Lecture 8

In the 8th week of this project I focused on the surroundings of my scene for the month of July.
Firstly I thought of some ideas for flooring such as carpet, oak wood flooring, laminated wood floor and tiles. Once I researched these ideas I thought that the best one for my scene would be tiles, this is because they won’t take too much focus off the main element in the scene like the cake and balloons but will look real enough to create the effect in the scene I am looking for.
So once I had decided on the flooring I then looked more in depth at tile textures, shapes, sizes and patterns on the internet. I finally decided to go with slate tiles from an image I found on the internet using the image tab via the search engine Google (www.google.com/images’)

Here is the image that I wanted to use as my map for the floor of the scene.

I then created a cylinder in 3ds max to use as my floor in the scene, I selected ‘cylinder’ from the create menu on the right hand side of the program, I then clicked and dragged the cylinder until it was the radius I wanted it (I used a large radius as this needed to cover the whole scene), then I used the mouse to determined the depth of the cylinder, I created a thin/ low height cylinder as no depth was needed for the floor as only the top face of the cylinder will be used.

I then added my texture map to this, to do this I opened the ‘Material editor’ by pressing ‘M’ on the keyboard, I then selected one of the sphere’s, then on the maps section of the editor I selected ‘get map’ for the bump option then the ‘map browser’ window opened and I then selected ‘Bitmap’ this then opened a window where I had to select the image of the tiles that I wanted to use for the floor. I then did the same for the diffuse colour map option. I then dragged the map to my cylinder.

Once the tile map had been added to the cylinder it looked out of scale for example the length was a lot longer than it was meant to be and the width had been squashed up so that the tiles looked very thin and skinny. To correct this I added the ‘UVW map’ modifier.
I could then use the UVW map parameters tools to correct the size and shape of the map, it took me a little while to play around with the settings until the tiles looked exactly how I wanted them.

I then opened my 3ds max file that contained my birthday cake, but unfortunately once I opened it I could see that there was no map on the cake. The cake was all plain white, when it should have the pink sponge map on it that I added to it previously.

I then found out that this was because my image for the pink sponge texture wasn’t it the same folder as it was when I added the map to the cake, so I transferred the image back into the same folder then re-opened the cake file and it was fine and correct again.

I then wanted to create walls for the room, I also wanted to add wallpaper to these walls to make the room in the scene look and feel homely.
To do this I created 2 large rectangles that were going to be the viewable walls in this scene and I then placed these at an adjoining right-angle to each other.

I then browsed the internet for suitable wallpapers to apply to the rectangles, I wanted something that had quite neutral colours and a plain pattern so that it didn’t divert the viewer’s eyes away from the main objects within the scene.

Here is the image that I am going to use for my wallpaper within the scene,

To add this image to the rectangles I opened the ‘material editor’ then selected one of the sphere’s and then selected the ‘diffuse colour’ option, then the material browser opened, so I selected the ‘bitmap’ option and then the ‘select bitmap image file’ window opened where I selected the image for my wallpaper.


I then applied this map onto my rectangles. Once I had done this the wallpaper looked a bit blurred and the patterns on the wallpaper image appeared disfigured, so to correct this I added the ’UVW map’ modifier to the rectangles and played around with the setting and map placement until the wallpaper looked perfect.

Here is a rendered shot of the tile floor and the wallpaper on the walls. I am happy with how both of these have come out and think that I have created the homely effect that I wanted with both the floor and the walls.