Igor, my servant, makes his first appearance on my blog in the video clip below.

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This is a follow up to my last post where I said I was getting back to using (learning) 3ds Max, and as you can see from the image on the left, I am not happy today.

In my previous post I showed three chess pieces I made – a pawn, a rook and a bishop. These were made following tutorials that were designed to introduce various methods one step at a time. 3ds Max is a difficult program to learn, I think mainly because there are so many hundreds or thousands of things that can be used (clicked on). It requires years of use to become competent enough to know how to do anything you want, just because there is SO MUCH to learn!

I am labouring the point of just how hard this software is to use, so that you won’t laugh when I say it took me NINE HOURS to create the knight, from a stupid tutorial that said at the start that it would take about ONE hour. It took me nine hours! That doesn’t include the sorry excuse for a horse that I created on my first attempt, which I abandoned almost halfway through, after 4 hours!

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It’s been a while, but I am finally getting back to learning 3ds Max. I want to stick with it for a while to try to improve. I have dabbled with 3ds Max before, and just when I’ve started to learn something, I get busy, stop using the program, and then forget how to use it. If I can become good at creating 3d objects that can be moved around, and viewed from any perspective, then I can add some fun things to my video clips. Before I can do that, though, I have to build my skills.

The animation below is of a pawn, which I made today. It was a beginners exercise, introducing the lathe modifier. I’ll do a few more chess pieces before working my way up to the knight, which looks a bit tricky to make. I can’t just spin that in the lathe. Though… I might… try. It is supposed to be sculpted though, at least the horse head bit of it.

I applied a kind of rusty metal material (looks more like painted wood, I think it needs a bump map for proper texture) to the pawn. Well… why not?

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