Now I am going to create box in the and to be more precise in the keyboard entry I am going to give the box the units; Length = 11mm, Width = 11mm and Hight = 4mm.
Now my reference grids in 3Ds max are a bit big and so I have clicked on the snaps toggle and selected the tab "home grid" and then changed the grid spacing to 10mm from 100mm.
Now I am going to use this rectangle that i have made as a reference. So i am going to go top the shapes pallet and select rectangle and under the creation method subtitle make sure that the edge too is on, now I just create a rectangle in the front view port.
Now I am just going to soften the corners as USB's don't have really sharp edges, so if I select the "select and uniform scale" tool and then go to the centre of the triangle and hold shift it will copy another rectangle in the same area but will effect its scale. so I could make it larger or smaller but in this case I will make it smaller.
I now want to fill the gap between these two rectangles and so to do that i simply select one of the rectangles and then right click and select "convert to editable spline".Then in the geometry roll down bar select the attach button then select the second rectangle. I then changed the colour (Blue) to show that they are attached but also to show the steps of my USB creation.
I then changed the name of these two splines from retangle001 to USB_Profile_01.I am now going to add an extrusion modifier and you will see that it fills the space between the two splines. Then i changed the amount of extrusion to 11mm, this will then extend the shape that the splines make to 11mm creating the basic outline of the USB.
Now I'm going to create 7 segments on this object, then I am going to clone the object to show my progression and then collapse the object to an editable poly.
Then i simply created two boxes for where the square holes are going to be.
Now i am going to remove these boxes and in the process also remove the squared area in which they pass through. This is called boolean. This takes more than one element and it uses the profile of the first element to cut a hole or shape out of another element. So to do this I selected the object that i wanted to make the hole in and then went to standard primitives and in the drop down box selected compound objects. Then i selected the boolean option and then the button named "pick operand B", then selected the box (the shape you want to use the profile of) and it immediately it immediately cuts the box and the box shape hole desired.
The reason you have to select the you wish to make the cut into first is because the operation is set to A-B (A subtract B) therefore it will simply subtract the first element from the second however these are easily changeable by selecting the different options in the roll down bar.
Now when i repeat this process for the second cube it creates a new hole but fills the second one in. To fix this you simply need to select off of the boolean tool and then reselect it and repeat the process, also remember it is very important to convert your object back to a editable poly after using the boolean tool as later it might have undesired effects on your model.
I also experimented with the render settings and here are a few renders i created of this part of my USB.
