Making a paper clip scene - Tutorial for beginners

Reactor isn’t just good for animations. It can really save literally tons of hours of painstaking work placing objects correctly in just a few clicks. Here we are going to create a scene with lots of paper clips that have fallen out of their box.

First find a good image of a paper clip box. I found this after searching for ‘paper clip box’.

Open up Max and create a plane object in the top viewport by going Create>Standard Primitives>Plane. Make sure it has the same width and height as the box image. I’m using Vray to render this scene so I change the default renderer by clicking F10 and assigning Vray at the bottom of the screen that pops up. If you aren’t using Vray, there’s no problem at all. Just omit this bit.

Now hit ‘M’ to open up the materials editor. If you’re using Vray, click on the blue sphere (circled red) and choose ‘VrayMtl’ from the list that pops up.