Country Cupboard
The Story:
After several years of working various manufacturing jobs for Herman Miller and doing freelance Bryce graphics on the side, I moved into marketing as a 3D artist. I won the position based on the strength of my Bryce work and without any 3D Studio MAX experience, even though the software is standard for the job. My managers, both wonderful people, had faith that I could quickly transfer my skills to 3D Studio MAX and I was determined not to let them down.
I had a week of vacation before I started the new position, so they let me take home a copy of MAX. Over the weekend, I took the manuals to the beach and read through them, taking notes on modeling, lighting, and material editing. Then I spent the whole week in front of my computer, exploring the possibilities. It was both a frustrating and exhilarating week. After several years of modeling in Bryce using only primitives and booleans, I was amazed and excited by mesh modeling, lathing, lofting, etc. I struggled to get used to the Material Editor, and wound up redoing objects several times until I realized that MAX does not default to 2-sided rendering. I thought I was making incomplete, hole-ridden models!
After a week of intense study and practice, I was determined to create my own complete image. No copying tutorials, no refering back to manuals, no opening the online help. And I did it. For that reason, I will always be proud of the above image.
Process and Tools:
- Composed and rendered in 3D Studio MAX 3.
- All models created in MAX and a majority of them are available for download as .3ds objects in the Freebies section.
- No post-rendering work. Some pre-rendering work done in Paint Shop Pro to create various texture maps.