Ruined Buildings Tutrorial

This tutorial is geared towards people who are not total beginners to 3ds Max, but who just need an introduction to new techniques, and new ways of doing things. It takes for granted that you have at least a basic knowledge of polymodeling, and using 3ds Max.



1. Make a cuboid in the Perspective Viewport (L=100, W=50, H=10) This will be the base of your building. It can be any size, but lets use these. It must have 1,1,1 segments. Press F4 to turn on Edged Faces.



2a. Convert it to an Editable Poly object. Select this edge and ring it. Select Connect, with 2 loops and at a pinch of 92.



2b. Do the same thing to the perpendicular edge of the cuboid, only this time, use a pinch of 84. It should look like this:



3. Select the outer polygons


and extrude them. This will make your walls.



4. Fill your basic model with edge loops, both inside and out, using the Ring and Connect tools. I have added 7 edgeloops to each selected Ring



5 Go to your Left Viewport, and press "F3" to turn on the wireframe view. Make sure that the inside horizontal loops line up with the outside horizontal loops. IF they don't, line them up by selecting the vertices, and in the Edit Geometry tab in the sidebar, select "Z".



Do this so that the edge loops line up in your left viewport, and the model looks something like this:



6. From all your edgeloops, select the polygons where your door/window/hole-in-the-wall will be, (remember to do this on both sides), and bridge them, so that you get something like this:



Think of it as removing bricks, one at a time, to bring out the basic shape.

7. Now that we have our basic shape, its time to start detailing.

7a. First thing we have to do, is get rid of the 90 degree angles, for example in the door.



To do this, select and move edges and vertices. Apply this process to windows, wrecked walls etc.



Note: Everything MUST be in quads, no n-gons or triangles

7b. Now is the fun part... Select edges of your model and chamfer/extrude, and target weld the tailing triangles, like this


8. Keep doing this on individual edges/verts, you can even move entire polygons, to make it look something like this



This image is not from the model created for the tutorial.

Good Luck!

I hope this was helpful. Keep modeling!

Un_dead