by Didik Wijaya
This tutorial needs you to understand basic use of 3dsmax.

3D designer is not always creating character, car, fantasy enviroment, space ship in unknown planet or so on. There's a branch in 3D career that lets you create object you've seen everyday. Usually, you model object for industrial or mechanical purpose. You may model bolt, bottle, machine part or anything similar. Today, I bring you a tutorial for creating simple object. Bolt and nut. Although these are simple object, you need a lot of tricks to create these models. Therefore, you will learn a lot of techniques in this tutorial. Hope this tutorial is useful for your career. Who knows, maybe you choose to become 3D product designer in the future.

1. First, we are going to create a bolt. In Command Panel activate Create>Shapes. Click Helix button and create Helix in Top viewport. Use Radius 1=50, Radius 2=50, Height=150, Turns=8, and activate CCW. Helix is used to create spiral spline like shown in image below. Don't forget to activate Edged Faces view in Perspective viewport (by pressing F4 in keyboard).

2. Apply Extrude modifier to Helix. Use Amount=18.75. Using this amount you'll get a tube shape. How do I get this number? Remember, Helix height=150, Turns=8, thus 150/8=18.75.

3. Although tube is looking good, actually it contains double vertices in most places. In viewport, right click object and choose Convert to>Convert to Editable Poly. Go to Modify tab. Activate Vertex selection. Select all object vertices. In Edit Vertices rollout, click Settings button right next to Weld. A small dialog box is opened. You can read number of vertices before and after welding. Just click OK to weld vertices. Right now, save your progress to different file. You'll need this file later.

Donwload 3dsmax lesson file up to this point

Modeling Bolt and Nut Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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