3ds Max Animation Navigating the updated Curve Editor

3ds Max Animation Navigating the updated Curve Editor If we select some keys, you'll see the length of those tangents there. And you can click this button to make the tangents larger. Just keep clicking it repeatedly and you will make those tangents larger and larger. Likewise, there's a button to make them smaller. The bulk of the new tools are on this tool bar here which is called the Keys Only Tools tool bar. We'll look at that in another movie but there are a bunch of miscellaneous key manipulation tools here. There are a few other tool bars available that are hidden by default. Let's look at how to reveal them. Right-click on the textured bar on the left of any one of the tool bars. Hold down the right mouse button and choose show toolbars. And these include all of the old ones that used to exist as well as some new ones. For example, we can choose the curves tool bar and that's got some useful buttons on here. For example, view all tangents. And when that's on, you don't have to select anything in order to see the tangents. Go back to my move keys tool now that I'm done scaling here. Or likewise, as we saw in the dope sheet, we have the ability to display key-able icons whether a track is key-able or not. And that's found on the curves tool bar as well. But the commands on the curves tool bar are also available from the menus. For example, we can go up to the view menu and enable keyable icons. Or once again, disable it.

3ds Max Modeling Navigating updated Track Views

3ds Max Modeling Navigating updated Track Views I can select it and then right-click in the view and choose to hide the selection. And now it's hidden, and when we enable the appropriate filter here, it's also hidden from the Dope Sheet. Let's unhide that box and then we'll see its track appear again. Right-click in the view and choose Unhide All, and now our box has returned, and its track has returned. So that's all it is, Visible Objects Toggle. If an object is hidden, you won't be able to see its track in the Dope Sheet. Down here, we've got a few navigation controls. Namely, we have the ability to frame the horizontal extents for the selected keys. We can just drag anywhere to make a selection of keyframes here, and then enable this switch, Frame Horizontal Extents Selected Keys, and the view expands out to enclose just the selected keys, but only in the horizontal dimension.

3ds Max Modeling Creating type with TextPlus

3ds Max Modeling Creating type with TextPlus If we click that button and the display showed only small dots in the center of each character, then that would mean that none of the characters were selected. The display I'm seeing now with a large orange rectangle around all of the type indicates that all of the characters are selected. We have limited capabilities in this mode. We can change the kerning per character. For example, I could get close in on that E and then click to change the spacing between it and the character before it. We can, for example, change the baseline and it will affect all characters because they're all selected. We could change the scaling, and again, that will affect all characters, but to get the full power of this we'll want to select per character. Let me undo that with Control + Z. To select a single character, hold down the Shift key and click on that character, and now we have the ability to scale just that character. We've got a corner here to scale uniformly and notice how the rest of the type is maintaining the spacing based upon the bounding box. Bring that down. Maybe look at this in the front viewport, Alt + W. Go over there and scale this up to a certain size. Maybe go to the next door neighbor, the E, and kern that a little bit tighter now. Use the middle mouse button.

3ds Max Modeling Modeling updated Bevel Profile

3ds Max Modeling Modeling updated Bevel Profile Okay. I experimented with that for a minute and decided on a Bevel Depth of two centimeters and an outline offset of .4. But you may need different values depending upon the shape of your curve. Let's take a look at this now. I'll press F4 to turn off my edged faces. And there, we've got our interesting Beveled Edge. You might run into a few issues here and there with complex geometry. And we can see here, we're getting a little bit of a glitch there on the end. And that's just sort of part and parcel of this process Certain shapes are not gonna lend themselves that well to the Bevel Process. In this situation, if I really needed to clean that up, I would have to resort to using the Editable Poly Tools to do that. Alright. That is a basic introduction to the new and improved Bevel Profile Modifier.

3ds Max Modeling Managing operands Boolean Explorer

3ds Max Modeling Managing operands Boolean Explorer That's an easy way to get to the parameters of the operands. If you wanna get to the parameters for the first operand, the one that you used when you first created the Boolean, then you can select that object and do it the old-school way, which is going to be through the Modify panel here. You can see that whatever object you have selected in the Boolean parameters will have its stack displayed. Then I can go into the Cylinder here. And I do get topology warning, but I'm not going to change anything here that would affect the Boolean results, so I can just say Yes. And in those Cylinder parameters, get in a bit closer here, we can see there's some overlapping geometry there. Just going to increase the height a little bit. All right, so that's how we harness the full power of the new Boolean, and also the Boolean Explorer.

3ds Max Modeling Creating compound objects with new Booleans

3ds Max Modeling Creating compound objects with new Booleans I can double-click to select one of these guys and then move it and you'll see where it overlaps with its neighbor we get an intersection. Alright, cool. So I'm gonna undo that movement, just restore it back to where it was. If we wanted to find the intersection of all of those objects, so that wherever they overlapped with the main disc we would have smaller discs, then that would be a good case for creating a sub-Boolean. Let's look at that. To make a sub-Boolean you go over to the modify panel and select one of the objects that you want to be a member of this sub-Boolean. And that's basically like parentheses in an algebraic equation. You're saying we wanna isolate this operation and perform it before we do any other operations. So I've got one of these cutter cylinders selected and then right-click and choose create new Boolean. Now I've got a sub-Boolean and I can drag these other ones one at a time into that.

