3ds Max Diamond Pattern Tutorial

In work recently I was asked how I made this shape. It's relatively straightforward to create but there are two ways to do it, that I know;

A. You can create a plane with quite a few subdivisions and then generate the diamond shapes that way and then bend it into the cylindrical shape. This was the way I originally did it, or...

B. Create it straight from the cylinder base. This is process I used this time around and I must admit I found it to be quicker with the same results.

Step 1
Create the highpoly cylinder. Pretty straightforward. Now magic trickery here.

Step 2
Duplicate the model without the turbosmooth and extract the selected edges as shown here. Delete the other faces, they are not needed.

Step 3 & 4
Connect every other ring of edges together and scale out the verts to makes sure it's cylindrical.

Step 5 & 6
Select all the edges and connect them. Now you have edges everywhere invert the newly connected edges selection by pressing CTRL+i and remove them by pressing backspace.

Step 7
Select all the faces, deselect those at the very top. Otherwise you will create some unwanted effects when baking out the normals.

Step 8
Bevel the polygons via polygon, convert the new polygon selection to verts and then weld to a point. Tessellate a couple of times and add a turbosmooth modifier to get it looking nice and crisp. Add to the existing and original high poly cylinder shape.

This is new geometry is acting as floating geometry. It looks like it's all one mesh and the bake will look like that too.

Step 9
Last but not least, the low poly unwrapped and baked out, rendered in the marmoset toolbag.

Hope this helped!







Update

A friend on facebook was curious as to how difficult it would be to something more complex like a gun handle, and this is no gun grip but it's more or less the shape.

1. Build the pattern using the same technique as in the tutorial but just on a plane instead.

2. Use the bend modifier to get the jist of the curvature

3. Adjust the rest of the shape using the ffd modifier by moving the control points of the lattice till it's done.

4. Use the cut tool to cut away the junk

voila! There you have it!