Getting Started - Making a Ship Wheel

So in our first practical session, I started to try and get familiar with 3ds Max. The program was quite challenging at first as I had not used a program similar to it before. For this lecture, we were given the task of creating a Ship's Wheel using the program.

Firstly, I started out by using the create tool in the top menu bar. I chose the option 'Standard Primitives' and the selected 'tube'.

Once I had selected the object I was going to use, I then clicked on the grid to create it and adjust the size. I chose the 'tube' object' to make the main part of the wheel as it didn't involve any further cutting or adjusting make the right shape.

I then wanted to create a smaller circle within the tube. I did this by, again, going to the create menu at the top, only this time selecting 'cylinder' instead. I created the cylinder at the centre point of the tube and made the radius quite wide, and the height reasonable small, the same as the tube.

To create the handles of the wheel, I used another cylinder. This time, I changed the viewpoint on the grid, so that I could see the side of the wheel rather than the top view. I then created a small thin cylinder from the centre of the wheel to the inner rimm of the wheel. I used another cylinder to create the smaller handle on the outser side of the wheel.

 I used the 'move' and 'rotate' tools at the top of the program, to make sure the handles were positioned correctly and evenly.

Once I had got the first handle positioned evenly, I then selected the object, using the 'Select Object' tool at the top, and then right clicked and selected 'clone'. After this, I moved the object using the movig tool, and positioned it evenly on the other side of the wheel.

Now that both horizontal handles were complete, I wanted to do the vertical ones. To do this, I cloned the object handle and right clicked on it again and this time selected the small box next to the 'Rotate option'. A small window then opened, giving me some options.

For the Z axis I entered in '90' so that it would rotate in perfect positioning. Then all I had to do was move the the handle to the centre of the wheel. I cloned the same handle and simply moved it down vertically to make both the bottom and top handles. 

To make the handles in between the horizontal and vertical handles, I simply changed the rotation option to '45' and then used the moving tool to position them evenly on the wheel.

Now that all the handles were in place and the wheel was made, I wanted to change the colours to brown to make them look more realistic looking. I did this by selecting the objects and and clicking on the coloured box on the left panel on the screen.