3ds Max New Features Saving animation with Game Exporter

3ds Max New Features Saving animation with Game Exporter Then we can close the scene explorer. Then go into the application menu, and choose export, game exporter. In the game exporter dialogue, go to the animation clips tab. Once again, we have the ability to create and manage presets with these icons here. The anim default preset is gonna be just fine for us. From the export all pulldown, we wanna choose export selection so we only save out the joints that we have animated. 

3ds Max New Features Sending to Print Studio

3ds Max New Features Sending to Print Studio From here, we can go ahead and run through the steps of printing our object. Check it for errors. No problems. See if it needs any supports. We can add automatic supports before printing. It's gonna calculate this shape and determine whether or not it needs supports. Looks like our model is pretty straightforward and doesn't require supports. 

3ds Max New Features Visualizing CFD as a gradient

3ds Max New Features Visualizing CFD as a gradient We've got our slice object ready. Select that plane and go into the Create menu. Under AEC Objects, down near the bottom we have Max Creation Graph tools, CFD Visualization and let's go for MCG Visualize CFD Velocity. That's the speed of the fluid. Click on that and then we need to select the data object with that Scene Explorer still open and go over here and click on CFDImportData001. 

3ds Max Visualizing computational fluid dynamics

3ds Max Visualizing computational fluid dynamics , choose CFD, click CFD Import Data and click anywhere in the Viewport and then right-click to complete that. Currently I'm not seeing any data displayed. We can make sure that the object is there and selected using the scene explorer, open that up. CFD Import Data does exist and we selected it, go to the Modify panel and click the button labelled CSV_File and this is the actual simulation data. And we're taken to that program files directory, be aware that we're making a link to an external document therefore it's a better idea to link to the version in my exercise files or current project. I've got that on the desktop. Scene Assets, CFD, office.csv, open that up. Even after linking to that external file I still can't see anything but I can create an object which will draw arrows to indicate the flow of the fluid. Go back to the Create panel and from the categories choose Max Creation Graph.

3ds Max Importing and replacing from the Asset Library

3ds Max Importing and replacing from the Asset Library but we can always of course select it, it's a group, and then use the move tool, position it in the scene, maybe put it in the origin here. Okay, that's cool. We can also replace that object. To do that, we want to have it selected first. And that's a group. And this is a little bit of a special case here, because when we click on a group in the viewport, it selects the group node and all of the members of the group. And if we did a replace with the Asset Library, then every object in here would be replaced with the incoming group, and we'd have a whole mess here. So we want to select only the group node in this case. A little bit tricky. Now, go up to the Scene Explorer. Turn that on, and just only select the Bookcase Group.

3ds Max New Features Using Asset Library filters

3ds Max New Features Using Asset Library filters .let's enable one of the filters. I'll turn on the tools filter. And nothing happened immediately. And that's because these files all had the word zip somewhere in their file name. This tool is not just searching for the extension. It's searching for the entire file name. If I then right click on that wrench and disable zip, now you would expect that it would hide all of the zip files because our filters are on and zip is not an allowed file type currently. Well, we do see these max files. And that's because we have another set of filters over here that is also in effect. And if a file has a string within it that matches any of these filters, then it will be displayed if it's enabled for that filter, or if the filters are completely turned off. Alright, so this one, the 3d, is turned off right now. But, again, if we right click we can see all the available file types.

3ds Max New Features Saving a model with Game Exporter

3ds Max New Features Saving a model with Game Exporter I don't need to in this case so I'm going to disable that. Close the dialogue. We do need to set an export directory. Click on the browse button and now you need to navigate to where you want to save to. I want to save into my current projects export folder and that just happens to be where I am now. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to know where I am currently. There is no actual display path on the screen here, but you can navigate up and down through the tree to figure out where you're at.

3ds Max New Features Accessing the Creative Market

3ds Max New Features Accessing the Creative Market Select that file and click open and click OK in the PBX import dialogue. And the object is loaded, we're not seeing the texture here, we'll need to go into material editor for that I'll use the keyboard shortcut "M". Here is the material, I'll drag over into the view, choose instance, double click it to load it here, and then up here at the tool bar, click show shaded material in viewport. And now we should see our texture and there it is. Okay, our FBX came in okay. I'd like to point out one last thing though, which is that the material here, the bitmap, was re-pathed. So when we opened up this FBX inside of 3DX Max, it unpacked the textures from the FBX file and saved them out.

3ds Max Defining per-view settings and preferences

3ds Max Defining per-view settings and preferences They would not share the same settings, they would just now start off with all having the same settings. But I'm gonna choose to not apply to all views, and only apply to the current perspective view port. Click okay, and now up here it says user defined, and I can switch between high quality and user defined. The settings of other view port panels will be independent of this one. So I could, for example, load the same camera into multiple views. And visualize my scene in different ways in each view port. That's a basic rundown of the per view ports settings and preferences.

3ds Max Choosing shading modes in viewports

3ds Max Choosing shading modes in viewports Go up to the third menu, now labeled "High Quality", and in the Materials section, we could choose Shaded Materials with Maps. And now we see there is a texture on the ground plane here. Our mode has switched over to a user-defined preset. And because of that little quirk, we're not seeing the full quality of this texture. We can just go back into that menu and re-assume High Quality mode. Now we're getting better rendering of the procedural texture I've got on the ground plane. That's a quick overview of the new menu structure for each viewport panel.

