I was asked in a 3ds Max forum how I made the roof of my Model T Ford, and could I perhaps even show some screen shots. Well I have done that. This won’t be of interest to most people, but for anyone who is searching for this kind of info, or wants to know a little more about how things are modeled in 3ds Max, this post shows how I did it. Some of the terms I use might only be understood by 3ds Max users.

Click on the images below to see the large size.

First I created the roof frame with splines set to “radial” so they would be round:

I then shift+dragged a copy of this frame, and set it to “rectangular” so that I could make canvas that goes over the frame bars.

Then I deleted the lower segments, leaving the rectangular “canvas” going over the bars at the top:

Here is another view of what I was left with. I’ll call this “frame canvas”:

I converted the “canvas” to an editable poly so that I could select the inner polys and delete them:

With the polys deleted, I selected the edges below, ready for bridging the edges to create a canvas that goes from one canvas to another.

Now the edges are bridged, joining the frames together with “canvas”. I’ll call this kind of canvas “segment canvas”.

Here I went and bridged all of the edges, they can be done all at once:

Below you can see I have selected edges to bridge the next segment of the frame:

All done:

Side view showing completed canvas. Of course this canvas is very short and needs to be stretched out:

The bottom view shows that the back of the canvas needs to be bridged to close it in:

Here it is completed:

Side view of everything done so far:

It’s now time to start stretching the canvas. Here I added geometry by connecting some edges:

With those edges selected, I simply drag down to add thickness to the shape:

Individual vertices can be selected and manipulated to created cloth-like creases, but to all that later after getting the overall shape.

Next I selected these edges in red:

Then did a connect with 2 edges:

Then I pushed the edges down:

It looks like I dragged an edge down here.

Next I selected these edges that are in red:

And did a connect:

Here I scaled the new edge in. I should not have scaled it in so much. Just a little bit to make it look like the canvas folds inwards when viewing from the side. I thought the smoothing would pull it out a bit so I compensated by scaling the canvas in more than I thought I needed to. As it turns out I scaled in way too far and spent a lot of time later trying to move the verts back out again. If I did this again, I would scale a small amount at the sides, then drag the back edge to the front and make all of the vertices planar, so that it is one long fold going across the car, like in the final image.

The next level of the frame, I did the same thing as above, and dragged the verts downwards. Like I said above, if doing this again, I would have scaled the sides in a little bit, maybe to just inside the frame, and then dragged the back edge forward. So below was also a mistake:

Now I selected the edges below:

And connected the to add more geometry. It says 5 below, but I must have ended up only adding 3, going by the screen shots below:

Here I scaled and dragged the bottom edge, making the same mistake as before. (scaled too much at the side)

Side view showing the edge dragged forward:

I selected this edge:

And dragged it down:

Then I did a ring on these edges:

And connected more edges to add geometry:

Then I did another connect going the other way to add more edges:

Here I selected two edges:

And created some basic creases:

Next I added a shell modifier (hard to see here), I think my settings were 0.1cm or 0.2cm for both the inner and outer. This gives some thickness to the polys as well as makes the material double sided:

Convert to editable poly, to collapse the stack, permanently applying the shell modifier:

From now on, it is just a matter of shaping by pulling verts and edges, wherever you want thickness and creases:

Below I selected polys to move:

Here I have dragged them down:

And again:

And again, with less polys selected:

The thin edges below can be thickened up by selecting the polys underneath and extruding them down.

Here they are extruded down:

Now that the general shape has been modeled, that is the fastest bit over. The next thing to do is to tweak edges, vertices and polygons for hours to get all the creases you want. It’s fun enough, because there is a lot of freedom sculpting the mesh, and there’s no need to worry about lumps in the mesh, because there needs to be lumps in the mesh.

Add as much geometry to the “segment canvas” as you need in order to be able to “stretch” it and shape it the way you want.

When all the modeling was done, I applied a NURMS smooth. If you get any tears or holes in the mesh that are hard to fix, you can always thicken your mesh up again with a shell modifier – problem solved. It may sound sloppy, but when you have been tearing your hair out for hours trying to fix your bad mesh, you won’t care.