Hi , violentpotato guy here.
I thought there would be alot of tutorials on this subject, but google has turned unavail
I was just wondering the best way to model a building in 3dsmax.
Modeling the external parts of the building is easy, but I find it difficult to get the camera in a nice position inside the building to beable to model it internally.
Things like UV unwrapping has turned difficult becuase if it.
I'm asking what is the best way?

Thanks.

You should be able to select and hide any faces that are getting in the way of what you are trying to work on.

If you have to populate your world with lots of buildings, I found that if you create the interior first then build the shell around it as a separate model, you can simply unwrap the interior by itself.

This is also useful in that you can have just the shell of the building placed if it's an non-enter-able ones.

Also, look into level streaming. I'm no expert in that department, but from my understanding, once the player enters a specific field, such as the threshold of the building, the other level loads. In this case, that level would be the interior.
...
Or I guess you could have the interior float inside the exterior and use the "select by element" thingy in edit poly to move it from being built outside the structure and move it to where it needs to be inside...

Hope I helped.

All right, cool. It must be a bugger to line up the interior with the exterior inside a game engine (UDK in my situation).
I'll give it ago.

Surprisingly, I'm also working on a project in UDK!

One thing you can always do is just zero out the movement gizmos on both models in 3DsMax so that way their origins match up before combining them into one mesh.

The other option is bringing them into UDK with zero'd out origins and a larger movement grid and snap-to on. It might be a pain to get exactly right after that, but they should be together that way and you won't have to worry about level streaming.

Either way, I wish you all the luck!

I don't use Max... I'm a Maya user but I can offer some advice and tips based off of my usual workflow in Maya.

I often use X-Ray selected to make the shell transparrent and this makes it easier to line everything up but I always start with the interior and then work on the external stuff as a seperate mesh, like a previously posted comment you can use that to your advantage and rip the interior out and place the building around for those that will not be entered... It will help optimize your scene,

I mess with a little MEL script to make a few tools and I'm sure there are Max scripts floating around that recreates that X-Ray on selected for those who are tackling similar problems, alternatively in Maya I sometimes use BackFace Culling but I understand Max's version of that does something different?

I sometimes find myself utilising the layers and only show the wireframe for the shell of the building or sometimes I completely hide it whilst I work on the interior stuff =]


I hope it helps...