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Page 1 of 2 Section A: Blueprint Prep
Setting up in Photoshop
Model each item separately that will be included in your scene.Before we start to model our first, or any item, we need to set up our blueprints that we gathered during our planning phase. For this tutorial I chose the time ship Relativity from an episode of Star Trek Voyager. The blueprint is located here.
We need to take this photo into Photoshop to chop it up into its various views. One of the main reasons I chose this ship, other than looking cool, is it gives us all 5 sides
- Top
- Bottom
- Side
- Front
- Rear
In Photoshop, choose View>Rulers and make sure it is checked. Begin to drag out guides from the rulers to box in the top view as shown here:
Make sure you bring the guides right to the edge of the ship, leave not additional white space.
HINT: Turning off snap under View, may help.
If you turned snapping off, go ahead and turn it back on, and create a marquee around the top of the ship.
Hit ctl+c or Edit>Copy to place the marquee image onto the clipboard.
Under File>New, create a new document. The dimensions for the copied image should already be set.
Hit ctl+v or Edit>Paste to paste the top view into the new document.
Continue these steps for the remaining views, just make sure your guides are tight and you have no un-necessary whitespace.
Now that you have them chopped up, you need to make sure all sides match. For example, the height on the Front and Rear match the height on the Side and the width on the Side matches up with the width on the Top and Bottom, etc.
To do so, pick a starting image, I chose the top, get it’s hight and width pixel dimensions and write them down. Now just right click each image, or use Image>Image Size to change the size, of each image to start matching those values. My starting values were as follows:
Width 567 Pixels
Height: 357 Pixels
NOTE: Un-check constrain proportions
Your image dimensions should be the following:
- Top
Width 567 Pixels
Height: 357 Pixels
- Bottom
Width 567 Pixels
Height: 357 Pixels
- Side
Width 567 Pixels
Height: 100 Pixels
- Front
Width 357 Pixels
Height: 100 Pixels
- Rear
Width 357 Pixels
Height: 100 Pixels
We have one more thing to do before we save out images. Due to selected objects turning white by default in 3ds Max we should darken out backgrounds.
One each images choose Image>Adjustments>Brightness and Contrast. Set the values to the following:
Brightness: -50
Contrast: +50
Save your documents as jpg format under File>Save As.
- Top.jpg
- Bottom.jpg
- Side.jpg
- Front.jpg
- Rear.jpg
FILES: You can download the prepped files here:  Relativity Blueprints (152.71 kB 2008-06-11 15:10:45)
There are great tutorials all over the net and in the 3d Max help file if you want the exact procedure to setup up blueprints. In fact blueprints.com has one I recommend to my students; however I find re-inventing the wheel is silly and it is just more efficient to use a pre-built script by Xoliul located here: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/blueprint-creator.
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Tutorials 
