BUILDING LOW POLY 3D BUILDINGS IN 3DSMAX

FOCUSSING ON GAME CONTENT

by Erik van Leeuwen
This tutorial is inspired by my experience in building a 3d version of downtown Phoenix, Arizona. It hosted the
American Formula 1 Grand Prix of 1991 and the circuit ran straight through the center of the city. The track will
eventually be available to race upon with Grand Prix 4.

I'll start with a simple building and, while explaining a couple of different techniques, I will end with a more
complex building.You will make skyscrapers as well as two storey high buildings. I will close with a guide on
how to export your objects to .3ds.

I'll be using 3dsMax 9 and 8 but 7 and 6 should work as well. I'm not sure if older versions have the same options
and features but in general, the modeling is pretty much standard.

GENERAL INFO

I will put hotkeys between ( ). So (M) means "hit the M key". Learning the hotkeys saves a lot of time and
eventually your wrist!
When you encounter {1}, it means you have to check the first screenshot below the text and look for that number.

The original images used in this tutorial can be found here.

BASIC 3DSMAX KNOWLEDGE

In 3dsMax you work with editable polys that are built out of quads (four sided polygons) and/or tris (three sided
polygons). An editable poly has five suboject levels:
element
polygon (4)
border (3)
edge (2)
vertex (1)
by selecting an object you can use the hotkeys to enter or leave its sublevels.

The standard operations: select (Q), move (W), rotate (E) and scale (R) can be found in the toolbar but you'd
better learn their keys. They can be applied to all subobject levels.

Here's a list of important keystrokes:

F2 = shade selected faces toggle

F3 = wireframe/smooth+highlights toggle
F4 = view edged faces toggle
Alt+W = maximize viewport toggle
Z = zoom extents all selected
Alt+Z = zoom mode
scrollwheel down = pan view
Alt+scrollwheel down = rotate view
Alt+Q = isolate selection
 LESSON ONE
A simple building with one texture
The most simple building is the rectangle one. Let's start with that.
Start with an empty scene and go to the command panel that covers the right side of the screen. Click the “create”
tab and click on “Box” (gets highlighted). Create a box in the perspective view by dragging a rectangle with your
mouse on the ground and after mouse button release, drag to set the height, click one more time to accept.

Create a texture for this building. I'll use this one:

Open the Material Editor (M or the 4 spheres button) and drag your texture in the first open slot. Select your
building and click the "assign material to selection" button. Now you see the texture appear on the box. If the
texture does not appear you should click the small checkered cube called "show map in viewport" in the Material
Editor.

The box has a box-type UVWmapping: Each face shows the complete texture.
Due to the nature of the texture you have to modify the UVWmapping. Start by adding the UnwrapUVW
modifier so you can modify it:
Select face subobject level {1}, select the four sides of the buillding {2} by dragging your mouse over them and
click the Edit button {3}. The Edit UVWs window appears showing your selection on top of the texture. If the
texture does not appear then you have to select it from the dropdown list. also make sure you have "show map"
(the small checkered cube button) active.
Now you can edit the mapping by moving, scaling and rotating the faces. You can always select and deselect
faces in your viewports and they will appear selected in the Edit UVWs window. You can also hide unselected
faces by clicking the small triangle just below the workarea. For this building the UVW's may look like this:
 LESSON TWO
a layered building with multiple textures
If you still have 3dsMax open, you should reset your scene: File->Reset.
Draw a new box in the perspective view. The building will have three layers. One at the bottom, one at the center
and one at the top. There are two ways to create those layers.

The first is to add them straight to the box and manipulate them later:
The second method is to slice your box at the desired places. You will have to convert the box to editable poly
before doing so (right click->convert to->editable poly). After the conversion you select the polygons that you
need to slice and click on "slice plane":
You can move and rotate the slice plane and when you're satisfied you click the slice button. I prefer this method
because you have more control over the end result. When you're done you have to click the slice plane button to
deactivate it. Clicking outside of your selection deselects it (Ctrl+D). If you need to move the new edges you
simply select one and then click "loop". To move the edges (W) up and down you have to hover your mouse over
the blue Z arrow of the move gizmo once it's yellow you can move your selection by clicking and dragging. If the
gizmo doesn't appear you hit the X button, it's the gizmo appearance toggle key.

