8

1106 Glossary
You can make shapes renderable to create tubular
forms in the rendering. Renderable shapes don’t
appear any different in viewpor ts.
Shapes can also be
NURBS curves (page 1–1079) .
You can use NURBS cur ves in exactly the way
you use spline-based shapes. You can also use a
NURBS curve as the basis for a NURBS model that
includes multiple curve and surface sub-objects.
Get S hape (Lof ti ng)
A circle is lofted a long a path to construct a tubular shape.
Get Shape chooses the contour spline.
You use Get Shape as a loft creation method when
youwanttheshapetomovetothelocationofthe
selected path. For example, you use this method if
you have created a path at the exact location where
you want your loft object to be. You use Get Shape
tocreatealoftatthatlocation.
Get Shape causes the shape to move and rotate to
align itself with the current level of the path. The
exact orientation of the shape is controlled by two
other loft settings named Contour and Banking .
The following describes the orientation of the first
shape at level 0:
• The pivot point of the shape is located on the
path at the current path level.
• The positive Z axis of the shape is aligned with
the tangent to the path at the current path level.
• The local Y axis of the shape is aligned with the
local Z axis of the path.
Sometimes, aligning the positive Z axis of the
shape with tangent of the path does not produce
the result you want. You can flip the orientation
oftheshapebypressingCTRLwhilegettingthe
shape. Pressing CT RL aligns the shape so that the
negativeZaxisoftheshapeisalignedwiththe
tangent to the path.
SHP Files
SHPisthe3DStudioR4(DOS)shape-fileformat.
You can import these files into 3ds Max.
The
.shp file cont ains polygons created in the 2D
Shaper in 3D Studio.
When importing an SHP file that cont ains multiple
shapes, the sof tware gives you the option to either
mergethemallintooneobjectormakemultiple
incoming objects.
The shape importer looks at the vectors on
incoming splines, and if they’re collinear within a
couple of percentage points, it changes the angle to
a smoothed Bezier (otherwise, it’s a Bezier corner).
Sk ylight
In the real world, daylight does not just come from
direct sunlight; it also comes from skylight that is
scattered through the atmosphere. 3ds Max offers
great realism and accuracy by calculating not only
sunlight, but ca lculating this scattered light as well.
In3dsMax,theskyismodeledasadomeof
infinite radius placed around the scene. Daylight
computes the illumination of a point in the scene
with reference to all directions around the point
where the sky is visible. The sky brightness is not
constant over the sky dome, but rather it changes
depending upon the position of the sun.