A Jug, orange juice, glasses, ice, glass and mental ray…

A Jug, orange juice, glasses, ice, glass and mental ray…

A scene like this is not hard to achive since it does not use any specialy advanced options of 3D Studio Max, and the only thing you might run into trouble with is drawing the contours which we will use for making jug and glasses with the lathe modifier.

Therefore, most of our attention we will put into making these contours.

1. – contour of jug

2. – contour of liquid

3. – contour of jug handle

4. – side view of jug handle

5. – contour of a glass

Contours like these are best drawn with some other program like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, and than import into max, but you can make these in Max too. On the create panel, click the shapes icon and choose line. With line tool you can make contours like this. To make it easier we will import the front viewport where you will draw these, set this picture as background. From the menu choose views/vieport background… find this picture. Turn on match bitmap and you will have the background.

Note: Little help with drawing curves.

Line 3 will be best drawn if you turn on smooth under initial type group in the line tool. Line one is easiest to draw by first making it rough, with corner option under initial type group on. The side view 4 should be drawn with a circle, and than make it into an editable spline, and in the vertex sub object mode draw the lowest vertex a bit down. If this seems too hard, and it should not because good spline drawing is imperative in Max, in that case get your curves here.

Hide everything except the jug curve and fluid. With jug contour selected switch to hierarchy panel / pivot and turn on the affect pivot only. On the top toolbar turn on the icon 3D snap (with your right click call up the 3D snap dialog and check the snap to edges) That way it will be easier to move the jug pivot to the axis shown in next picture. Do the same with liquid contour inside the jug.

Select the jug spline, on the modifier panel find lathe modifier. You will get almost the complete jug, on the lathe modifier turn on weld core. Change number of segments from 16 to at least 50. We want a detailed glass jug. Turn on generate mapping coordinates option. Same action apply to liquid contours. If you do not see the liquid object, turn on flip normals option in the lathe modifier.

Unhide the remaining splines. Now it is time to make the jug handle. Select spline number 3 (handle itself) and on the create panel choose compound objects/loft. With the spline selected, click the get shape button and select spline 4. We now get the starting shape of the handle like in the picture.

Note: Be carefull that the handle be oriented inwards. Switch to modify panel with handle selected, go into subobject mode and choose shape. It will be easier to rotate it 90 degrees if you turn on the option Angle Snap toggle on the main toolbar. Rotate the shape into correct position like in pic.

Before we connect the jug and handle, we will set a bit more realistic look of handle. Get out of sub object mode if you have not already. On deformations panel turn on scale. You will get a dialog with wich you set the length scale of object handle. With Insert cornet point (yellow colored icon on the picture) add enough new points on the line.

Switch to Move control point and set points approximately like in next picture. Now the handle looks more realistic. Look at the handle in the viewport and how moving control points effects it. The more points you add deformation will be more detailed.

Now that you are happy with the handle look, move it close on the x axis to the jug so that goes a bit into the jug itself. Before we “stick” it to the jug, we will cut out the surplus with a Boolean operation. Check the top viewport if handle is aligned to the middle of the jug.

Zoom in the handle and jug so that it is convenient to draw a new line of object with wich we will cut out unneeded parts of handle. Choose spline and along side the jug like in this pic draw a line.

On that line add extrude modifier. Set the new object to center so that it covers handle completely.

On create panel, with new object selected choose Boolean, choose pick operand and click the handle. In properties of Boolean modifier under group operations choose Substraction (B – A).