3ds Max 2020 Scaling the interface

3ds Max 2020 Scaling the interface To get more control, you can access the advanced display settings. Within this page, scroll down once again. Click "Advanced sizing of text and other items". Inside this display page, click on "set a custom scaling level". And here you can choose an option. Once again you'll need to click OK and then apply the changes. Sign out of Windows and sign back in again to see your changes. That's how we can scale the Windows interface for an ultra-high-definition monitor screen.

3ds Max Appreciating the new UI

 

3ds Max Appreciating the new UI I don't really need this view port layout tab. I'll right-click on an empty spot of the main toolbar. And then from that pop-up menu choose to disable the view port layout tabs. I don't really use the view cube. I'd like to disable that.

3ds max 2020 Beginner tutorials

3ds max 2020 Beginner tutorials to If you see one labeled finished example that's just what it means. It's an example that I created to show you what the tutorial should look like when it's done. If there isn't a finished example, then the next movie in the sequence is the end state. So in other words, the end state for 0308 layer is the begin state for 0309 desk. Okay, so that's how the sequencing works here. And additionally, there's another folder inside scenes. And these are Xrefs, or external references, and these are here to save disk space.

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Editing UVs with Unwrap UVW brushes

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Editing UVs with Unwrap UVW brushes Click on UV Paint Movement. And move the cursor in the view. And you will see that you've got two circles surrounding that cursor. Those are two radii. The Strength radius and the Falloff radius. It's easiest just to control those from the keyboard shortcuts. Hold down Ctrl and drag up and down to increase the Falloff. Hold down Shift and drag to increase and decrease the Strength. Strength is not really strength

3ds Max Rendering Daylighting with ART Sun Positioner

3ds Max Rendering Daylighting with ART Sun Positioner 3ds Max Rendering Daylighting with ART Sun Positioner so set that to whatever is convenient. Click again to complete that sun positioner object, and then right-click to exit the tool. Let's go over to the physical camera I've prepared, and switch it into high quality display mode. Click on the label that says standard, and then choose high quality. These scenes are loaded into other scenes at the top level here. The Xrefs are referenced, or linked, into these other scenes so that we don't have massive duplication of data.

3ds Max Placing maps with Texture Object Mask

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Placing maps with Texture Object Mask it's the radius within which the tool will have 100% influence. And that influence will diminish to zero when we reach the Falloff radius, or the dashed line. You can see it in effect if you just simply click and drag. And anything that was within that Strength radius moved as a unit.

3ds Max Rendering A360 cloud rendering

3ds Max Rendering A360 cloud rendering For the image size I'm going to choose a custom size, and I'll make it 1280 x 720, using a 16 x 9 aspect ratio. We'll use advanced exposure, which means we can change the exposure after the rendering is finished. And the file format we'll choose PNG. We can test the scene compatibility at this point, and see if they're any errors. And we did get a few errors, there's a shape object that's not renderable, that's not a problem. We'll see that the RGB multiplying node that's in the shading network, is not supported.

3ds Max Rendering Switching renderers scene converter

3ds Max Rendering Switching renderers scene converter It might take a moment for it to render all of the previews, but there you have it. Materials have all been converted. Additionally, the exposure has been converted. We can check in on that, Rendering Exposure Control. The MR Physical sun and sky has been replaced by the ART Physical sun and sky. We're now using Physical Camera Exposure Control, whereas a minute ago we were using MR Photographic Exposure Control, and for me today I'm seeing that the exposure value did not transfer over, unfortunately. It's supposed to be a value of 14, so I will enter that in now. The tone curve pretty much came out the way I wanted it.

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Placing maps with Texture Object Mask

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Placing maps with Texture Object Mask Our draft quality ART rendering is complete. Let's compare it to the Mental Ray draft quality rendering. I've got that in a cloned rendered frame window here. We can see that the sun and sky plugin looks drastically different, and, also, our materials have changed significantly. It looks pretty good. I mean this is a good rendering, but it has changed somewhat from what we had, namely, we're not really getting the shininess that we saw in the Mental Ray Rendering, but that's to be expected that we would need to go in and make some adjustments. For example, I would want to add subsurface scattering to the cactus here. The Scene Converter is a useful tool, but it's just the beginning of getting a scene tweaked up in order to look good in a target renderer, in this case ART. Let's take a quick look at the high-quality renders of these that I've prepared. First is the Mental Ray, and then the default scene converted version rendered in ART.

3ds Max Mapping vector text decals with TextMap

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Applying vector text decals with TextMap  And we also of course need a Texture Object Mask map. And here it is, Texture Object Mask, drag that over. Assign it to the Diffuse Color of the material. And then double-click on that map, and we get its parameters. We need to choose the control object. Click on the button that says "None", and now minimize the Material Editor and click on the plane primitive in the scene. And now it's assigned. And you saw that the color changed subtly here. And if we select the object and use the Move tool to position it, we may or may not see a preview.

3ds Max Animation Skin Voxel and Heat Map solvers

3ds Max Animation Skin Voxel and Heat Map solvers When I click hips, I only select that bone. I want to select all of its children as well. Go up to the Select menu, and enable Select Children. That is going to stay on from now on, so if I click on something, all of its children will be selected. Even the next time I open this dialogue. I'll click on hips, select all its children, and then click Select. Now all the bones have been added to the list here. We can test out the initial skinning with envelopes. To make it easier for us to do that, let's just freeze the character mesh. It's still selected, I can right-click and get the quad menu and choose Freeze Selection. And now when I hover my mouse over the bones, they will light up with pre-selection highlighting. I'll go down here and hover over the femur to select that joint at the knee. And then with that joint selected, press the E key on the keyboard to get the rotate tool. And rotating in local reference coordinate system. And as you can see, we're having some skinning issue with the vertices on the left leg being attached to the bone on the right leg. Again, that's with the default envelope skinning. Let's undo that with Ctrl + Z. I want to select the mesh again.

