Greebles became a core part of our 'Fantasy Architecture City' a few years back - allowing details to be added to buildings quickly and easily. In a new series of posts we thought we would provide a walk through of how to quickly and easily create your own city using the Greeble Plugin for 3D Max. For those new to Greebles - Wikipedia defines them as: A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects. They serve no real purpose other than to add complexity to the object, and cause the flow of the eye over the surface of the object to be interrupted, usually giving the impression of increased size. It is essentially the small detailed technical part of a larger object. The detail can be made from geometric primitives, including cylinders, cubes, and rectangles, combined to create intricate, but meaningless, surface detail. Greebles are commonly found on models or drawings of fictional spacecraft in science fiction. In part one we are going to build the skyscraper featured top right: You will need: 1x Copy of 3D Studio Max (a 30 Day trial can be downloaded from here) 1x Greeble Plugin installed into your Plugins Folder Time Required: 5 -10 Minutes Level: Beginner Step 1: Making a Cylinder Create a new cylinder in 3D Max with the following units: Radius: 50, Height: 600, Height Segments: 32, as pictured below: For those new to 3D Max the Cylinder object can be found under 'Standard Primitives' on the right hand side tab with the 'Arrow' Icon. Step 2: Selecting the Polygons We are going to give the cylinder some shape by using the 'Taper' Modifier, before we taper we need to convert the Cylinder to an 'Editable Poly' - simply right click on your cylinder and select 'Convert To/Convert to Editable Poly': Step 3: Adding some Shape Now our cylinder is converted we need to select all the polygons in order to change the shape to something a little more interesting. Go into the objects 'Modify' list - you will find 'Modify' next to the Create Tab. Expand the drop down list and select 'Polygon', now click and drag around the object and you will see your selected polygons turn red. We now apply the 'Taper' Modifier which is under your 'Modify' list. We have used 0.4 for the amount and ticked the 'Symmetry' box to ensure the top and bottom of our skyscraper is tapered by the same amount. Once your object is tapered right click on your cylinder...
A city can be constructed using 3D Studio Max in under 5 minutes using the Greeble Plugin and a few simple steps. In the second part of our series on Greebling a City we take a look at creating the cityscape itself. If your new to Greeble take a look at the first part of our tutorial: Greeble a 3D City: Tutorial 1: Greeble Skyscraper. To build a Cityscape: You will need: 1x Copy of 3D Studio Max (a 30 Day trial can be downloaded from here) 1x Greeble Plugin installed into your Plugins Folder Time Required: 5 -10 Minutes Level: Beginner Step 1: Making a City Block Create a new Plane object as pictured below, we used 100x100 units with 10x10 width and length segments (hint: press F4 to view the outline view if it is not visible): This creates our basic outline, we now want to convert this plane to a Editable Poly, to do this simply right click and select 'Convert to Editable Poly', as pictured below: Step 2: Greeble the City Now we have an editable polygon we can click on our Modify list and select Greeble: As soon as we click Greeble a basic cityscape will appear with small units on the roof and a low rise city block. There are a couple of tweaks we want to make to create a more city like view, firstly set 'Taper' to 0 and increase the height to say 35 units. This produces the city block illustrated below: You now have the basics for building a city, if you clone the block and change the heights in each section you will begin to build a background cityscape in which to insert various more detailed buildings as seen in our first tutorial. Road layouts can be included and more realism by including simple additions such as street lights and signage. Greeble can be an extremely useful tool for quick and easy city models, we hope this tutorial as provided an insight into how to quickly and easily build your own city. In future tutorials we will look at Rendering the City, as previewed here and if there is interest taking a look at creating road junctions and textures, let us know if there are any additions you would like to see...
A city can be constructed using 3D Studio Max in under 5 minutes using the Greeble Plugin and a few simple steps. In the second part of our series on Greebling a City we take a look at creating the cityscape itself. If your new to Greeble take a look at the first part of our tutorial: Greeble a 3D City: Tutorial 1: Greeble Skyscraper. To build a Cityscape: You will need: 1x Copy of 3D Studio Max (a 30 Day trial can be downloaded from here) 1x Greeble Plugin installed into your Plugins Folder Time Required: 5 -10 Minutes Level: Beginner Step 1: Making a City Block Create a new Plane object as pictured below, we used 100x100 units with 10x10 width and length segments (hint: press F4 to view the outline view if it is not visible): This creates our basic outline, we now want to convert this plane to a Editable Poly, to do this simply right click and select 'Convert to Editable Poly', as pictured below: Step 2: Greeble the City Now we have an editable polygon we can click on our Modify list and select Greeble: As soon as we click Greeble a basic cityscape will appear with small units on the roof and a low rise city block. There are a couple of tweaks we want to make to create a more city like view, firstly set 'Taper' to 0 and increase the height to say 35 units. This produces the city block illustrated below: You now have the basics for building a city, if you clone the block and change the heights in each section you will begin to build a background cityscape in which to insert various more detailed buildings as seen in our first tutorial. Road layouts can be included and more realism by including simple additions such as street lights and signage. Greeble can be an extremely useful tool for quick and easy city models, we hope this tutorial as provided an insight into how to quickly and easily build your own city. In future tutorials we will look at Rendering the City, as previewed here and if there is interest taking a look at creating road junctions and textures, let us know if there are any additions you would like to see...