3DSMAX – Sword of Darkness Tutorial (Part 8 – Conclusion)

Update (4/13/2011): Old tutorial but I did receive feedback long ago so I added to the FAQ  and added renders that were sent to me.

FAQ:

I’m having trouble with the spines when making the blade. It always comes out with strange results and/or missing pieces.
Somewhere, there is an unfused edge. In each spot where vertices meet, be sure you are doing a drag select and fusing, recheck all vertices along the edges where the holes are forming. Also, no more than four edges can be formed, as surfacing works on 3 or 4 only. Make sure you have no five sided closings. Also, when combining splines, make sure they ARE being merged. A quick check: single click a vertex, and drag, if there are splines not moving along with it that should — that’s a problem.

More surfacing problems…
Be sure every spline ending has a point to actually fuse with. I’ve had several people try to actually just line up the end point with the middle of some spline. This will not work. You will need to subdivide splines where this is a problem, and give the spline with no end point, an end point through this method.

CREDITS:

All my help came from the lovely bunch of guru’s down at #3dsmax on IRC (efnet). This sword couldn’t have been done without ’em. I’d like to thank (and sock a few hugs in there):

NBT: For offering helpful suggestions on how to start the pommel. He also helped me find out a good way to easily select the faces for the sword smoothing groups.
Riplee: This guy is one of the most handy guys to have around. I’d like to thank him for spending a night with me when I was trying to fix some problems with my blade.
CCrat: For helping out Riplee and I when we were trying to convert 3dsmax files to OBJ late at night.
Woolymoo: For pointing out that it was my smoothing groups that were causing me problems in the blade, your a life saver.

OTHER:

I haven’t had much feedback and I know there has to be some cloudy things in the tutorial that could be cleared up. I urge you, please write feedback about my tutorial so I could implement changes and ensure that no one else gets confused!

USER CONTRIBUTIONS:

I lost a few others in an email transfer losing attachments, here’s what I was able to salvage: