens looks like the same dialog box that is used for the Spacing Tool, where you can specify a Count, Spacing value, and Offsets.

Walls

Walls are simple, with parameters for Width and Height. You can also set the Justification to Left, Center, or Right. The nice part about creating wall objects is that you can connect several walls together just like the Line tool. For example, creating a single wall in the Top viewport extends a connected wall from the last point where you clicked that is connected to the previous wall. Right-click to exit wall creation mode. Figure 5.29 shows a room of walls created simply by clicking at the intersection points in the Top view.

FIGURE 5.29

Rooms of walls can be created simply by clicking where the corners are located.

Doors

The Doors category includes three types