Making Of 'Drum Kit 101'

Introduction

This was a personal project that I went ahead with; I've been using 3ds Max for two years, and more recently I've started using more than just Mental Ray. For this project, I decided to use V-Ray, simply for its fast calculations and realistic results. Plus it's easy as hell to use once your passed rendering a million spheres just because you can and just for the hell of it!

Now, this is my first ever tutorial so be kind... I will be using textures from the 3DTotal Textures V1: R2 DVD Collection. So let's get on with it!

Concept

First of all, I had to come up with a concept that I was capable of. I'm a drummer and know drums like the back of my hand, but I still used reference images for help. I used a photograph of my own drum kit (Fig01), plus a reference image which I found on the Internet (Fig02).

Modelling

I started off with a simple cylinder, five segments in height. I created a cylinder for each of the pieces of the drum kit, so that was 5 cylinders in total.  I then created another cylinder which was much skinnier and taller, and placed it in the centre. I went to Create Compound Objects and ProBoolean (if you're using a version of Max 8 or lower, use Boolean). I then had the shell of a drum, then all I had to do was to instance it five times and re-size them - there's no point in actually making five separate pieces for a model like this (Fig03 & 04).

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Details

Next to be modelled were the details of the kit. All the fixtures are the same on a drum kit - screws, bolts and so on, so all I had to do was to make them once and duplicate them for as many as required!

I kept duplicating the required parts until I achieved what can be seen in Fig05, 06 and 07. Don't skimp on the details as these are what really make an image!

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

I continued with the same process until my drum kit took shape and looked like what can be seen in Fig08.

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Texturing

Then came the fun part: texturing! For this part, I used 3DTotal Textures V1: R2 DVD Collection (Fig09). I only used the colour and bump because this was all that I required for this specific task. The rest comes under the heading of 'materials', which I'll cover later on...

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

So, I opened up Paintshop and the first thing I did was to open the wood texture (Fig10), then I created a new layer and painted over it in a nice shade of red (Fig11). I then darkened it a little by adjusting the level of Brightness for a more realistic, wooden feel (Fig12). I left the bump as it was (the bump was already created on the Total Textures DVD).

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

I was then ready to apply the texture to the drums...

So I had three colours, the original wooden panel texture, the red one, and then the bump. I wanted to apply the red texture first of all to the whole drum (Fig13). To do this, I went into Edit Poly mode and selected all of the faces inside the drum kit, then applied the wooden panel texture. Only the outside shell was coated red (Fig14), as that gave a 'real-life' effect to the drum kit. It's all of these extra little texture details like this that convince your brain into believing images!

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

Rendering

With the drum kit textured, it was then time to render... I set up my scene (I'm not going to tell you how to render using my rendering configurations as that'll take all the fun out of having your own rendering setup!) by simply messing around with the settings (Fig15). The final render can be seen in the image, Fig16.

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

Fig. 16

Fig. 16

Post Production

And there you go - a fully textured drum kit in a studio environment, ready to be rendered (Fig17). I hope this tutorial has been helpful for you, and I'd love to hear from anyone with any questions or feedback, so please contact me! Keep modelling!!

Fig. 17 - Final Image

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