Some Newb Questions

Hello, i'm looking for help, and came across this board's tutorials (pretty good ) but i have some newb questions, if you guys don't mind.

1) How to create water ripples. I completed the water FX tutorial in the tutorials section, but the water droplets just go into the water, with no ripple effects, is there any way to make the ripple?

2) Abstract shapes. How would i make an abstract shape that is not a perfect box//cylinder//pyramid, or something that looks like a piece of the box was cut out?

I'll probably have some questions later, really interested in 3ds

[Jelmer]

1. This can be pretty difficult depending on how far you want to go/ how realistic the end result should be.
there are 2 options i think, you can buy a plugin like glue3d, or maybe try a trial version, not if that's available. A more expensive but accurate solution would be realflow (4), but that's not integrated into max.
Using one of the 2 mentioned above it should be fairly simple because the calculations will be handled by the plugin/software.

Another option would be to try particle flow, i won't go in detail here, a general outline should help, and there are more tutorials for particle flow included with max.
Create a deflector on the water surface, then you can use a colission operator within PF (particle flow) that will spam new particles when the drops collide with the water surface. Those new particles should have the shape of the ripples, once you have that you can render them from the top view into .avi for example, and then use this animated material as a bump, or more realistic displacement map to show the ripples.
Although it may be a bit tricky, it's certainly possible using this technique.

2. there are many ways to make something look abstract. to change the shape use editable poly, if you want to cut out object you can try booleans. To smooth objects use turbosmooth, and if you want objects distributed on other objects you could try 'greebles' , particles, or the scatter modifier.
Other modifiers that can help you adjust your model are, bend, twist, noise, all the names are pretty self explanatory. You should really just experiment with that yourself, have fun!

btw, welcome to the community.

Thanks for the help and welcome, glad to be here

I have some more questions:

1) Boolean, how do i get to it?

2) I'm using a bitmap image on my ice asteroid, but i want to have it reflect and be a little clear, i used diffuse, but it doesn't show an option for opacity//reflection, how would i do that?

[Wiggy]

1)It's in the drop down box, compound something, not quite sure sorry.

2) Use a raytrace Material set the diffuse to the bitmap. At least, that's what i think.

[Jelmer]

1. compound objects, what wiggy said.

2. raytrace is good for reflections and works with both scanline and MR, set the reflection to fallof>fresnel for realistic results, remember when doing reflections, they only look good when you have an actual environment to reflect. You can also set transparency if you want to be able to see through the ice.
If you want to get more advanced you could also try mental ray with sub surface scattering for the ice, check jeffpatton.net for an ice like shader example for mental ray.

[robinmitra1]

for ripples go to this link where i have attached a file that does the job: http://www.enjoycg.com/forums/showth...ted=1#post7051