Lego seem to be the new trend :)

[Micke]

So here's my contribution.

Modeling each piece in 3ds is something that never gonna happen (would be fun though), so i use leoCad. Anyone have any tips ideas on how to get the smoothing on the round parts on a object.. meshsmooth dont work well.

[skb875]

Wow awesome
For the smoothing, if I understand right, just turn on smoothing.. lol then just fix the normals on the flat surfaces. Not exactly sure how to do this in MAX, but it's very easy in LightWave.

[Shorty]

this looks 100% pure lego i used to have tons of those....

[Macneil]

I would say turn on smoothing, then on something like a cylinder, you would select the bottom faces, and detatch them. This will give yu a hard edge there, and everything should be smooth

[majestic]

you can get a plugin called f-Edge
http://www.ddag.org/
but i never tried it

[RebelMonkey]

To smooth\round it can you just crank up the number of segments on the cylinder ? That should smooth it out if its a cylinder, May get messed up if its already got a "edit mesh" on it but try that if you can it might work...

[Bjolletts]

Very cool indeed I love LEGO

If you want smooth surfaces in 3dsmax without subdividing the mesh ( = meshsmooth modifier ) you must use smoothing groups.

faces with the same smoothinggroup will align their normals to creat smooth transitions between the faces. But only to an extent ... faces with to big angle between them will look bad.

On a cylinderprimitive for example, the top and bottom faces belong to smoothing group 1. And all the side-faces belong to 4. This will create a sharp edge between top and sides.

The number on the group is irrelevant it just needs to be different.

[Johnas]

LoL! Nice

Looks well modelled sofar.

[YuriyXXX]

You can use smooth modefier, where you can change the angle at which the normals will be averaged

[Dennispls]

smothing is easy
select the faces you want in the same smoothinggroup and group it.