- [Instructor] In the last movie,
we applied a Bevel Modifier to our logo here to make it 3d
and give it a chamfered or angled edge.
And this is fine if this is going to be a static model.
If this is just going to be a flying logo
that literally flies around on the screen,
that's really all we need to do.
But let's say, for example,
we wanted to make this change shape.
We wanted it to have some kind of ripple or deformation.
In that case, what we see here would not be sufficient
because it does not have enough polygon detail.
There aren't enough points on the surface
in order to create a smooth deformation.
So let me illustrate, I'll select that object,
and go to the Modifier Panel and let's add a deformer
which is called noise, and we'll add it above the Bevel.
So if we select the Bevel Modifier
and then add some new modifier,
it'll be added above the Bevel.
So let's choose noise.
We can scroll down and choose Noise.
All of its values are at zero
so we'll will want to change those up.
Let's set the strength in X, Y and Z to five,
type in a five press Tab, five press Tab,
and five and press Enter.
And we have a very subtle noise effect.
We'll want to reduce the overall scale
to see that more clearly.
So if we bring the scale down,
as we drag we can see more change the size of the noise.
Let's set the scale to a value of 10.
Okay, so we've got our deformation
but it's not really clean.
And we could see in certain areas
there's some shading artifacts and some other areas,
we're not getting any deformation at all.
Like for example, these straight line segments,
they're not being really deformed.
We're not seeing any kind of interesting shape there
like we do in some of these other areas
that have more segmentation.
So let's increase the level of detail
for the Bevel Modifier.
So there are a couple different ways to do this.
First is to increase the number of extrusion segments
along the extrusion depth.
Go to the Bevel Modifier, and in the parameters,
in the surface section, we'll see Segments.
Increase the number of segments
and we'll get more level of detail or more polygon density
in that dimension along the depth of the extrusion.
Okay, so that's one.
The next one we want to look at is the number of segments
running along each one of these spline curves.
And that'll be dealt with
in the editable spline interpolation.
In the Modify Panel, select the Editable Spline.
And let's enable Show End Results
so we can see the end result of all of our work.
And here we have the interpolation rollout.
First thing we'll do is disable Optimize.
Remember, Optimize is going to remove any segments
in between corner points.
So straight line segments will not have any divisions.
Let me orbit around with alt and middle mouse,
take a look at that.
So check this area out here.
When Optimize is off, we get a lot of segmentation there
or some segmentation at least.
And when Optimize is on, we don't have any detail there.
Okay, so turn Optimize off.
And we conditionally increase the number of steps
to increase the level of detail.
But here's the thing, this object,
when it came in from illustrator
had basically different levels of detail all over it.
And that was determined by how the type
was converted into outlines.
So for example, in some areas
we have very dense polygon structures.
For example, on these circular areas,
we're getting lots of segmentation
because there were a lot of control points on that curve.
Here in these other areas,
we're not getting as much segmentation.
What we could do is actually add more control points
on that curve, which will in turn result in
more steps or more subdivisions.
So let's take a look at this without showing result.
Let's turn Show End Result off
and then go into Segment Mode.
Now in Segment Sub Object mode, we can see all of the points
and here's why we were seeing more segmentation
or more steps in these circular areas,
is because there were more points there
and there are fewer points over here.
We can add more points using the Divide Tool.
I'll select this line here, that one segment,
over in the geometry rollout of the Modify Panel.
We can scroll down,
and we're looking for something called Divide.
And it's down here near the bottom.
By default, we're only going to add one point.
Let's increase the divide parameter value up
to let's say four, and then click the Divide button.
And we've just added four new points there.
All right, cool.
I'll exit out of Segment Sub Object
and I'll reenable Show End Result.
And now we have a lot more segmentation there.
We didn't increase the number of steps
but we added more points explicitly.
All right, So if you needed a consistent level of detail
across the entire model,
you would want to do that throughout,
examine each one of those segment
and figure out if you need to add more points or not.
And finally, we have the level of detail
on the front faces of our Bevel.
This is the trickiest part of all actually,
because what we're getting by default here
is each one of these front areas is a single polygon.
But that polygon is divide up into lots of triangles.
And the way that those triangles are sliced and diced
is called tessellation.
And we have kind of limited control
over the tessellation here.
Well, let's take a look.
If we go to the Bevel Modifier.
In the stack, we will see cap type,
and there are only two options, morph and grid.
And morph is the more efficient one.
The one that's going to to kind of use up less resources,
but it's not going to work well in this situation
when we want to deform.
When we want to deform, that means we need
a kind of more or less uniform level of detail everywhere.
So to see this more clearly,
we want to enable the invisible triangles.
So we're getting kind of deep into the weeds here,
but for each polygon, it's divided up into triangles.
And in 3ds Max, those subdivided internal triangles
are hidden by default and we can make those visible.
And one way to do that would be to go to the Display Panel
and in the display properties for this selected to object,
we can disable edges only, turn that off.
And now we can see all of the internal triangles.
So most of these polygons here are quadrilaterals
except for the ones on the front and back of arch extrusion.
And each one of these is one giant polygon
that's divided into many small triangles.
Okay, now back to our Modify Panel
back to our Bevel Modifier, we can set our cap type to grid.
And that's going to do a better job
of creating an even tessellation across the entire surface.
It's not going to be perfect,
but it it's better than the morph cap type.
Alrighty.
So now we can just turn off edge faces completely with f4
and we're going back to just seeing a shaded view.
And there are still some issues here.
We would actually need to probably go deeper
into subdividing all of these segments
in order to eliminate all the problems.
But this gives you an idea of what you're up against.
We can go back to our Noise modifier,
maybe play around with it.
We could change the seed
which will give us a different random result.
And we'll see that as we do that,
different areas of the model are going to have
these kind of deformation shading artifacts.
And again, that's a result of the cap type.
And because we don't really have
a clean way of subdividing these polygons on the front,
this is pretty much the best that we can get
under the circumstances.
But again, we could work on this some more,
subdivide those segments a bit more
and get better results in the end.
All right, so that's how to adjust a level of detail
for the Bevel Modifier.