3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Creating an image plane Maximize the top view with Alt W and get in closer with the mouse wheel, and you'll see that it looks very fuzzy and very difficult to read. So you want to change up your display parameters in order to load the image in at its full resolution. And that's done from viewport configuration. Go to any viewport and click on the plus sign at the upper left in the viewport label menu. So click on the plus sign, go to configure viewports. And we have the display performance tab. And here you see texture maps. And that is the display of textures in the viewports. And it's set to 512 by default. Increase that up to 2,048. And now once we click apply, we can see that our image is much more legible. Okay, so I can set this back just to demonstrate. 512, press enter, and then click apply. And it goes back to a very grainy display. All right, I wouldn't push it any farther than 2,048 unless you've got really good graphics capabilities on your computer. While we're here, by the way, you can see that I have the anti-aliasing quality set up all the way. And this is just the generic anti-aliasing. What that does is soften up wireframes and things like that. So I'm going to set that to its highest value on my system. If you experience any issues with your computer then you might want to come back in here and set these to lower values once again. Click apply to close the viewport configuration dialogue. And that's how to set up an image plane. I'll mention just in passing that there is an alternate workflow for this using the background of a viewport, but I don't use that workflow because it's very difficult to control the size of the image. And so that's why I use an explicit plane primitive.
And so I've constructed this image very precisely so that the width of the canvas, if it were to be measured, would be 20 meters or 2,000 centimeters. And the floor plan within that is smaller. So this is just a gotcha. You have to be aware that in order to get your image plane scaled correctly, you need to account for the size of the canvas or the page and not just the size of the object. Okay, so now that we know that, I'm going to close this and then create a plane in the perspective view. Go to the create panel, and from the geometry section, standard primitives, click on the plane button. Go over to the perspective view, and click and drag to create that plane. Right-click to exit and then go into the modify panel. And rename it image plane. Let's set its parameters. You have the length and width. We'll set each of those to 2,000 centimeters. 2,000, type in a tab, and then the width, 2,000, and press enter. And center it on the world. Use the move tool, and give it an X and Y value of zero. And then we can dolly back in all views. I can use zoom extends all selected. Click on that button and now we can see our entire scene. We need to apply the image plane onto the surface. We'll learn a lot more about materials later. For now, we're just going to create a very basic material so we'll be able to see the image plane. Open up the material editor, and it's got a button on the main toolbar or you can invoke the keyboard shortcut, which is M. And we get this slate material editor. And then expand that window a little bit and make it bigger. And create a physical material. We can see it over here in materials, general, physical material. And this is the best choice for materials because it's compatible with almost all renderers and viewport technologies. So drag that over into the view here and we create a new physical material. Then double-click on the name or the label. And its parameters are loaded into the parameter editor. Let's change its name up here. It's got a name called material number something. We'll rename it and call it image plane, and press enter. Then we need to connect a bitmap. Down here we see basic parameters, base color and reflections. And it's got a color swatch. Next to that color swatch is a little button. This tiny little button here allows us to add a map to that color. So click on that button and we get another window coming up called the material map browser. And we see a bunch of maps listed. And near the top is maps, general, bitmap.
