A Jug, orange juice, glasses, ice, glass and mental ray…

A scene like this is not hard to achive since it does not use any specialy advanced options of 3D Studio Max, and the only thing you might run into trouble with is drawing the contours which we will use for making jug and glasses with the lathe modifier.

Therefore, most of our attention we will put into making these contours.

ATTENTION:Please follow the instructions to the best of your ability. This assignment must be rendered with the Mental Ray renderer in 3ds Max 2009 to give the most realistic appearance as possible.Render the assignment to a .jpg file format as a resolution of 720x486. Save the completed assignment as follows; Initials, last four digits of you "C" and a short name of the assignment.Place the completed assignment in the completed assignment sub-folder of your class directory on the Super-Server. Due Date: 03/27/2009. Thank you. Page 1 of 2A scene like this is not hard to achive since it does not use any specialy advanced options of 3D Studio Max

1. – contour of jug

2. – contour of liquid

3. – contour of jug handle

4. – side view of jug handle

5. – contour of a glass

Contours like these are best drawn with some other program like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, and than import into max, but you can make these in Max too. On the create panel, click the shapes icon and choose line. With line tool you can make contours like this. To make it easier we will import the front viewport where you will draw these, set this picture as background. From the menu choose views/vieport background… find this picture. Turn on match bitmap and you will have the background.

Note: Little help with drawing curves.

Line 3 will be best drawn if you turn on smooth under initial type group in the line tool. Line one is easiest to draw by first making it rough, with corner option under initial type group on. The side view 4 should be drawn with a circle, and than make it into an editable spline, and in the vertex sub object mode draw the lowest vertex a bit down. If this seems too hard, and it should not because good spline drawing is imperative in Max, in that case get your curves here.

Hide everything except the jug curve and fluid. With jug contour selected switch to hierarchy panel / pivot and turn on the affect pivot only. On the top toolbar turn on the icon 3D snap (with your right click call up the 3D snap dialog and check the snap to edges) That way it will be easier to move the jug pivot to the axis shown in next picture. Do the same with liquid contour inside the jug.

Select the jug spline, on the modifier panel find lathe modifier. You will get almost the complete jug, on the lathe modifier turn on weld core. Change number of segments from 16 to at least 50. We want a detailed glass jug. Turn on generate mapping coordinates option. Same action apply to liquid contours. If you do not see the liquid object, turn on flip normals option in the lathe modifier.

Unhide the remaining splines. Now it is time to make the jug handle. Select spline number 3 (handle itself) and on the create panel choose compound objects/loft. With the spline selected, click the get shape button and select spline 4. We now get the starting shape of the handle like in the picture.

Note: Be carefull that the handle be oriented inwards. Switch to modify panel with handle selected, go into subobject mode and choose shape. It will be easier to rotate it 90 degrees if you turn on the option Angle Snap toggle on the main toolbar. Rotate the shape into correct position like in pic.

Before we connect the jug and handle, we will set a bit more realistic look of handle. Get out of sub object mode if you have not already. On deformations panel turn on scale. You will get a dialog with wich you set the length scale of object handle. With Insert cornet point (yellow colored icon on the picture) add enough new points on the line.

Switch to Move control point and set points approximately like in next picture. Now the handle looks more realistic. Look at the handle in the viewport and how moving control points effects it. The more points you add deformation will be more detailed.

Now that you are happy with the handle look, move it close on the x axis to the jug so that goes a bit into the jug itself. Before we “stick” it to the jug, we will cut out the surplus with a Boolean operation. Check the top viewport if handle is aligned to the middle of the jug.

Zoom in the handle and jug so that it is convenient to draw a new line of object with wich we will cut out unneeded parts of handle. Choose spline and along side the jug like in this pic draw a line.

On that line add extrude modifier. Set the new object to center so that it covers handle completely.

On create panel, with new object selected choose Boolean, choose pick operand and click the handle. In properties of Boolean modifier under group operations choose Substraction (B – A).

Now it is time to connect handle and jug. On the modify panel right click and turn Boolean object of handle into mash. Again turn on Boolean opearation on the create panel/compound objects, click pick operand and under operations select union.

And now before you there is a pretty nice jug with the juice already in it. Turn Boolean object into mash (or some other format you feel comfortable with: pathc, nurbs, poly) Repeat the lathe command for the remaining glass contuours.

Extrusion on top of the jug is relatively easy to make. Select the jug in front viewport and on modify panel choose mash select modifier. Go into vertex sub object mode and select the top part of the jug like in picture. Now we will limit the effect only to selected part of mash. Now add an FFD 4x4 modifier to Jug from the modifier list. Go into control points subobject mode and set control points so that you get a look that you like. With a little practice and experiments it should be fun and easy.

Now for the ice. Make a cube big enough to fit in a glass (create panel, standard primitives, box), change

number of segments to 32, 32, 32 and add it noise modifier on the modify panel. In noise parameters turn on roughness to around 0.435, and turn on fractal too. Strenght noise choose for your self (somewhere around 3, 3, 3) so that your cube looks like this.

