Bender

Bender was mostly done using the edit mesh and edit polygon modifiers applied to primative shapes like spheres, cylinders, and extended shapes like capsules. The hardest part to model on Bender though was actually his mouth area as I had wanted to avoid using booleans if I could help it.

I had wanted to avoid booleans from my past experience with them always resulting in a rather bad looking mesh. However I was pleasently surprised when I found out about "ProBooleans" which is a newer feature in 3ds max. It was actually created by a 3rd party company and sold under the name of "PowerBooleans". This allowed me to use a boolean operator while ending up with a clean mesh at the end free of the many skinny triangles that would have resulted using a normal boolean operation.

Another aspect was how to actually move bender into the position I had wanted him. Originally I was going to use a skeleton system but realized that Benders arms and legs were suppose to be flexible and would not look right if I had just used bones. Furthermore I reasoned that it wasn't worth rigging a skeleton in a statue as it would only need to be positioned once. With that in mind I just played around with the bend modifiers until I had the desired effect.

Some problems did arise on bender though relating to the lighting. The round joints on his legs, his feet cups, and his sholder areas all appear much darker than they should. This is due to the filtering that needed to take place in order for the image to appear nice overall.