Here I have created a cliff face which my final glider will take off from.
I created a sea which backs onto the cliff face. To do this I made a simple box in the shape of a rectangle for the cliff face which I then changed into an editable poly to change the vertices so it looked like a cliff edge. i then duplicated the cliff edge which I then moved up a small amount to make the grass top which I then added grass material to the top and a cliff face texture to the bottom.
Once I had done this I had to create a sea. for this I made a plane and then in the material editor I used simple mapping techniques like bump and reflection to create the sea texture. For the colour I changed the ambient, diffuse and specular colour settings to different shades of blue going from a dark ambient blue to a light specular blue. To get the reflection off the water I added to simple target spot lights to the model which when rendered gave me a light reflection off the sea.
Da Vinci's glider is the invention I have decided to recreate within 3ds max. Through real life experiments and mistakes Da Vinci learned the difficulty of realizing his great dream of flying in a machine powered by human propulsion, and turned his talents toward the problem of gliding flight. In the glider drawing to the left has the flyer's position studied at the point where he is balanced through movements of the lower part of the body. The wings, modelled upon those of bats and birds of large wingspans, are fixed on the inboard portion (next to the flyer), and mobile at the external portion. This part of the wing in fact can be moved by the flyer by a control cable connected to handles. Leonardo arrived at this solution by studying the wing structure of birds and observing that the inboard part of their wings move more slowly than the outboard, and that therefore serve to thus sustain themselves and produce forward thrust. In his notes Leonardo describes the position of the flier’s arms and legs, which – with the help of ropes – can move the wing so that it cleaves the air edgeways when moved forward, and surface-ways when moved back. This is the glider that uses these ideas and which I am going to incorporate into my model. 
