How to make a modle of Earth Planet

[The Gipsy Girl]

hello all,
any one know how we can make such a model of the Earth Planet in 3DMax?
i mean how to draw the lines on a sphere, or how to apply them to the sphere after drawing them (in 2D) and then extrud them?

[minimus]

wow that was nice. i dont have a clue really.

all i kan think if is this:

1: use displacementmapp on the spear to gett the lands

2: paint the splines in cad and import it to max

3: make the spear and use the bevel modifyer when applying in photoshop.

and you can always try to polly model it but....eh....think that wouldnt be the best way :P

[epoclaen]

The best solution is to use an Editable Spline to make the latitude and longitude lines.

1. Create a sphere with 20 segments. Convert it to an Editable Polygon.
2. Go to the Edge selection rollout.
3. You could try selecting all edges and then clicking the Create Shape From Selection button under the Edit Edges rollout but this produces corner edges so the resulting editable spline's vertices need to be changed to bezier vertexes which likely will cause some funky tangents that need to be corrected and becomes a chore.
4. Instead, select one of the vertical longitude edges and click the Loop button in the Selection rollout. This just selects the whole longitude line on half of the circle.
5. Now click the Create Shape From Selection button under the Edit Edges rollout and you will get a small dialog box asking if you want to name this Shape01 and to select a smooth or linear shape type. Select Smooth and leave the name as it is for now.
6. Leave the Edge Selection mode and select the new Shape01 spline that was just created. Go to the Tools menu and choose "Array...".
7. Under Array Transformation: World Coordinates set the Incremental Z column's rotation value to 18. Under the Array Dimensions select 1D and make the count 20. Under the Type Of Object select Copy. This should create 19 more splines for the longitude lines, each at one of the 20 segments we made in the original sphere.
8. Now select one of the horizontal edges of the original sphere object for each latitude circle. Click the Loop button in the Selection rollout to extend the selected edges all the way around the globe.
9. Click the Create Shape From Selection button under the Edit Edges rollout and accept the proposed name for the new shapes.
10. Now select one of the shapes and click the clicking the Attach Mult. button under the Geometry rollout. Select all the shapes in the list and hit OK.
11. You can now rename the spline to something more appropriate if you like. I also added materials to the Globe Spline and Globe Polygon by choosing a semi-dark blue color with gray specular for the Globe Spline and a lighter blue with 43% opacity, 40 on the Specular Level and 53 on the Glossiness.
12. Under the Rendering rollout for the Globe Spline I set it to Enable In Renderer with a radial thickness of .5" (for a 6'0" sphere) and made the splines 8 sided. I threw in a target spotlight just to test the shadowing and turned Shadows On in the General Parameters rollout with RayTraced Shadows as the shadow engine. I also threw in a ground plane for the shadows to land on.

Attached is the result. There may be much easier ways to do this and I haven't tweaked much with the coloring and rendering settings and all but you can handle the rest from here.