Beginner : Help me make a bunker

Leodido

Hey guys, so I've recently started using 3ds max a bit more because I'd like to be able to make some props for a level I'm doing in UDK. I have no experience at this and there is a lot of stuff I don't know how to do, so I hope you'll be able to give me advice and show me the way.

Something is not really clear in my mind is that low/high poly business. What should I first start making? Since I wanted some practice in 3ds max I just went with it and didn't care too much about poly.

Luckily I found a nice blueprint so I imported it in 3ds max and started working. I had some troubles with various shapes but I got something I like. Since I want the player to be able to go inside the bunker I had to tweak some heights and width to be sure the player wouldn't get stuck.

Here is my reference sheet.


This is where I am right now.



I still have work on this but I stumbled on some problems so I wanted to ask some questions.
To make the inside of the dome, I simply cloned the exterior and scaled down. This works fine, now the problem I have is that I want to connect both domes at the door (there is a hole at the moment that you can see on the picture above) How can I connect these two together? I tried creating polygons but when selecting vertices from one dome and the other I get a illegal new face message from 3ds max.

All comments and advice are welcome, like I said I'm very new to this stuff.

Brendan

Chances are the normals of the inside of the dome are flipped (the polygons are still pointing towards the sky, when they should be pointing towards the center of the bunker.
Reverse Normals, then try extruding edges and welding them to the outer shell of the roof.


Only other comment is 'how the hell did they haul that thing onto a battlefield already prefabricated?'

Leodido

Brendan wrote: »

Chances are the normals of the inside of the dome are flipped (the polygons are still pointing towards the sky, when they should be pointing towards the center of the bunker.
Reverse Normals, then try extruding edges and welding them to the outer shell of the roof.


Only other comment is 'how the hell did they haul that thing onto a battlefield already prefabricated?'

Thanks a lot for the tip, I'll give it a try, it's probably this.

Well if you are curious you can read more about them here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania

They are made of several pieces put together on the field.

Ich 666

You could just use the bridge tool for connecting the inside with the outside.

For the "highpoly/lowpoly first" stuff: Thats usually just what the artist prefers, some do a High Poly first, others the Low Poly, both methods can give you good results. If you want to make a High Poly for this one, you probably want to look into sculpting, because it will be difficult to archieve the wears and tears of the bunker with 3dsmax.

Leodido

so I worked more on this, and after lot of different tries and restart I got this. I don't think it's great but I had a lot of trouble extruding and correctly making the bunker hole. Maybe I should have started from a primitive for this part? any advice welcome.

Leodido

Some more progress on this, I guess it's not perfect but I can't really make it better without advice since I don't know what I'm doing so I'll go with it I guess

poopinmymouth

You should play around with the "shell" modifier. You make a single poly thickness, and the shell modifier gives it actual depth and connections. It's awesome for this kind of thing.

Leodido

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it

Leodido

I'm currently doing the old pillar dvd tutorial, since I guess that the way to go about making props (3ds max -> mudbox -> 3ds max). Is that correct? Can that workflow be applied to any prop making? If it is the case I will probably, start another simpler prop and try to finish it since it was not the best idea starting with a round one.