Summary

This post will sum up what I have learnt in the past semester.
I have gone from not knowing anything about using 3dsmax, to creating three images representing 3 different months of the year.
In the first few weeks, I found the program complicated and unforgiving if I did anything wrong. I also struggled to grasp the different views, knowing what one to use when. Through the weeks however I gradually got fast with using 3dsMax and began to learn about some of its more complex functions (i.e. Lighting, hair and fur) and also some of its more fun features (i.e. materials). Whilst I still find the program complicated, I feel capable of making 3d models, and whilst not on a professional scale, they still look decent in my opinion.
My first image October changed considerably during the creation process, and went from being a hill with an evil pumpkin to a slightly more peaceful looking pumpkin patch. The pumpkin took a fair amount of time to get to the right shape originally, however, once I had one pumpkin it as more simple to create the others.
The second image is my least favorite and the one I feel that I could improve. This is my inter scene and also the one I started before the other scenes, however, I put it aside whilst creating the other two because I felt I could learn new techniques in the other scenes to use I the winter one. To improve the scene I would add more items to it and to try different lighting and fog to make it feel more atmospheric.
My favorite scene is April. This scene to me feels bright, cheerful and also fairly comedic. The bee I feel follows quite closely the bee I found and used originally, this combined with the flower, which whilst simple to create looks quite effective, merges to make a great scene.
My three months can be seen below:

April

December

October

April.

I had originally planned to create a wintry scene for February. However, after beginning the image, I felt that it would look too much like Christmas, so I decided that I would go forward a few months and create an April scene.
For the April image, there was one image that I found online which inspired me with the creation of the image, this bee:


To create the bee, I started with two spheres, and changed their scales to make them more oblong and flatter. I then added a striped texture immediately after so I could get a feel to how the bee was shaping out.
Then using the 2d shape tool, I drew some wings and gave them depth to make them 3d. They were then retarded to look like wings. I added legs and antennae (made from cylinders rotated) and also added eyes, which were made from two spheres, rescaled and merged.
I then needed add some flowers in the background. Using a very helpful web tutorial, I was able to make some cartoonish feeling daisies very quickly, from simply combining a rescaled cylinder (petals) clones multiple times, and a cylinder for a stem.
Because the images fee was to be cartoony, it made creating textures simpler as I could make them brighter and with more un-natural colours.
I then added lighting from two directions; one from the left and one from the right facing onto the bee. Finally I created a background with mimicked zoomed in, out of focus grass to add effect.
The final image can be seen below:

Christmas Comes

The month of December was completed swiftly after October.
December shows a wintery scene of a cabin set aside two snowmen and a fir tree. Snow lays on the ground and the feeling of cold runs throughout the image.

The image is made up of three main objects. The first object is the snowman. The creation process for this object can be read about in an earlier post., which I is also more of a tutorial. The second object is the cabin, which is made up of a simple cube, with squares beveled into the surface, to create windows. Creating a pyramid, then adding a roof like texture to it, made the roof. Finally I added a chimney by simply creating a very high cube and adding a brick texture.
The tree was created following a tutorial I found online. It involved a very complex process which started by creating a spiral. This spiral then got extended and drawn out, and I had to apply a filter called “hair and fir.

The hair and fir filter gave me many different options to how I could create the most natural tree, and after changing many settings and trying several colors etc. I finally settled on my final choice, which can be seen in the scene below.

The background image looks familiar to my October scene, as I have used the same image, however I feel that yet again it works well. Shadows have been added to the scene to ensure that most of the light falls on the front of the image allowing you to see the front of the image in full.