3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Managing display layers If I open up the layer itself, I can see all of its members. So I've got the image plane, and I've got the columns Group node and all of the members. Notice that this is not organized hierarchically like it is in the standard Scene Explorer. So if we take these and put these next to each other, the Scene Explorer shows a hierarchy. The columns are all children of the Group. But here we don't see a hierarchy, we just see display layers. Let's create a new display layer for all of those columns. And I want to include the columns Group in the layer as well. So select column-001, hold down Shift and select columns Group, so that all 12 columns and their Group are selected. 3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Managing display layers
And then on the Layer Explorer toolbar, there's a button with a plus sign, Create New Layer. And when you click that it creates a new layer and populates it with all of the selected objects. Let's click on that, and highlight it, and rename it. We'll call it columns, press Enter. When you create a new layer, that layer is made active. And you can see that here, we've got a blue icon on that layer. This means that when I create a new object, it will be dropped into the active layer. So after creating a layer, you will almost always want to go back to the default layer and make it active. Now I could play around the column's properties here, most importantly we have freeze and display. So display is the little eye icon, just click that to hide all the members of that Group. And then click it again to make them visible. You can also disable visibility for individual objects. Then we come to freeze, and a frozen object is not selectable in the viewport. So I can click on the little snowflake icon, and all of the columns are frozen and I can't actually select them any longer. Notice that they turn gray, and that's the default behavior. 3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Managing display layers
3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Managing display layers A frozen object will be displayed in gray. And that might be okay for the columns here, but I also want to freeze this image plane. I don't want to be able to select it or do anything to it. So for that image plane I want it to be on a display layer as well. I want to be able to freeze that layer, but I don't want to lose the display of the texture here. To make this a little bit more clear, I'm going to select that plane, go into the Modify Panel, and just set its Length and Width segments down to their minimum of 1, so that we're not distracted by those internal edges. So I'll select that image plane object, and in the Layer Explorer it's already selected, but I can click on it just to make sure. And then once again click to Create a New Layer. And then rename it, it's already highlighted here, so I can just call it image plane. And again, make sure that you make the default layer current so that any new objects will be dropped into that default layer. So if I freeze the image plane layer, I lose the display of my texture because frozen objects are displayed in gray by default. I'll turn that freeze button back off again, and depending upon your preferences, you may want to change a switch either in the layer or in the object itself, so that frozen objects are not displayed in gray. Now, I have 3ds Max set up so that objects are created, quote, By Object.3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Managing display layers
