Halfwire Tutorial

Here is a tutorial an how to do a half wireframe picture using 3ds Max and photoshop.This technique is not hard to do, but I will try to explain it the best that I can. First thing to do is open up 3ds Max. Render your mesh as you normally would all textured as seen in fig 1.a.

fig 1.a

Next, we will render it as a wireframe. The best way to do this in max is to force wireframe. This is done by going to the render dialogue (teapot with a little square above it) as shown in fig 1.b.

fig 1.b

Also set your wire thickness low for complex meshes like this one, as it will look better in the end. Now render. You should have something like fig 1.c.

fig 1.c

Make sure you save each render at the exact same angle (dont move your camera or pespective view) as a .bmp for good quality later on I used wire.bmp and shaded .bmp.

Also you may also want to set your self-illumination way up in your wireframe render, you can do this in the material editor, but that is only if you want to. Now we are done with max so, save if you want to, then shut it down and fire up Photoshop.

In Photoshop, load each pic that you just made. Place the wireframe on top of the shaded pic (I just drag and drop from the layers menu), make sure they are directly on top of each other. Now go to quick mask mode as shown in fig 2.a

fig 2.a

Now, all we do is select a soft brush like in fig 2.b and we are set to go. Now all we do is mask out the sections we want to remove like in fig 2.c.

fig 2.b

fig 2.c

Now, select your edit in standard mode button (next to the quikmask button). See fig 2.a and you should see a dotted line where you used the paint brush. All you do now is hit delete on your keyboard a there you have a half wire half shaded pic like in fig 3.a

fig 3.a