3ds max Spline Modeling Modeling walls with the Extrude modifier At this stage, we're going to extrude up the walls, and then later we're going to come back in here and cut holes with a Boolean. So for now, we're just going to trace over the floor plan that I've loaded in. And if you have trouble visualizing this floor plan, if it looks fuzzy, go back and look at the movie earlier in the course that dealt specifically with creating the image plane and the material for the image plane. My scene is currently set to a working units of centimeters. And although the image plane is not really that accurate, we can actually snap to the grid and get very accurate results. So let's check in on the grid. Right-click on any of the magnet icons on the main toolbar to open the Grid and Snap Settings dialog. I'm snapping to grid points. Under Options, I am going to enable the axis constraints. And the home grid shows a grid spacing of one centimeter. I can close that and then enable 3D snaps. And now, if I use the Move tool, then you can see the cursor is snapping to grid points even though the grid is not being displayed in this top viewport. If I press the G key on the keyboard, I can see that grid, but it's kind of hard to see the grid and the image plane at the same time. So I'll turn the grid off with G. Let's just create a simple rectangle for this hallway wall. Go into the Create panel, to Shapes, Rectangle, and drag out to create that rectangle. And it may not be at the exact right location, but that's okay. The important thing is we're snapping to grid points. Right-click to exit, and then we can get in closer with the mouse wheel. Position that, and it looks like I got it pretty right the first time. But you might need to go into the Modify panel and check in on the dimensions.
We do want a 10-centimeter thickness to these walls. And the width here, I've got a nice round number of 1800 centimeters. It does look like I've pretty much got it right the first time. Now that's kind of rare, but there you go. For the other wall over here, we can create another rectangle, but we'll probably need to get in closer and turn on the grid. So let's press the G key, enabling the grid display. Get in very close. We want to be able to get down to the level of individual centimeters because this one's a little bit trickier. It's not quite on round numbers or every 10 centimeters major grid lines. So that's going to be 10-centimeters wide, and we want to visualize the width while we're creating it. And we might not be able to do that if the Display Layers palette is opened, so let's turn that off. Go to the Create panel, and choose Rectangle. And we're snapping in 3D. Click and drag, and monitor that width as you do it. And we have the Width parameter down there, so let's make that 10 centimeters. And we can drag upward. And we want to go way upward, but of course we can't get that far. But here's the magic trick. Hold down the middle mouse button and the left mouse button at the same time. So I'm holding down the left mouse button at all times.
And then when I want to move the view, I can use the middle mouse button, hold that down, or I can use the wheel. I can zoom out. So this is very helpful, middle mouse and wheel while holding down the left mouse button. Getting closer again, and we've got a 10-centimeter width and a length of 565 centimeters. Finally, release the left mouse button and right-click, and that rectangle has been created precisely. All right, cool. So we have one more here, which is this interior wall. It's L-shaped. I'll turn the grid back off again. And we can create this one with a standard line. Enable the Line tool. Get in a little bit closer. We don't have to be super precise because we can always change this later. Click to create a point. And we can zoom out, zoom back in again with the mouse wheel, click to create a point. And we're going to create a closed line. So just go all the way around. And then finally, when we get back to our original point, click on it, and we get a dialog, asking do we want to close the spline? And the answer is yes. Let's get back in really close, and then press the G key. And reposition those last two points that weren't quite right. Go to the Modify panel. Go into Vertex subobject mode. Select those points, and just position those. And exit out of the subobject mode.
