Today is a great day in your life, you will learn to model a tyre on 3dsmax.

First thing you will have to do is a Plane on the top view port. Your plane will have 1 length segment and 9 width segments. It will look like this:

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Now you are going to convert it to Editable Poly, clicking with the right mouse button on the plane, after Convert To and then Editable Poly.

On the modifier panel of your editable poly “tyre” you are going to select from the first submenu “Selection” > Vertex and model your tyre like this. This will be in fact one line of ridges from your tyre, dont worry, you will understand it later.

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Now use from the Modifiers menu on the top tool bar Mesh Editting and then Symmetry, make it that your tyre ridges will look like this after using the symmetry and scaling it a bit:

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Now re-convert your symmetric object to an editable poly, select the upper and lower edges and while selecting it, hold the Ctrl button to make a new set of small polys up and down from our main object like this

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now select the following polygons and bevel(from the modifier panel, with your object selected, choose polygon from the selection menu, then go down to the edit polygons submenu, choosing bevel. So bevel them so that they will look like this:

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Now choose the front viewport, or the viewport where your tyre will look like this, then from the Modifiers menu, select Free Form Deformers > FFD 4×4x4, make it this way:

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Recovert it to an Editable poly, and from the Tools menu choose array, and choose the following parameters for your array, this will make all the ridges for your tyre, dont forget to use preview to check if all your ridges are connected:

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Now, this is VERY IMPORTANT, after the array and while the last ridge of the array selected, convert it to editable poly and attach all other ridges with it. Afterwards, using the Modifiers> Parametric Deformers> Bend with the following parameters, it will look like this:

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Cool, now create a tube with meshsmooth and position it in the outter part of your tyre, like this:

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Thats it, give it a render to try, the ridges are pretty simple on this one, but u can use this technic to create almost all types of real tyres! In the next tutorial, we will learn to texture it!

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In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Depth of Field in Mental Ray, using the camera’s depth of field.

The depth of field basically allows you to focus a single target on the camera while objects that are closer of further from the camera’s target will appear gradually less and less focused.

In this scene we are just using some spheres, with a target area photometric light, and then, let’s go for the camera settings.

In this first image from the top view port you can see where the camera target is:

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Now we are going to set the camera parameters so we can have the Depth of Field Effect. Select the camera, and go to its properties menu. Go down a bit until you find Multi Pass Effect. Check the Enable Box and choose Depth of Field(Mental Ray). The depth of field parameters will appear under the Multi Pass Effect Box.

Choose 12.0 as the f-stop value.

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Now we are going to make a test render to see how it goes.

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As you can the, the balls that are further from the target look more blurry than the one that is targeted. Now let’s try with a smaller value for the f-stop, set it to 5.0

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Now the balls that aren’t targeted are much more blurred than the target. Another thing you can do is change your target to see how it goes. Choosing the second last ball, you will see that the balls that are closer to the camera are blurred, creating a perfect depth of field effect.

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That’s it, very simple, but great results, i did low quality renders just for the understanding, but if you go for more quality it will look like a realistic depth of field! Good luck and see ya next time!

This tutorial will help you to create a self illuminated object using VRay Light Material

The first thing we are going to make is a wall with a cylinder that is going to be our Light

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The second thing we are going to do is add a VRay light illuminating our wall… don’t forget do set the light to be invisible and uncheck the Specular Reflections box

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Now we are going to make our VRay Light Material. In the Material Editor click on Standard and then choose VrayLightMtl. Once you have chosen it, this is how your material will look like

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And this is the texture bitmap i am using to be our light.

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Apply it to your cylinder and this is the final result you’ll have! Good Luck!

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