Threaded Strap in 3ds Max

Introduction

In this tutorial I will show you how to make a strap like the one shown below in 3ds Max (Fig.00). 

Fig. 00

I will assume you already have a basic knowledge of how 3ds Max works, so I'm just going to go over the steps I used to make it.

Step 1

Create a circular spline like so and convert it to an editable spline. Keep note of your radius as you will need that for the next step (Fig.01).

Fig. 01_creating_poly_mesh

Fig. 01_creating_poly_mesh

Step 2

Make sure your selection is set to Vertex, select the two middle vertexes and click on Break. Then change your selection from vertex to spline, select the bottom half of your circle and drag it to the right. If you know the radius of the circle then you can just move it over by that much. Once you are done you should have something that looks like this (Fig.02).

Fig. 02_curves

Fig. 02_curves

Step 3

Make sure you weld the two central vertexes together. Now what we are going to do is select the spline (it should select the whole profile) and shift drag it to the right to make a copy. Weld the vertexes and repeat. You should end up with something like this (Fig.03).

Fig. 03_joining_curves

Fig. 03_joining_curves

Step 4

Once you have done this use the clone and instance commands to make something like this (Fig.04). Move some of the splines so that later they will cross over. Also attach them all together so that they are one selectable spline (Fig.04).

Fig. 04_creating_strap_model

Fig. 04_creating_strap_model

Step 5

Select your spline and shift rotate 90 degrees. Make sure your splines cross over by enabling Enable in Render and Enable in Viewport. The result should look like this (Fig.05).

Fig. 05_strap_polygons

Fig. 05_strap_polygons

Step 6

Convert to an editable poly. As you can see it is a bit messy so let's clean up the mesh to make it nice and uniform (Fig.06).

Fig. 06_strap_square

Fig. 06_strap_square

Step 7

Shift-drag your nice clean piece of strap and repeat to get a long section of strap (Fig.07).

Fig. 07_straight_strap

Fig. 07_straight_strap

Step 8

Almost done. It's now time to add some dimension to this strap. To get the strap to bend round to the cap, use a bend modifier and play around with it to get what you wanted (Fig.08).

Fig. 08_bending_strap

Fig. 08_bending_strap

Step 9

To make the strap a little less uniform and make it look more natural, let's use a Noise modifier and change a few of the parameters. Once you're happy with that, use the FFD 3×3 modifier to make it look more relaxed. Here you can see the result of the Noise modifier (Fig.09).

Fig. 09_adding_details

Fig. 09_adding_details

Step 10

There is no step 10 really. I would advise you to convert the strap to a VRay Proxy once you are done modifying as this strap is quite poly-heavy and might cause some problems if there are a lot of other objects in your scene (Fig.10)

This strap was made for my Hugo Boss model. It could be made for any other model and you can use any modifier you want to get your desired effect.

I hope this tutorial was of use to you - thanks for watching!

Fig.10

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