001.making the geometry - preparing for modeling
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We will start off by creating planes that are proportional to the dimensions of the
concept sketch sizes. Try to get any opposing images (eg front and back views) to be the
same dimensions. In this tutorial's example, the front/back views are 618 x 768 in size,
while the side view is 221 x 768. Instead of creating a character that's 768 max units
tall (think Godzilla on that one), we want to aim for a height of around 100. Therefore
we'll need three planes--one for the front view (81 x 100), one for the back view
(81 x 100), and one for the side view (29 x 100) that will have the image visible on both
sides.
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First we need to create the three planes we will be using for our concept sketches. Go to the
"Create" tab and toggle the "Plane" button. You could just click and drag to create
a new plane in the scene, but your best bet here is to use "Keyboard Entry" for a more precise
plane that will correspond proportionately in size to your sketches. Use a value of 100 for the
length on all planes, a width of 81 for the front and back planes, and a width of 29 for the side
plane. Some other things you may want to go ahead and do are name each of your new planes something
appropriate and/or useful to you and turn on "Angle Snap", setting it to 1-degree increments.
Check the 3ds max help files under "Angle Snap" if you're not sure how to do this.
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Now we want to position each of our planes with the base at the origin so that each plane is not only
at the same height, but they are all sitting on top of the Z = 0 plane. In order to set up our new planes
correctly (so that they match the materials we'll create next), we need to do some rotation. Go ahead and
rotate each plane -90° on the Z-axis. The back view needs to be rotated -180° on the X-axis (so
that it will face backwards), and the side view needs a +90° rotation on the X-axis.
