Prop Creation

Just a quick post about the three main props within the Animation. The tree stump chair, the scythe, and the huge boulder. Because these three items did not take much time to create, I do not have step by step screen shots of how I made them, I will simply describe how I did it instead.

The Tree Stump Chair

To make the tree stump chair, all I did was create a cylinder, bevel out the bottom to create the thick trunk where the roots go into the ground, and to extrude out a small branch from the side. I then used the inset tool to make a small lip at the top of the tree so I could extrude it up slightly to show that the bark was bigger and thicker than that of the inside of the tree. To add a nice final touch, I made a little leaf by flattening a very low poly sphere and extruding out one of the vertexes. Like the old man and the fence models, the materials on this item were just colours from the material selection palette to give it a very cartoon like effect.


Scythe

After making the first scythe from a cylinder and a lofted plane, I decided to expand on this idea but to add some extra detail onto the scythe itself. What I did was to displace all of the verticies on the cyclinder using a modifier. I then used turbo smooth to take away any rigid edge that may have appeared. Once I had done this I used soft selection to select the bottom 1/3 of the model and to curve it slightly so that it looked like it used to be the branch of a tree. For a finishing touch I added a 3ds Max generated wood effect to it to make it slightly more detailed then that of the tree stump.

Boulder

To make the large rock that the old man pushes through the scene, I took a sphere which I used a very strong displace modifier on, once this had been done, again, like the scythe, I used turbo smooth to remove any sharp edges and and give it a nice finish. This prop is unique in the fact it has its own texture from outside of 3ds Max. I found a nice rock texture that worked very well with a bump map.