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!

What I came up with after nine exhausting hours, is not perfect. I know that. However you will tell me it IS perfect, and not mention that I forgot to give the horse a mouth. I have learned different techniques that I did not learn when creating the pawn, rook or bishop. According to the tutorial, this is what I have learned:

Features and techniques covered in this lesson:
■ Building a spline cage.
■ Refining and Connecting spline vertices with new segments.
■ Applying and adjusting the Surface modifier.
■ Using the Symmetry modifier.
■ Extruding patches using the Edit Patch modifier.

Don’t ask me what those things are, I forget. If I wanted to make another knight, I’d need to follow the tutorial again. I could probably do it in half the time too, but that is 4.5 HOURS! Geez it is slow going. Practice practice!

You can see what I came up with below, if you want.