3 - Building of 3D Reference Plates

3 - Building of 3D Reference Plates
Eric Maslowski


Create > tab > geometry > plane. Create plane that will hold the front view of the image.

Set up units of scale. Click and drag plane in view port.

Modify panel > change the length and width segments down to 1.

Position plane – in top view port. We created plane at 0, but the plane needs to be positioned behind what we are modelling. Click and drag plane to the side and move back and over to the left.

Create material that will hold the photos
Material editor> select material slot and assign to diffuse channel > bitmap > ok Find our topology file which is a PSD file. Open as this is a Photoshop file, we can collapse all layers or individual layer. Use collapsed layers if you have several layers in the image.

Click and drag image on to the plane. You will notice that the map doesn’t show up, which is default behaviour in Max, in order to see the texture go to the blue and white chequered box, click to see image.
The image looks severely squashed; we need to maintain the same aspect ratio. To do this we need to modify texture co ordinates through the modify panel > UVW map > to modify the texture co-ordinates for the plane. We could decrease the U tile amount but not precise enough, so use a tool called ‘bitmap fit’ under ‘alignment’ in the modify panel.

On the modify panel where you see UVW mapping in the stack, click on the plus sign – this reveals a gismo, this can move rotate or scale image it is applied to. Move tool, click on x axis and move to fit the face on to the plane properly.

As you rotate image around it gets darker. We want to see the reference plane clearly behind the object.
The Material editor is hierarchal, when assigning a map you are assigning a child, so need to ‘go to parent’, back to bitmap, need to remove lighting by self illuminating the material. In the self illumination panel change the illumination to 100. Close material editor.

Copy our existing object. We need to tweak to show the left side. Switch to rotate shift click and drag it makes a copy to 90 degrees. Press A on key board which is angle snap if you are having trouble.
Move to new location set up left plane. You will notice that the image is facing the wrong direction and the plane isn’t big enough to hold profile image.

Therefore we need to flip the image – flip is next to UV tile.
In order to add space to accommodate the entire side of the head to left and right – jump back to plane increase the width to whatever is needed.
Tweek the UV mapping gismo and adjust further. Now we have two nicely positioned reference planes.

Select one ref planes – right click freeze selection the panel turns grey. You need to modify the behaviour of the plane. Therefore left click > properties – Check freeze then uncheck ‘show frozen in grey’ this preserves the appearance of the object. Do the same to the profile view.