Copy the cube. In this scene I made four glasses and I will put 3 ice cubes in each. Hide the Jug, and put glasses in the wanted position. Before that turn ice cube to a mash object (select cube, go to modify panel and right click option collapse all) If you have not done it already turn the glasses to mash too. Before copying the

cubes give it a nice name something like ice box

Now we will use reactor to put the ice cubes in glasses with physics.

On the reactor toolbar, choose Create rigid body collection and set the reactor icon somewhere on the scene (position of icon is not important for simulation itself).

In RB collection rollout turn on Add and add all objects on the scene that you can see.

(RB collection should be made of 4 glasses and 12 ice cubes) Select all the glasses (ctrl click) and on reactor toolbar choose Open Property editor. Option Mass put to 0. (we do not want our glasses to move) Under Simulation geometry turn on concave mash.

Get out of property editor and select all the ice cubes. (it will be easier to select them all by choosing “Select by name” option from the main toolbar. Again turn on property editor on Reactor toolbar. For ice cube mass add 5. Turn on concave for simulation geometry and get out of editor. Turn on preview animation on reactor toolbar. Shortcut “P” will start the simulation. Check if all the cubes are falling nicely into glasses. If it seems that the cubes are not so naturally postioned one on top of other, increase their bounce coefficient with the reactor property dialog. Than they will jump around a bit more and their final position will be a little more chaotich. If you notice that they are apart one from another or from the glass (space between them) that is solvable too. On the utilities panel choose reactor and in the world group find Collision tolerance. Lower Collision Tolerance from default 3.6 to 1 or less.

Note: If your preview is too slow, probably your computer is not good enough for a real time simulation. Problem is solvable by selecting all the ice cubes in the modify panel and finding option Optimize. That will lower number of poligons on them and preview should work much faster.

If you are happy with the simulation, turn on in preview editor update max from max menu. Get our of preview and all the ice will already be in the glasses. That is it for simulation. Unhide the rest of object (jub and liquid), now it is time to make a scene out of these objects, ad a base on which they will stand, lights, materials and turn on caustic effects.

Base you can make with a simple circle (create panel, shapes, choose circle) In top viewport make a circle and in the modify panel with right click turn it into mash.

Before adding materials, we will switch maxs default scanline renderer to mental ray. In render scene dialog, under common tab, find group Assign Renderer. At the production field choose icon with three dots and change default scanline to mental ray.

Setting up lights.

Before doing materials, we will light the scene with two lights. Under create panel choose lights. Firs put one skylight on scene from top viewport. Its position is not important. All settings should be left to default. Make one omni light. Set it above the scene, a bit forward so that it lights the right side of objects. In properties of omni light, turn on cast shadow and choose raytrace shadow.

Now its time for materials. Open material library from the main toolbar. We will set a total of 5 materials in the scene and we will use maxs materials. (make sure you have installed matlibs library) In material editor turn on icon get material, from the list left choose library and find the folder with materials on your max installation. Choose raytraced_01 and in it material glass clear. Click twice and material will be in your first slot of material editor. Now switch to another slot and in the same way, find library raytraced_02. From this library choose glass frosted material and click twice. You will see it in the second slot. Now for the liquid materal we will choose it to be orange juice and we will make such a material. Click the third slot in material editor, and call it juice material. Apply type of material Phong, and color set for ambient and diffuse put a strong yellow color. Turn on 2 sided, pu opacity to 70 and click the empty icon on the side. There from map browser (make sure that in “browse from:” right group is turned on new) find falloff and click ok. Material is now more see through from inside than from outside. For juice we need it the other way round. Click the white cube under “front-side” and drag it to the black one down. Dialog will ask you to copy or swap, you should choose swap. This way we will switch places to white and black color wich sets transparency levels. With icon go to parent in material editor go back to your juice material. Material for the base you can choose at your own free will we will use just plane old white plastic. Materials can be added to object with Assign to selection. It is easier just to drag from

the slot to object.

Open render scene dialog and on bottom choose final gather and number of samples should be 50 instead of default 500. (for test renders 50 samples is sufficient with default settings) Click the render button and you should see a nicely filled jug with orange juice and ice in the glasses waiting. In this tutorial you learned how to use lathe, Boolean, how to change object axis, how to set up a simulation in reactor, generator caustics and render with mental ray. Want more? Now we leave you to your experiments. You can add caustic effect, add a background or pour the juice into glasses and beutify them with some lemon circles or mint leaves, model a table and a garden to put all this into. Everything is up to you. If you want caustic shadows that will show the light going through glass like in the picture just open the render scene dialog and with Indirect Illumination, turn on option Caustics. It will be enough to leave default setting for a test render (glasses, jug, liquid) and right click/ properties find tab mental ray. There turn on option to generate caustics and click OK.

Note: If you want a better quality of your render and anitaliasing, in render scene dialog choose the render tab and in group samples per pixel first order put to 1 and the other to 64, this will give you best quality but also slow down your rendering.