3ds Max Animation Using Buffer Curves

3ds Max Animation Using Buffer Curves Go back into the buffer curves tool once again. Then we have one more button here, revert to buffer curves. We'll make our edit again with control and drag. Revert to buffer curves erases all changes since the last commit. It's kind of like an undo all history. So, I can make multiple edits, hold down control and drag, and maybe do a few different things here, and when I click this button, we will go not one step back, but as many step backs as necessary to take us back to shape of the curve of the last time we made a snapshot or the last time that we entered the buffer curves tool All right, that's a basic introduction to buffer curves, an analysis tool for animation.

3ds Max Animation Introducing keys-only tools

3ds Max Animation Introducing keys-only tools I'll hit Control + Z once again to undo that. The shifted function for space keys evenly will move the keys to different values to achieve even spacing between the first and last keys. Hold down Shift and click and now the change in values between adjacent keys is equal. We can make that a little bit easier to see by making them linear tangents and we get almost a straight line there, not quite, but if we wanted a perfectly straight line we could of course, once again, use space keys evenly without the Shift and now we have an almost straight line. It's never gonna be perfect because we're quantizing the frames here. Okay, I'll undo all of that with Control + Z and back to our original curve, we're moving on to relax and that, once again, only affects three or more contiguous selected keys. When you click on relax, it adjust the key values to move them towards a linear transition between the first and last selected keys. They're trying to go into a straight line. And again, we're only adjusting values here and not timing. I'll undo that with Control + Z a bunch of times. Take us back to here in our history.

3ds Max Animation Navigating the updated Curve Editor

3ds Max Animation Navigating the updated Curve Editor If we select some keys, you'll see the length of those tangents there. And you can click this button to make the tangents larger. Just keep clicking it repeatedly and you will make those tangents larger and larger. Likewise, there's a button to make them smaller. The bulk of the new tools are on this tool bar here which is called the Keys Only Tools tool bar. We'll look at that in another movie but there are a bunch of miscellaneous key manipulation tools here. There are a few other tool bars available that are hidden by default. Let's look at how to reveal them. Right-click on the textured bar on the left of any one of the tool bars. Hold down the right mouse button and choose show toolbars. And these include all of the old ones that used to exist as well as some new ones. For example, we can choose the curves tool bar and that's got some useful buttons on here. For example, view all tangents. And when that's on, you don't have to select anything in order to see the tangents. Go back to my move keys tool now that I'm done scaling here. Or likewise, as we saw in the dope sheet, we have the ability to display key-able icons whether a track is key-able or not. And that's found on the curves tool bar as well. But the commands on the curves tool bar are also available from the menus. For example, we can go up to the view menu and enable keyable icons. Or once again, disable it.

3ds max Getting Started Using project folders

3ds max Getting Started Using project folders And with my project now set to the exercise files, if I go to the file menu and choose open, I should be taken to my current project scenes folder and that is in fact what has happened. And here are all the scenes for the course, alright. I'll cancel out of that, alright. So I've set up my projects. If I want to switch to a recent project, all I have to do is choose it from the pull-down list here. So I can for example switch over to the 3ds Max essential training project. One last thing to mention, if you open a scene file that's in a different project than the current one, then 3ds Max will ask you if you want to switch projects or not. Let's say that I have my project currently set to 3ds Max essential training, but then I try to open a file from a different project, I'll do that. Go to the file menu, and choose open, and then navigate to a completely different project. Desktop, exercise files, scenes, and I'll open the file 0104project.max, click open and I get a dialogue warning me about a project mismatch. Here I can choose whether or not I want to change the current project to match that of the incoming file. Usually you do want to do this. You want to change the project so that the incoming scene file can find all of its dependent assets, such as texture files. If you choose don't ask again, then 3ds Max will automatically switch projects for you until the next session, that is until the next time you launch the program. I'm going to leave that switch off, so that I will always be notified of any future mismatch. Click continue, and the file is loaded, it's just got one sphere in it, and the project has been switched over now to the exercise files. Alright that's how to create, set and switch project folders. And that concludes our chapter on getting started.

3ds max Getting Started Setting preferences

3ds max Getting Started Setting preferences Moving on to the files tab. Kind of importantly, I think it's a good idea to enable this switch that says convert local file paths to relative. I'll turn that on, and now anywhere that a file path is displayed in 3DS Max, it will be displayed to me relative to the location of my current project. It's going to store an absolute path for every asset. In other words, it's going to know what drive letter the asset is located on. But for the purposes of self contained projects, we want all of the internal links to be relative to the project route. We don't actually want to store the project's drive letter or volume name or its network location. And the reason for that is that so that our projects can be portable. And that means we can pick up an entire project and move it somewhere else, and all of the links internal to that project will still be preserved. And that's what this switch accomplishes for us. Technically it is storing the absolute path and merely displaying the relative path to the user. but from a practical standpoint, if this switch is off, then we could potentially run into some issues with our file paths getting mangled. So I do recommend that you leave that on. So moving on, we've got the view ports tab, and in here this is also very important. This is where we can choose and configure the display driver. And in 3DS Max, the sort of software module that draws images in the view ports here, that's the display driver and it goes by the name Nitrous. And we currently have Nitrous at the Direct3D level 11 feature set. And that's a good setting, and we do want to leave it at that. However, if you're having some issues on your computer, if 3DS Max is flickering or doing strange things, first you should look at updating your display driver, whether it's an Nvidia or AMD. You'll want to find the appropriate software and try to update that driver. And if that doesn't work you can go in here and choose a different driver. Click on choose driver. And from this pull down list we can actually downgrade the driver to an older, possibly dumber display driver. For example, if you are doing a remote session, maybe you're logged on through remote desktop, you might need to choose a software renderer instead of these hardware renderers. But again, you want to use the highest level Direct3D you can whenever possible. So leave that as it is. And even though I didn't change anything, I got a warning saying that the driver changes will take effect the next time you start 3DS Max

