Basic Modeling: Creating a Halloween pumpkin in 3dsmax.
Written by: Julio Juárez

To make this pumpkin were going to build a simple spline cage then surface it to make the basic shape of the pumpkin, this shape will then be edited to take the shape of a Halloween pumpkin.

-. Make a circle shape->converting to editable spline.
-. Reshape it to look something similar to this - while on vertex sub-object mode select the vertices, convert them to bezier corner and edit the handles accordingly.

- . Make multiple copies of that spline, shift-rotate. In my case I just made 6 copies.

- . Select one of the splines and attach the rest of them in order for all of them to form a single spline.
- . Use the ‘create line’ tool to make an entire circle around the center of the pumpkin splines, but first configure the snap settings so there set to ‘vertex’ (customize->grid and snap settings), then turn snaps turned ‘on’ (press s on the keyboard).
- . Covert the new line points into bezier corner also, edit the handles to give the lines come curve after each division.

- . Apply a surface modifier to the spline, just make sure ‘remove interior patches’ is checked.

- . In order to make the face of the pumpkin, convert the pumpkin to an editable poly, select the faces that will form the pumpkin cuts then delete them.
- . Edit the vertices to form the teeth and shape the nose/eyes.
- . While on border sub-object mode chamfer the border around the eyes/nose/mouth an amount of 0.1, the reason I did this is because so when you extrude it inward it doesn’t distort the shape of the mouth/nose/eyes.
- . Extrude the newly created borders (created in chamfer process) downward to your desired amount.
- . Enter vertex sub-object mode and select all the vertices, click on the weld button, this will get rid of overlapping-extra vertices that might cause problems with the faces.
- . for the material I just make a ‘blend’ type material, on the material 1 slot, I used a smoke map as the diffuse and used a dark orange color and a dark orange color for the smoke, used the same map as bump map also. For the material 2 slot I used a smoke map as the diffuse map also but this time used a bright yellow/orange color and a green color for the smoke and used it as a bump map also. Finally, used a noise map as the mask map (Fractal type), I just adjusted the threshold, used a high value of 1 and a low value of 0.5, this way we only get a small/random amount of the green material in the mix ;).
- . Finally, you can just create a cylinder-bend it and chamfer and extrude it on the edge to give it a little roundness and place it on top of the pumpkin.

This tutorial was written by: Julio Juárez

 

Copyright © by Julio Juárez