GMax Fundamentals

[clintonman]

The past few weeks I've been using the 3DBuzz Max Fundamentals course videos to learn GMax. GMax is a free limited version of 3DSMax version 4 that was made for game content creation. It has no renderer and I was thinking of using the Open Arena game as a renderer. GMax has a gamepak that lets it write to the Quake III format and Open Arena is like an open source version of Quake III.

The first project is an animated bouncing ball. This is done except for the rendering.

The second project is much bigger. A pair of F-14 jets take off from a carrier and blow up a target on the high seas. I've modeled the animatics for the aircraft carrier and the jet. The image above is the completed jet model that will be animated in the final scene. The next lesson is modeling the aircraft carrier.

[Tiles]

Nice one. But isn`t GMax a bit too outdated to toy around with it nowadays?

[clintonman]

Nice one. But isn`t GMax a bit too outdated to toy around with it nowadays?

You would think so, but surprisingly it's not too bad. I had to change several keyboard shortcuts to match 3DSMax and it's definitely lacking some tools, but I can follow almost all of the steps in the tutorial. The most noticeable things missing are no loop selection, no ring selection, no insert ring loop function and no bridge tool. The snapping modes don't work as well as 3DSMax and the object move widget is not as good. Overall it is not as good as 3DSMax but it works the same way. I'll be ready for the next 30 trial from autodesk.

[clintonman]

Started the aircraft carrier. At the moment it doesn't look much different than the animatic version and in fact it is being made using the animatic model as a starting point.

Also shown is the animatic F14 jet made prior to the regular F14 model.The jet and it's animatic were 2 distinct models. The animatic was a polygon model and the F14 started as a collection of curves that were skinned and then refined with polygon modeling techniques.

I've given up on the idea of using Open Arena as a rendering engine for the first project, the talented ball. The Quake III engine doesn't seem to have an easy way to just play a vertex animation. It might still work out for the second project since there is no vertex animations in it.

[clintonman]

Working on the tower and just finished the guard rails. I can't get a better image because the wireframe display is chunky and there is no renderer for GMax.

I was able to compile the OpenArena source and I found some work by someone who makes it possible to do cut scenes with the quake code. So I might still be able to use it as a kind of render engine.

[clintonman]

Still moving forward. Did a little bit of modeling and started copying the text for the Quake 3 single person game for cut scene creation. I like that GMax/3DSMax has the ability to render a curve with thickness and then convert that thickness to a mesh.

[clintonman]

That's it for the carrier. Next model is the target that gets blown up.

[v3rd3]

Really nice work clintonman... please keep adding the wire screens it helps us noobs better understand good modelling practice.

[clintonman]

Really nice work clintonman... please keep adding the wire screens it helps us noobs better understand good modelling practice.

Here is what the wireframe looks like in GMax. GMax wireframe has a lot of dashed lines and chunkiness so there is no way to get a good looking image, even close up like this.

[clintonman]

Started target model which will be some kind of ocean or oil platform. Mostly a bunch of cylinders all stuck together.