3D Simple Road

In this 3D Studio Max Tutorial, I want to show you how to create a simple road or bridge. The main purpose of this tutorial is to show the abilities of Loft. The result on this tutorial can be use on your 3D Modelling Projects when you need to span a valley, water, or anything related to 3D road projects. Even beginners or 3D aspirant artists can follow this tutorial because simple and effective techniques are given to achieved this real looking bridge model.
Final Result Preview:

Step 1:
We need a section and a path which are Splines. Create your own section and straight path. The path in here is a Line. When you are creating the path with Line, enable Grid Points in Snap to make sure it will be a straight path.

Step 2:
Select the path (Line), in Create Panel go to Compound Objects and click on the Loft. In the Loft parameters, in Creation Method roll out click on Get Shape button and then choose your bridge section from the scene.

As you can see in below picture, the section shape extrudes along the path and creates the bridge or road.
Step 3:
I want to create a curvy bridge. So I create a curvy path same as the below picture. There are some ways that you can create this path. One of the fast and easy ways is to create a Line as a path first. This line will just have one segment. So choose this segment and in Line parameters, hit Divide button once. Be sure the Divide value is set to 1. So in this way, the selected segment will be divided to two segments. Right click on the middle vertex and make sure it is set to smooth.

For two other vertices, select Bezier-Corner. Now move the middle vertex upwards.

Step 4:
Repeat step 3 to create the bridge. You can design your own way. The path can go left or right or even downwards.

The final result is not enough smooth and you can see segmentation on the curvature. Right click on the Loft object and choose Object Properties. Look at the number of Faces. It has near 7000 faces but still you can see segmentation on it.

If you want your final result be smooth, you need to go to loft parameters and increase the numbers of Path Steps and Shape Steps. Here I increase the number of Path steps to 15 and keep Shape steps to 5. Now my Loft object has 18432 faces. This is really very big number while the result is not enough smooth yet.

Under Path Steps, there is an option call Optimize Shapes. When this option is On, it will ignore shape steps for straight segments and in this way will decrease the number of faces without losing curvature. Here I had check it and it decrease the faces to near 10000. I am still looking for a better way to decrease more while keeping quality.

This time I want to decrease the Path steps and Shape to 1 and use another way for having a smooth result. Select your original path. In the sub-object rollout choose Segment and select your 2 segments. In the parameters, divide path to having more segments.

Step 5:
In loft you have two choices for creating the smooth curvature. One way is to increase your Path steps and Shape steps which dramatically will increase the number of faces and a better way is to increase your splines segments.

Here I divided my path to having more segments and result become as smooth as previous way. About the section shape, I selected the segmenst which have curvature and then divide them. We no need to divide corner and shape segments.

The new Loft object just has 6720 faces and if you check the Optimize Shapes, the number of faces reduces to 5780 while the quality is still same.

Step 6:
Finally, I want to create more complex objects such as a parking ramp. I use a Helix shape as my path. Again repeat step 3 to create a loft object. The problem is that the section is rotating about the path. Whenever the path bends, the section rotate too. In the Skin Parameters in Loft, Uncheck Banking to flat your loft object.

Part II
Until now you have learnt how to modeling with Loft. One of the things that make worry when creating a complex bridge is its texture and material.

The fact is that when you create a loft object, it will generate mapping coordinate so you do not need to use UVW Mapping modifier.

Step 7:
In Editable Spline parameters for section shape, set ID for different segments.

Step 8:
Open the Material Editor, hit standard button and double click on the Multi/Sub-Object.

Step 9:
By default, it will give show 10 materials but because in this tutorial I just have 5 material IDs, I need to decrease Multi/Sub-Objects materials to 5. Click on the Set Number button and change it to 5.

Step 10:
Now you can create your own material for your loft object. You should notice that in your loft object parameters, Use Shape IDs must be check then it can accept different material IDs.

The below picture shows the materials I created for my loft object. You can see three materials that I made for this bridge.

Step 12:
Here the question is that while we are not using UVW Mapping, how to repeat out texture? We have two ways. One is the old way which we go to the texture settings in Material Editor and change Tiling.