3ds max Getting Started Customizing user interface and defaults

3ds max Getting Started Customizing user interface and defaults And almost never use the 3ds Max standard material. And finally with this Max.ART preset, objects will not inherit the properties of their enclosing layer. And so for example we can set the display properties of objects individually even if they're inside the same layer. So I'll click Set. And we got a little warning saying that the settings will take effect the next time we restart, and that's fine. And then you can see you may get some screen corruption because it just reloaded the interface, but that's okay just close the program and relaunch it. And that's how to choose the default tools settings in the customize user interface and defaults window.

3ds max Getting Started Choosing a workspace

3ds max Getting Started Choosing a workspace But once it does you'll see that we have a different toolbar up here at the top. And some of the tools have been moved down here to a another toolbar on the side. And we have a different set of menus. And the alt menus are actually more complete than the standard or default menus. If you are familiar with other Autodesk applications such as Revit, you might want to choose the so called design standard workspace. Let's choose that from the workspace's pull-down. Design standard. And once that refreshes we'll see that we have larger buttons up here, and a series of tabs. And again this is designed to resemble some of the other Autodesk applications. There are a number of these workspaces from which you can choose for example: There is a modular mini workspace.

3ds Max 2020 New Features Conclusion

3ds Max 2020 New Features Conclusion I've only stored those scenes once inside Xrefs. Additionally, other dependent files are found in scene assets. Open that up. Inside scene assets images are a few bitmaps that are applied to materials. There's also a single vector art file of a logo. There's similar vector art files. Over here there's one, there's an Illustrator document, because later I'm going to illustrate how to import from Illustrator.

3ds Max Rendering A360 cloud rendering

3ds Max Rendering A360 cloud rendering The sun here is coming from directly overhead. That's certainly an issue, we would probably have better results if we used photometric lighting, rather than the sun in the sky, but let's take one last look at what we can do with what we have, and that's adjust the exposure. Back up here in the thumbnail, click on that down facing arrow, and click adjust exposure. And then, once our preview is loaded we can play around with the exposure of this shot after it's been rendered. And I can for example, pump up the highlights. Give it a little bit more saturation, and change the white point which is the color balance, or white balance. Make it a little bit warmer. If we're happy with that exposure, then we'll click apply down here. And then we'll need to scroll back up. We may need to wait for that to calculate, but when once it's finished, we can now download the image. Once again click on the down arrow and choose download image. Let's save it in our current project in the render output folder. I'll right-click to make a new folder, and give it a name 05_05_A360_cloud_render Hit enter, and double click to enter that folder, and click save to save the file out. Now we've got to local copy of that file, we can open it up here in the Windows Explorer interface. I can double click on that file, and open it in the default viewer, and here it is the A360 rendering. I'll just maximize that and that is a draft quality rendering really not a standard quality but it calculated in the cloud we didn't have to use any of our local computing resources. There are some limitations, but depending upon what you're doing it may save you some time and effort to render in the cloud. And that concludes our chapter on rendering, and it also finishes our whole course on 3DS Max 2017 new features.

3ds Max Rendering Adjust ART Physical Sun and Sky

3ds Max Rendering Adjust ART Physical Sun and Sky To compensate for that, we can reduce the global intensity. Over here, we'll set that to a value of 0.1. And it still looks a bit overexposed in this material preview. However, we are not actually rendering the sky as a background in this case. We don't really care what the sky looks like, all we care about is how it looks on these surfaces here. With those values entered, I'll do a test rendering. Go into the Render Setup dialog. ART is our current renderer, and I've got a target quality of, once again, 28 decibels. Click "Render". Here is the end result with a sky intensity of 30 and a global intensity of 0.1. There is almost no direct sunlight in this version of the render. The light is coming from everywhere in the sky. And so we have almost no shadows whatsoever.

3ds Max Rendering Daylighting with ART Sun Positioner

3ds Max Rendering Daylighting with ART Sun Positioner Our sun positioner is active and we're seeing lighting in the scene. Let's select that sun positioner, and to do that, you need to click on the compass rose, it's easiest to do that in the top viewport. Go over to the modify panel now, We can adjust the sun positioner parameters, I'm going to use manual as my mode of placement. Down here under sun position, set it to manual, and now we can enter in degree values for the azimuth and the altitude. Scroll down a bit, Horizontal coordinates, azimuth and altitude. You can't actually click and drag on these spinners, but you can click and hold, and that will move it in one degree increments, you can see how my sun is rotating here when I adjust the azimuth. I'll set that to a value of 300 degrees, and we have the altitude, which is the height in the sky. Again, we can click and hold the mouse to adjust in one degree increments. I know I want a value here of 40 degrees, so I'll type that in altitude of 40 degrees. Because I have a physical camera in my scene, I want to use physical exposure. When I created the sun positioner, that got enabled, just silently behind the scenes. Let's go check it out in the rendering menu. Exposure control, exposure control is currently set to physical camera.

