Building reference

Today we went out taking pictures for reference of making a street. For my street I wan't to have a Victorian theme so I took lot's of pictures of old houses, street's and cobbles. These are my top 5 reference pictures.

This first picture I have here is good reference of stone brickwork, I can edit this in photoshop to make a pattern that I can add into 3D Max as a texture onto a wall. I want to change the colour a bit though since I want my street to be a night-time street and I a hint of blue in the stonework to give it an overall cold look.

 This is a good reference of the kind of windows I want to use, to make them I'd probably have to use a lot of cylinders and boxes to make this window-frame so it'll be quite hard, if I did do this I intend to simplify the design a quite bit. 

Making a crate in 3D

Today we made a crate in 3D max. First we made a simple box and set the peramiters to 25 for each axis and positioned it to the centre of the screen. 

 Next we converted it into a an editable poly and dragged the left bar across so get the full menu.

 With 'polygon' selected we clicked the box next to inset. First we changed 'group' to 'by polygon'  and we then set the amount to 3. Next we selected the box next to extrude and set the amount to -1.5 and were done.

TEXTURING

There are two main ways to add a texture, one is very simple, you just press 'm' to bring up the material editor, you then simply select a material slot and click the box next to diffuse. You then select bitmap and simply choose any file with a texture and it will apply it to your crate. This gives you a pretty simple texture, if you want to give different parts of your model a different texture you simply select the faces you want different (for example the inside of the crate) and do the whole process again on a different material slot.

Another way is to make a texture for something if you want text or a recurring image on it is to use a technique called UVW unwrapping. First we select our untextured crate and select UVW unwrap from the modifier list, next we click edit in the UVW editor window which should have popped up, a new window should now appear. Now you need to select one face of the crate and press the big plus button in the selection modules section to select the inner face then shrink it by one square and repeat again. Then using the move tool in the UVW window you just move it to top, then you select another side and move it until you have all sides in the shape of a net of a square. Then using edge selection select an edge next to another, right click and choose stitch, it should stitch your net together, carry on until it's all joined up then after selecting the whole thing and shrinking it into the square you can export it as a png (tools > render UVW) and open it in photoshop to draw on your pattern.