Another solution is using Mapping group in loft object parameters. You can repeat your applied texture but increasing Length Repeat and Width Repeat as well.

My suggestion is to use loft Mapping group as your global repetition and then if you need to increase or move any texture individually, just use its texture setting in Material Editor.

At the end I want show you the settings of my three textures that I used for this bridge.

3D Realistic Glass

In this tutorial I will show you how to model, texture and render a realistic glass.

Step 1: The modeling phrase is easy. For the glass, start with an Cylinder. If you want to use references for the glass. Here is my modeling process of the glass. To make  the interior part of the glass use a Shell Modifier. Then add a TurboSmooth Modifier.

Step 2: Now  the most important part is the liquid. To make the liquid select the internal polygons of the glass and detach it.  You can see the detached polygons in the screenshot:

Step 3: Now go to the Element sub-object level and select the polygons you’ve detached. And then click Flip button to reverse the direction of the surface normals. If you do not flip that faces it’ll make a trouble when you are rendering the liquid.

Step 4: Go to to Border Sub-Object Level and select the border of your detached element and Cap it.

Step 5: Use the Bevel tool to give some edges to liquid. After that add a Turbosmooth Modifier.

Step 6: Now we must add a Push Modifier to the liquid. Because at the moment the detached polygons are touching the glass surface. The liquid surface must over lap the glass surface.

Step 7: Here is a  screenshot. The blue object is the liquid and the other is glass. Using the Push Modifier make the liquid bigger than inner glass surface.

Step 8: The other objects are pretty simple. So i will only demonstrate the orange peal.  Create a Box Primitive  then a Helix shape.  Add a Path Deform Binding(WSM) to the Box. Then use Helix as a path. Adjust the settings as necessary. Collapse it and make some modeling for inner and outer parts then put it on the glass.

Step 9: Done. Modeling part of this tutorial is finished. The other pieces which you can see in the screenshot are very basic models.

Step 10: Now we are going to render our model, but there is an important thing to do before the rendering. Open a new Scene then go to the Customize menu > Units Setup . Make the Unit Scale cm. It is necessary for getting a realistic render. Then Merge everything and scale them as necessary.

Step 11: And now I Merged the models to the scene. As you can see in the screenshot, I put three V-Ray Lights and three Omni lights. And for the reflection put a nice texture on a Plane and turn off the Cast Shadow option of the Plane.  Then you must model a platform which the glass will stand on.

Step 12: When these things finished, draw a big sphere that will implicate the other objects. Then put a Normal Modifier on to the sphere. And then check the “Flip Normals” box.  And put a V-Ray Light Map on to the sphere. After that put a UVW Mapping Modifier on it. Don’t forget to turn off the Cast Shadow from its  Object Properties.

Step 13: Now I’m giving you the material settings of the glass and liquid in the screenshot.

Step 14: And the test render settings.

Step 15: And  finally the high render settings:

OK, here is my final render.

3D Head 1 of 5

3D Head 2 of 5

3D Head 3 of 5

3D Head 4 of 5

3D Head 5 of 5

3D Water Text Effect

Step 1

Open Photoshop and create a new document. Fill the background layer with black and using the Brush Tool (B) or importing a vector file with a handwritten text. You can the one I used in the PSD file that you can download in the end of this tutorial.

Step 2

If you create a text using the brush tool or importing a vector and paste it as bitmap, create a marquee selection of the area you want to apply Repoussé. With the selection active go to 3D> Repoussé>Current Selection.

Step 3

To create the water effect we will use the Inflate preset and pretty much use the same values we used in the previous step, the Inflate 3D type. Change the Depth to 0 and the Scale to 1, also for the Inflate, change the Slides to Front and Face.

Step 4

You will notice that the E will be a solid block and the hole will be lost, then select the area that you want to be hole and then change the Type to Hole. Also increase the Strength of the Inflate to 1.