3ds Max Rendering Introducing the ART renderer

3ds Max Rendering Introducing the ART renderer That is not possible with ART, and in fact, you have no control over things like the density of shadows. That is all determined by the number and position and intensity of lights in your scene. So, you don't really have the impressionistic power that you have with a renderer like Mental Ray, but you have much faster setup than you would with something like Mental Ray. You, basically, drop your lights into the scene, set the intensity according to the real luminance that they would have in the real world, and use the physical material on all of the objects. Once you have all of those things lined up, the rendering will come out nearly photo real with very little work on your part. The advantages of ART are that it's easy to set up, and that it produces high quality photo real results. On the minus side, the disadvantages are that you have less creative ability. You can't achieve certain effects in ART. Also, the render times can be very long. Mental Ray or V-Ray are going to be faster in most cases, but you're going to spend more time setting them up. On the topic of creativity, or art directing a shot, we notice as this is rendering, that we're getting a pretty hard edged shadow here, and that's occurring because I have point lights in the scene, and they're not really point lights, because they have to have some volume or area for the purposes of ART.It's not really fast enough for doing animation at this point. You can also bump up the quality a little bit by enabling Noise Filtering here, and the default strength of 50% is a good balance, because if you have it up too high, it might cause some banding, and you'll lose some detail. So, I'm gonna kick this off once again, and it's going to take quite a long time to render this, but we'll take a look at it once it's finished. Now that rendering is completed, we can take a look at it. It has a target quality of 32 decibels. We've also enabled Noise Filtering with a 50% strength. That's the basics of setting up the ART Renderer. As we've seen, there aren't very many options to worry about, but once again, the render times can be long.

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Shading with the Physical Material

 3ds Max Materials and Mapping Shading with the Physical Material And once again, select the node in the material editor and click assign material. We're ready to do another test render. Once again, give focus to the physical camera. And render production. And this will take longer, because it's calculating the reflections of these physical materials. Once that's completed we can see that we're getting some shiny highlights on this polished aluminum. Alright, back to our material editor and I just wanna talk a little bit about these parameters. If we go back and forth between this stairs material and the physical material and look at the parameters we will see that the main things that have changed are the roughness and the metalness.

 3ds Max Materials and Mapping Shading with the Physical Material For this polished wood we've got a roughness of .64 and a metalness of zero. For the polished aluminum we have a roughness of .29, a lower roughness, and a metalness of one. Because this is a physical simulation of a material the most important property in determining the size and intensity of highlights is the roughness. The aluminum material is a good example of that, because I can change the roughness and see how that affects the reflections. Set the roughness down to zero and we get a highly polished perfect mirror here. If I set the roughness up to one then I get a perfectly ideal diffuse material. That's the most significant parameter here of all. As the name implies, metalness controls the amount of metallic property this material will have. And with a value of one it will be a complete metal and with a value of zero it will have no metal. 3ds Max Materials and Mapping Shading with the Physical Material

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Editing UVs with Unwrap UVW brushes

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Editing UVs with Unwrap UVW brushes All right, I'll undo that with Ctrl + Z. If I just wanna make some adjustments to the UVs here without creating too much distortion, then I might want to have a Strength of near zero. Hold down Shift and drag and make that a very small circle. And that way we're gonna have a very soft influence over our resulting UVs. I'll undo that. And then we can also change the Falloff Type. The default is Linear. I think the best one actually is Smooth. And with a very low Strength and using the Smooth Falloff Type, I'm getting a pretty good result here. I'm not seeing weird stretching as I move things around. All right, undo that. So, this is for touch-up work, obviously. And it uses a form of soft selection allowing you to interactively adjust the UV placement in a sort of organic way. The other tool we have is Relax. And it's really the same tool that you would find in the menus here under Tools, Relax. The Relax Tool will operate on the entire object or on selected UVs. The brush implementation, of course, is interactive. So let's try that. We've got a couple different options. The default one, Relax By Polygon Angles, I think, is actually the best option. So we'll use that. I'll navigate in the view here and go to an area that's got a bit more variation. Here in the middle, around 0.5. And click and hold down the mouse. And as long as you hold down that mouse, you're relaxing the mesh. Eventually it will converge, and you will hold down the mouse and things will stop moving. You've reached sort of an optimal state for the Relax. And what Relax is trying to do is to equalize the UV space to match the polygon size. Cool, so that's the Interactive Relax. I can undo that with Ctrl + Z. And, of course, adjust my Strength and Falloff values. Maybe make it a much larger circle. Hold down Ctrl, bring that out.

