Creating Jewels that Refract Light using Ray Tracing in 3DSmax

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Introduction

In this project, you create a faceted cross by modifying a geosphere. After you create the cross, you create and assign a ray-traced material to the cross to make it look like it is carved from an emerald.

In this project, you learn how to:

• Turn geospheres into jewels.
• Shape geospheres using an FFDBox modifier.
• Create a ray-traced material that refracts light like a green diamond.
• Use lens effects to make a light sparkle.

This project also contains a diamond, ruby and sapphire material you can use in your own images and animations. If you wish, you can add the materials in this scene to your own material library.

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Creating Jewels with Facets

The easiest way to create a jewel is to start with a geosphere. Most jewels have surfaces composed of facets. There are lots of evenly and symmetrically distributed facets on a geosphere. You can use tools like FFDBox and Edit Mesh to move the vertices of the geosphere to create the desired effect.

Prior to proceeding with this project, open 0631a.max which can be found in the self-extracting executable m0631a.exe. To unpack the source files, just transfer the .exe file to a folder on your local hard disk. From the Windows Start menu, choose Run. Select the .exe, then choose OK. Specify where you would like the source files placed.

Follow these instructions to create a faceted cross.

1. Select the Sphere in the Front view.



2. Select the Modify tab.
3. Remove the check from the Smooth checkbox on the Modify command panel. This tells 3D Studio MAX not to smooth away facets on the sphere when it renders.
4. Select the Octa checkbox. This arranges the faces of the sphere in a common jewel cut. You can experiment with other options if you like.



5. On the Main Toolbar, choose the Select and Uniform Scale icon, then drag down to select the Select and Non-Uniform Scale button.
6. Drag down on the Z spinner located under the viewports to flatten the sphere.



7. In the Modify command panel, from the Modifier List select the FFD (Box) modifier. You will use this to modify the sphere.



8. In the command panel, select the Set Number of Points button.
9. Type 6 in all spinners to specify the number of control points on the object.



10. Choose OK to exit this window.
11. In the command panel, in the Modifier stack, select the + associated with the FFD(box) 6x6x6 entry.
12. Select Control Points from the list of sub-objects.

    

13. Select two points in the top view to put a window around the four control points indicated in the image.



14. Select the Non-Uniform Scale icon, if it is not already selected.
15. Move your mouse onto the band above and to the left of the inner triangle on the scale icon. It will turn yellow. Click and drag on the band to scale the vertices on the X and Y axis, but not the Z axis.

    

16. Choose the Select and Move icon on the Main toolbar.
17. Move the selected points to the position shown in the image.

    

18. Repeat this procedure for the remaining corners on the object.

    

19. Select, move and scale vertices until your cross looks like the one shown in the image.

    

20. Choose the Create tab to indicate that you don't want to move or scale control points any more.

You will find our version of the file to this point in 0631b.max in the self-extracting executable m0631a.exe.

This tutorial continues . . .