So now that you have a box with three layers it's time to put the textures onto it. You need four textures:

one for the ground floor

one for the middle section

one for the top

and one for the roof

Open the Material Editor and click in the first slot on the "standard" button. A new window will open, now select
"multi/sub-object" by double clicking on it.
You will see the basic parameters window where you can set the amount of textures to use. You have four
textures so set the number to 4. Drag each texture on a different sub-material slot and give them the right names:
Assign this material to the object you have made. 3dsMax will assign the submaterials automaticallyto the
polygons so it will be a mess. Now you have to assign the right submaterial to the right part of your building.
Enter polygon sublevel (4) and select the polys that need the floor texture. Scroll down and find the Polygon
Properties rollout and set the right materialID, in this case 1:
You will see the texture of the floor part of the building change to its right texture. Now do the same for the
others. If all went well then this is what your building looks like:
Now add the UnwrapUVW to finetune the mapping of each section. You can select the polys by materialID to
keep a clean working space. Open the Edit UVW's to view your selection. You have to detach your selection
from the rest of the mapping in order to avoid anomalies. You do that by right clicking on your selection and
choose "detach edge verts":

It is a very important step that I sometimes forget, with dramatic results! Now you can move, rotate and scale
your selection. Remember that you can edit each face individually.
Here's what the end result may look like:
 LESSON THREE
a complex building
In this lesson I'll take you deeper into polymodeling. Now you will learn how to add and subtract objects and how
to create more intrinsic shapes.

Start with a fresh scene and create a tall standing box and a long lying box:
Move the lying box towards the standing one so that they cross each other:

Select the tall one and select "compound objects" from the create tab rollout:
Now you can click the "boolean" button {1}. At {2} you can select what you want to do. Let's try "Subtraction
{A-B}". Click the Pick Operand B {3} button and see what happens.
Here's what the subtraction did to the tall building:

After each boolean action you have to convert your new object to editable poly in order to do a next boolean. Try
the other boolean actions as well, they might be very handy.

By using boolean you can make complex shapes a lot easier. That's how I made the Renaissance Square buildings
of Phoenix.
By assigning a multi-sub material to this object I got this end result:

Another way to make complex shapes is by extruding and bevelling polygons and edges. Create a new scene,
create a box and convert it to editable poly:
Select the top polygon and click the button next to bevel. A window pops up and you can change the values, you
will see the selection change shape:
It's an easy way to make roofs for example. Click OK to close or Apply to do another Bevel.
After clicking OK click on the button next to Extrude. A pop up will appear, change the values again and see
what happens. Fill in a positive value and hit OK. Now click next to Outline change its values. Do the same with
Inset. Apply another Extrude to top it off. I ended up with this temple like shape:

You see that you can make complex shapes in a small amount of time. In this example all actions were
symmetrical but by using different settings and selections you can do almost anything you like.
Until now I started with a box and ended up with a building. You can also start with a flat plane and work your
way from there by extruding edges.

Reset your scene and draw a flat plane on the ground with no extra segments:

Turn the plane into an editable poly and go to edge subobject level (2). Click the Select and Move button (W) and
select the rear right edge.You will see the edge turn red and the move gizmo appears (to get rid of the grid you hit
the G key):
Now hold down the Shift key and move your mouse to the blue Z-arrow. While holding the Shift key you start to
move your mouse up and a new polygon will appear.

You can do this endlessly until you have the shape you want. You can extrude edges like this in all directions, of
course. You can select multiple edges and also do a Shift-Scale with them. Just try and find out. I use this method
on cars but also on fences and walls. To select opposite edges in a row you select one and click the "row" button,
to select connected edges you select one and click the "ring" button.

If you need to create a copy of an object you can use Shift-Move and move the cpoy to it's desired place
immediately. You can make an instance of it to have it connected to the basic object. Any changes made to an
instanced object will be made to it's sister-objects as well.
 LESSON FOUR
exporting to .3ds
3dsMax uses smoothing groups on polygon level to smoothen your work. .3ds uses normals on vertex level to
smoothen your work. This causes broken vertices and strange smoothed surfaces when exporting to .3ds. I have
found a way to bypass this.

The adjacent edges of faces that share a smoothing group appear smoothed, adjacent edges of faces that have
different smoothing groups appear sharp.

Create an object, in this case a simple box. Turn it into an editable poly. It has 6 sides with sharp edges. To keep
it sharp we need three smoothing groups because of the nature of the shape. You can do this manually but
3dsMax can do this for you.

Select all the faces (Ctrl+A) and go to the Polygon Properties. Click the AutoSmooth button, that's it:

Now click the button right above it: Select by SG. Pick one and press OK:
Now scroll up until you see "detach". Click on it and hit OK.

Do the same with the other SG's until you have one left.

Our object is now split up by SG into several objects. Now you have to put them back together so you have one
object again but the vertices are broken along the smoothing groups.

Click the button next to "attach" and select the new objects. Click "attach" and the box is one object again.

Now you can safely export it to .3ds. I use Export Selected, otherwise all the objects in your scene will be
exported. For more complex objects the AutoSmooth may make mistakes, you will have to manually adjust some
smoothing groups to have the best smoothing.
With a scene full of objects I isolate the selected object by Alt+Q and then start to detach by SG so the attach
process is a little easier.

This concludes the tutorial. You can reach me at [email protected] with all kinds of questions regarding this
tutorial and 3dsMax in general. Remember to press F1 when you're stuck. The 3dsMax reference and help files
are very detailed.

Have nice day!

04 november 2007