3ds Max Materials Mapping Placing maps : Texture Object Mask

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Placing maps with Texture Object Mask  If I rotate this, I will probably be able to see something. So it's not terribly accurate. Don't trust what you see in the preview here. Definitely do a production render to make sure. And wherever that plane slices through that object, we have a transition between right now just a black and white color. Cool. So I'll restore the rotations to zero. And also set the position to a value of 0.4 meters in the Z axis. Back to the Slate Material Editor, we can make some of these other connections. We've got the noise, we'll assign that to "Texture1". And it takes a moment to update. We can see here now that the noise is appearing on the top half of this little material preview. And then drag the Gradient Ramp, or the Forest Noise, onto "Texture2". Finally, let's just adjust the values of this snow noise here, I'm gonna double-click that. I'll call it "snow" up here. Set its size to 0.5, set the Low value to 0.5 as well, it's going to increase the contrast, and swap the two colors here. Just click "Swap". And now we should have a mostly white material preview there. We'll do another rendering. Go back to our perspective view and click "Render". And you can see here now we've got a transition between the snow material and the ground material, or the forest. Let's render this camera view that I've prepared. Highlight that viewport and do a rendering. Here we can see that we are getting a very unrealistic effect, because we are just simply cutting off at a certain elevation. Back in our Slate Material Editor, we can change this up. Double-click on the Texture Object Mask map. And over here we have Transition Range. That's the softness of the transition between the Above and Below. Set that to a value of 0.3. And then do another render. Now we've got a softer transition there. We can even make this more interesting by varying the shape here, so it won't be a straight line. In the Slate Material Editor, in the Texture Object Mask map, there is a slot here for transition displacement.

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Vector textures with ShapeMap

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Vector textures with ShapeMap All right, very cool, now we've got our vector art applied onto the flag, and once again it is resolution independent, we can zoom in very, very close on Mr. Beaver here, and do a quick rendering, and see how good that looks. Of course, we can edit our original curves as well. So it's all live, we can go, select that object, go into the Modify panel, and select by Spline, drag a rectangle around all of the beaver splines there, grab the scale tool, and then make sure we're scaling around the selection center, not the pivot point, click and drag in the center of the scale gizmo, to scale all of those splines, and notice how we're also scaling that on the flag itself. So there is a lot of connection between the spline object, and the vector art that we have within our shading network. Notice that the thickness of these lines did not increase, that would need to be set in the parameters. Very cool, I'll undo that with Control + Z, and now we've got a regulation flag. I'll exit out of the cell object mode, and that's how to use the shape map to convert a shape or spline object into a map or texture.

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Applying vector text decals with TextMap

3ds Max Materials and Mapping Applying vector text decals with TextMap We can control the size of that text object through the usual way which is in the coordinates roll out, the tiling here. We can also change it based upon the size of the region of the TextPlus object itself and that's done here. So in the text parameters it says map boundary. It's defaulted to text bounds. If we select the TextPlus object, go into its modify panel and play around with the region here we can control the size of the text on the object. If I increase the length of the region we're causing it to become taller and it's squeezing the type into a smaller area. I'll reduce that length once again. Then we have the width. If I increase of the region we're causing the text to be squashed into a smaller area from left to right. Notice that it looks very fuzzy in the view port here. There's is a control in the parameters for text map called hardware bitmap size but this only affects renderings in Quicksilver and iRay. We could play around with the view port configuration and try to get that to look a little bit better here in the view but it really doesn't matter because all that we really care about is whether it renders well. We'll get in very close there and do a quick production render. Click on the teapot with the lightening bolt and in the production rendering we have extremely crisp outlines, very cool. Of course, we can change the fill and background colors here.

Choosing a 3ds max reference coordinate system

Choosing a 3ds max reference coordinate system So if I try to animate this moving in that direction, what I would find is I'm actually animating in world x and y because the object has no parent. So local mode is useful for modeling operations, but if you're going to be animating then you'll need to look a little bit deeper. And we'll talk about that more when we get to rigging and hierarchies. Let's move on now to the rotate tool. And it's got view and world coordinates as well. And it's got local coordinates. Local coordinates will be easier to see if we select a single object rather than this group or assembly. So I've got an object over here, this dodecahedron. It's a single object. And I can use my newly minted keyboard shortcut that I created in the previous movie to zoom in on that object in all views. And it's shift control z for zoom extents all selected down here.

3ds max hotkeys not working

3ds max hotkeys not working I'll go back to Zoom Extents All Selected, I chose it from the flyout, and again, that caused it to actually commit that command. Well, if I want to zoom all viewports to all geometry, I can just deselect, select nothing, and then use the Zoom Extents All Selected button and that does the same thing as Zoom Extents All. Zoom Extents All Selected is a better command because it's a two-in-one command. It'll allow me to zoom to a certain object or, if I have nothing selected, it'll allow me to zoom to all objects in all views. Let's customize that. Go into the Customize menu to Customize User Interface and in the Customize User Interface dialog, in the Keyboard tab, in which you'll see all of the commands for 3ds Max. And they are categorized here, so that might help you narrow the search a little bit. But, in all honesty, you need to know the name of the command in order to find it and if you don't know the exact name of the command, then you can hover your mouse over an icon and you should get a tooltip to tell you what that command is. Zoom Extents All Selected. So that'll be at the bottom in alphabetical order. Zoom Extents All Selected has a blank next to it, there is no shortcut. But, Zoom Extents All does have a shortcut, as we saw earlier, Zoom Extents All is redundant because Zoom Extents All Selected will perform that function as well. So I'll select Zoom Extents All Selected, and over here we have a hotkey field. Click in there to get focus to that field, and then hold down the keys that you want to assign.