Step 5

Select the Front Inflation over the 3D Palette and then click on the folder next to the Bump values. Select Open Texture to open the texture in a new document. Then in this new document create a new layer and go to Filter>Render>Clouds. Make sure that you are using black and white for the colors. After that go to Filter>Render>Different Clouds. If your result is too dark, go to Image>Adjustment>Levels, then increase the white input. This texture will be the Bump map, which will distort our 3D text.

For the other values, use white for the Diffuse color, 15% Opacity, 20 for the Reflection, Black for the Illumination, 100% Gloss, 100% Shine, white for the Specular and 1.5 for the Refraction. You can render here to have a preview of the 3D effect.

Step 6

Now to make our effect more realistic let's mix some stock photos. The one I used is from Stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/photo/884261 and http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1131843). Open these 2 images in Photoshop. Copy some parts of the water splash from the photos and paste it in our 3D image.

Step 7

Repeat the process, copy and paste more splashes. As the water splashes from the photos have black background, just change the Blend Mode to Screen, so the black will be transparent.

Step 8

Time to Render our 3D object. On the 3D Palette change the Quality to Ray Traced Final. It will take a few minutes to render the 3D object. If you want to change the lights you can do that and render it again until you find the best result.

Step 9

Duplicate the rendered 3D object and go to Layer>Rasterize>3D. I will rasterize the 3D object so I can apply some image adjustments, I could do that with the 3D layer but some wouldn't work the way I want or it can get a bit slow.

Add a new layer and fill it with black, then merge the black layer with the 3D rasterized layer. After that go to Image>Adjustments>Levels. Use 15 for the Black, 0.8 for the Grey and 160 for the White inputs.

Step 10

Select all layers and duplicate them. After that go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Use 15 for the Amount. After that change the Blend Mode to Color Dodge and the Opacity to 30%.

Conclusion

Last year I created this effect using Cinema 4D to create the 3D part, which was really simple as well. However now with Repoussé in Photoshop CS5 Extended we can do everything, in this case the 3D part, in Photoshop. I have been playing quite a lot with Repoussé and there are lots of new things that we can create with this new tool, this water effect is an example. I hope you enjoyed it and now it's up to you.

3D Chain Link

1 : Start by creating a single Torus with the dimensions of the type of chain link
you want for you scene. Obviously this can be any shape you would like.

2 : Next we will give the link physical properties. (By doing it now,      it will also set the attributes to the links we will be cloning shortly). 3 : Make sure the link is selected. Once selected go to      menu – Reactor > open property editor. 4 : The Rigid Body Properties window will open.      For this tutorial I will be using the settings      Mass: 6000.0 (how dense your “link” will be)      Friction: 1.0 (How “smooth” the link will be when rubbing against another link)      Elasticity: 0 (How “stretchy” your link will be) Make Sure to choose concave mesh or this will not work properly.

5 : Now you will want to “clone” your link (what ever axis you want).  You can do this by holding shift and moving the link in your chosen direction.  Make sure that when you do this that you only move the copying link far enough  to keep the old link and the new one connected. 6 : You will get this pop up. (I chose to make 15 copies) Click OK

7 : This is what your scene should look like now.

8 : Now select every other link. And rotate them 90 degree’s. Like so.

9 : Now select all of the links. Then go to 
     menu - Reactor > create object > Rigid body collection.

10 : Now choose the very first link you created. In this case chain_link, and go to
      menu – Reactor > open property editor. Make ONLY this links mass 0, and check
     off Unyielding. (This makes the object stay where it is, and allows it to be animated)

11 : We are just about done. Now give all of your links a material         (optional of course) BUT IT LOOKS BETTER! 12 : Now go to the Utilities sub menu (menu to the far right).

13 : Expand the Preview & Animation pull down menu.         Now chose either create animation, or preview in window.         Since this is our first go I think we should preview in window Now just click on Simulation > play/pause.

Go back and make any setting changes that you wish. 
Make it more realistic, or more cartoonish. It’s up to you. 
When you’re ready to go just choose Create animation in 
the reactor pull down instead of preview in window. 
This will automatically add the keys.

Source: "http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/working_chain/chain_01.php"