Explanation on how i made my 3D chess set in 3ds max

I created this chess set with a combination of a tutorial that I found on the Internet and using my own knowledge. The tutorials web address is http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/3dsmax_2010_moddeling.pdf

The tutorial only teaches you to create the Knight, pawn, bishop and castle, i had to create the king, queen and chess board myself.

The first part that i worked on was the pawn chess piece. This one was the first that the tutorial started with most likely because it was the easiest. The first thing that i did was get the same picture of chess pieces as the tutorial.

I then clicked on the front view panel and enlarged it (Alt W). In this viewpoint I zoom in to the pawn because this is the first chess piece that i am going to work on. I started making it by using the line tool and drawing it down the middle of the pawn then using the same line i do an outline of the pawns right side, I continue to do this line until it meets at the top again. After this I go to the creation method roll out and set both initial type and drag type to corner. Then activate the Fillet button from the geometry roll out, then with vertex selected you can smooth off the jagged edges left from the line. I now had the basic outline of the shape and could spline it which coppies the outline that i did 360 degrees round the line in the middle of the pawn creating a 3D pawn.

The next peice that i made was the castle, the first half of the castle is made in the same way as the pawn was done, first by drawing a line down the middle and around the right side then splineing. After this the castle is nearly finished, all i have to do after this is select all of the polygons on top of the castle and inset them to turn each polygon into two polygons.

After I had inset the castle I had to decide how to space them out. I decided to select 4, skip 2, select 4, skip 2, etc. until I had all the polygons that I needed selected. I then extruded the polygons to a length that looked consistent with the reference picture.
Next was the Bishop which was again made with the line and spline tools. The only different thing that I had to do for the bishop was to make that gap that they have on one side of them. The way that I did this was by creating a rectangle the right size for the gap and extruding it into the bishop. After that I went to the compound menu and selected Boolean which cut the shape of the rectangle into the bishop.
The knight was the last chess piece that was explained in the tutorial and is also the hardest one of the pieces to make. To start off I used the line tool but this time drew all the way around the reference image for the knight. Then I went to the creation method rollout in the creation panel and smoothed all the corners to fit the reference image better. I then used refine/connect to create more lines going down and across the knight to help shape the knights body this is called a spline cage. I then went into the top view and moved the cage till it matched the image given in the tutorial. This is what makes the horse 3D. The line that I originally drew around the reference image has symmetry on so the image becomes 3D.
When I originally did this the knight it did not look like it should the curves and shape of the body were not correct, so I had to start again from scratch because I wasn’t sure at what stage the knight had gone wrong. I got it right on the second attempt and that was as far as the tutorial took me.
The next piece that I worked on was the queen, since this piece was not covered in the tutorial I had to use the knowledge that I obtained from doing the tutorial to make this piece. The first thing that I did was use the technique taught on the pawn by drawing a line down the middle but leaving out the cross at the top. This gave me the base for the queen after that I drew out the shape of the cross with the line tool and turned it into an editable poly; I then extruded it to the right thickness. After that I attached the cross to the base and the queen was finished. The last piece was the king. I made the king exactly the same way as the pawn.
After all the pieces were done all that was left was to make a cube to serve as the chess board and texture it all black and white.