Saving time with 3ds max keyboard shortcut hotkeys

Saving time with 3ds max keyboard shortcut hotkeys  Likewise, I can use the wheel to zoom in and out in the ortho views. Back to the Perspective View. Click there, maximize it with Alt+W. The other keyboard shortcut you need to memorize is Orbit. And that is Alt and middle mouse button. So if nothing is selected, and you hold down Alt and middle mouse, you will Orbit or Tumble around the origin of the world. If you select an object, like that dodecahedron object there, and then Alt and middle mouse, then you'll see we can Orbit or Tumble around that object, or around this monitor. All right, that's cool, so those are a Viewport navigation, so it's all about the middle mouse button. Middle mouse, alone, by itself, is Pan or Truck or Pedestal. Alt and middle mouse is Orbit or Tumble. Control+Alt and middle mouse is Dolly or Zoom, and finally the Transforms of Position Rotation and Scale all have standardized keyboard shortcuts as well. So if I select an object, I can enter into the Move Tool, using the W key, and I've got the Move Tool active. I can switch to the Rotate Tool with the E key. And I've got the Rotate manipulator, Undo that. The R key is Scale, Undo that as well. Control+Z to undo. And the Q key on the keyboard is the Select Tool. Q for select. So Q, W, E, and R, are the most important keyboard shortcuts for the main toolbar. Q is Select, W is Move, E is Rotate, and R is Scale. And finally, if you want to Zoom in on an object, the keyboard shortcut for that is Z. Not Control+Z, that's Undo, and not Shift+Z, that's Undo Viewport Move, but just Z by itself. So if I select an object like that plant and press the Z key, then I'll zoom in on that object. If I have nothing selected, if I just click on a wall here, which is frozen, and I can't actually select that. So I click on nothing and press Z, then I'll zoom out to enclose the entire world. All right. Those are the most important keyboard shortcuts for Viewport Navigation and Object Manipulation.

Choosing 3ds max viewport shading modes

Choosing 3ds max viewport shading modes If the viewport is in the default shading mode then you can choose some shading options from this menu here and it says standard by default. Click on that and we can switch over to, for example, performance mode, which as the name indicates, is for high-performance applications. In other words, if you've got a very heavy scene and you're having trouble navigating, switch over to performance mode and you'll lose your shading and lighting but you'll be able to navigate more quickly. From this menu we can also choose the high-quality mode and that'll take a moment to load actually and I found that the high-quality mode is actually not very reliable and in this case I can see that the exposure's all wrong so I don't actually use the high-quality mode. What I do is I use the standard mode and turn on lights and shadows, so let's do that. Now go back to standard mode and from that menu, lighting and shadows, I can choose to illuminate with scene lights and I've got all these photometric tube lights up in the ceiling and now I've got a nice lighting affect in our viewport and it is interactive. We can also enable shadows from this menu once again that now reads user defined, go in there to lighting and shadows, and enable shadows and we even have a screen-space ambient occlusion effect in here if we want that.

3ds max Navigating in viewports

3ds max Navigating in viewports But in this axonometric projection, the lines of the grid still do not ever converge at a vanishing point. So objects maintain their size regardless of distance. So this is something I never use anymore, but if you get into this situation, then once again, you can use the undo. And I've done a bunch of these undos, so I might as well use the keyboard shortcut which is Shift + Z. I can do that a few times and get back to my front view. I can always choose the view from this pull-down list. I can choose Front view, but I might not be restored back to the same place that I was before. And finally, if you want to zoom in on particular objects, there is a button for that called Zoom Extents. And we've got them down here. There's Zoom Extents Selected, and then to right of it, Zoom Extents All Selected. So if we click Zoom Extents All Selected and nothing is selected, then all of the viewports are going to zoom out to enclose all of the geometry, all right. Let's select one object, so I'll grab this Select Object tool and select this plant and go back down here and click again Zoom Extents All Selected. And all of the views zoom to show that object. If we want to do it just in one view, we can select an object, like that monitor, and we have Zoom Extents Selected. Not Zoom Extents All Selected, but just Zoom Extents Selected. And only that one viewport zooms. All right, so if I want to go back to my perspective view that I had before, of course, I can use the undo and maybe do that again. And now I'm back to the framing that I had before. Those are the basics of using the viewport navigation controls in 3ds Max.

3ds max Transforming objects with Move and Rotate

3ds max Transforming objects with Move and Rotate So, if I move everything in the top view, then I know I'm not moving them in Z or in elevation. And I can move the object in any one of the three cardinal directions in 3D space including Z which is the elevation. I'll undo that. Additionally I can move an object in two axes at once in the perspective view because there are three little brackets that correspond to the three planes of the Cartesian coordinate system. The x-y plane is the ground plane, you can move around just in the x-y space. Undo that. Then we have the y-z plane. Undo that. And then finally the z-x plane. Undo that. So, that's the move tool in a nutshell. Let's move onto the rotate tool and that's found next to it on the main toolbar. And we get a gizmo or a manipulator that looks like an orb. It has three interlocking circles and they are color coded to the axes, RGB, red, green and blue correspond to x, y and z, so if I rotate by clicking on the red axis, then I'm rotating around the x-axis of the world in this case. I'll undo that and then y is the green. And z is blue. I'll undo that as well. If you click in the center, then you've got a trackball kind of operation where you're swiveling and you're actually rotating in three dimensions. Undo that. And then finally we do have the ability to rotate in screen space with this outer circle here and I don't have much application for that in the perspective view. Undo that. But in the orthographic views, that outer ring can come in handy, so I can right click in the top view to give it focus and then just click on that outer ring