Personal Tutorial - Dodecahedron

It's Saturday Night, and I like the way you blog~

Hope you're all having a good weekend, where ever you are.

SlyShaddow is back with a short tutorial for 3DS Max about creating a Dodecahedron. Of course, the tool I'll be using allows you to create more then just one many sides shape, you can create whatever you want to. Including a complex star I also found out. It's all about the details you put in when you're creating it.

I'm choosing a dodecahedon specifically because we were asked to make one for another module of ours. I figured the process could help me in my 3D model as well, and it's not going to be very long so. It's worth reading over if you have a spare minute or two~


My classmate helped me find a tutorial explaining about the Extended Primatives tool within 3DS Max. I read over it a few times when I first started out but nothing made sense to me at all. I came back to it a few weeks later and I could get some basic details from it that allowed me to create the shape and actually understand what I was doing.


I selected the Hedra option and created a shape in one of my windows. It came out like the image shown up above. Doesn't actually have 20 sides does it? Now, if you look down the create panel on the right, under the family option you can see various different selections. Feel free to experiment with which ever you desire but for this I am going to select the Dodec/Icos option. This immediately turns my shape into the one seen below:

Getting there~!

To turn it into a more defined shape I have to use the Family Parameters section. There is a specific relationship between the P and Q option that I couldn't quite get my head around. But for those interested I've left a link to a site at the bottom which describes each family type in the Hedra sections. I think, that basically as one value decreases those particular edges create new faces.

For the dodecahedron the P value is set to 1 and the Q value is set to 0. And that's all there is too it. Not really as intimidating as I first thought! A few simple steps and boom, 20 sided shape. Nice. :)

There we go!

That's all for this post, I'm open to all tips and explanations. I'm only a beginner and I love hearing where I'm going wrong and what I could do to improve. Thanks Bloggers!

More details on Extended Primatives

Watch this Space~ <3

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