Enabling safe frames - 3ds max Camera Techniques

How To Use 'Visible To Camera' Technique

Enabling safe frames - 3ds max Camera Techniques So we are actually cutting off that corner, whereas we can see it quite clearly in our view port. Well what's going here, is the view port aspect ratio, or the ratio of width divided by height, is different from the renderer, and that's why we're getting this odd result. So I'm going to cancel my rendering. Just go up to this little floating window, select it and then click cancel, and we can close the rendered frame window as well, and enable safe frames in our camera view. We can enable safe frames from the view port label menu, click on the name of the camera, and then enable show safe frames. Now the view port is actually cropped to the aspect ratio of the rendering. 

3ds Max: Cinematography for Visualization

3ds max  2020 Camera Techniques And we have a what you see is what you get situation. So we know that this is the framing we will see, when we actually render. So I can change the framing, move the middle mouse button, and then do another test render to see what happens. Click on render production. Alright and now the framing is identical between the two views. And actually just by serendipity, just by luck, they're actually the same size on the screen here too. So it's very easy to see that there is a one-to-one correspondence in the framing. Alright we can go up to the rendering window here, click cancel, close the rendered frame window as well, and you'll need to turn safe frames on and off, really for each camera, and to speed up your work a little bit you can use the keyboard shortcut, which is Shift+F. Shift+F turns safe frames on or off. Alright and I can resize the command panel, bring that back down to one column. And now we see that the view port is wider than the rendering, so we have pillar boxing here, we have black bars on the left and right. But regardless of whether the view port is wider or taller than the rendering, you'll always see this yellow box indicating where the true edge of the frame is. If you want to see safe areas, you can do that too from the view port configuration. Click on the plus sign in the view port, go to configure view ports, safe frames, and in here we can enable an action safe rectangle, and click apply, and now we have an inner rectangle that indicates the action safe area. And the size of that is controlled here, so I can bring that action safe down to a value of five and click apply. And now we have a much larger action safe area, and smaller area that's not safe. 3ds Max: Cinematography for Visualization

Creating a physical camera and target - 3ds max Camera Techniques

3ds max 2020 physical camera and target

Creating a physical camera and target - 3ds max Camera Techniques Target, and Free Physical is, as I said before, the more modern camera and Target and Free are both flavors of the standard old-school camera. Let's create a physical camera click on Physical and then click and drag in the top viewport and release the mouse to determine the position of the target and then right-click to exit creation mode. As we can see in the left and front views, it's positioned right at the ground plane so let's move it up, we can select the camera or its target or actually we can select them both and the way to do that is to click on the line that joins the two, so get in closer with the wheel, de-select everything and there's a blue line here, it's kind of hard to see right now but it is there, tell you what, I'll select both the camera and its target with the selection rectangle and then select and move, bring that up so you can see the blue line there Creating a physical camera and target

Creating a physical camera and target  if I just click on that line, I'm actually selecting both the camera and its target. Let's load the camera into a viewport. I like to keep the perspective view available for sort of the God's eye point of view or the artist's point of view, and I'll also need to have a panel for the camera point of view. I'm going to need the top view 'cause that's my layout or plan view, I can sacrifice this left view over here and load the camera into that view. So from the viewport label menu, I can click on the name of the viewport which is currently Left, and then choose Cameras and then the name of the camera which is PhysCamera001 now we're looking through that camera's lens. Enable shading with F3, and we can experiment with moving the camera or its target Creating a physical camera and target

Sculpting with Conform Transform - 3ds max Freeform Modeling

Sculpting with Conform Transform - 3ds max Freeform Modeling we increased the Conform amount to make the road stick to the landscape, but now for this application of the tool, we need to set the Conform amount to a value of exactly 0.1. And now we can do a screen-space adjustment, or a tweak, of this model. And I'll tilt down so I'm looking at this almost on edge, and turn off the edge faces with F4, and just click and drag to sculpt the landscape. And I'm doing this in screen-space, and I can tumble around. And we can prove that it's in screen-space, because if I look at this from the top and then drag, you see, I can actually distort that shape and push it in any arbitrary direction. Alright, I'll undo that. So we have the usual keyboard shortcuts for this. 

Sculpting with Conform Transform - 3ds max Freeform Modeling In order to adjust the full strength and fall-off radii, and the fall-off radius is CTRL + drag, and the full strength radius is SHIFT + CTRL + drag. Alright, so that is the Move Conform. We also have Rotate, Relax, and Scale. So if we choose Rotate Conform, we'll be able to see this better with edged faces. I'll hit F4 and go into some sort of screen-space mode here, looking at this on edge and click and drag to rotate, and I'm rotating those polygons around the cursor in screen-space. Alright, so that was a little bit of an issue, but we can fix that with the Relax brush. Alright, very cool.

Adjustment with Move Conform - 3ds max Freeform Modeling

3ds max Freeform Modeling

Adjustment with Move Conform - 3ds max Freeform Modeling To adjust the falloff radius it's Control + Drag. And when I have a very small distance between the inner and outer circles I'll have a really hard brush. Get in a little bit closer here. Or maybe get farther out, then click and drag. You can see we have a very hard effect. Alright so ill undo that with Control + Z. We'll make that falloff radius larger once again with the keyboard shortcut Control + Click and Drag.Adjustment with Move Conform - 3ds max Freeform Modeling   And I want to make the full strength radius very small, and the keyboard shortcut for that is Control + Shift and drag.

Conforming one object to another - 3ds max Freeform Modeling

Video Tutorials 3ds max Freeform Modeling

Conforming one object to another - 3ds max Freeform Modeling And now all the Freeform tools are available. Now we can conform the selected object to another editable poly. On the Freeform tab, there is a button that is currently labeled "grid." That's the "draw on" button, and that gives us the ability to select an object that we want to draw on or conform to. And this is a pull-down list, so click on the little down arrow and choose "draw on surface." Next, we need to pick an object, and currently I have the word "terrain" listed here, but on your system it'll probably just say "pick," and you'll want to click on that button that says "pick," and then you can select the object in your view. And then it should actually display the name of the object. I just wasn't able to demonstrate that, it was sticky, it just remembered that sometime in the past, a million years ago, I clicked on that

Conforming one object to another - 3ds max Freeform Modeling  . I was unable to get rid of it, so there you have it, but on your system it will say "pick." And then you click the object. Okay now the next step is, we want to set some options before we actually start conforming. And first we have the off-set here, and that's a gap between the conforming and a conformed object. And we need that to prevent polygons from poking through the road. I'll give that a low value of point one and that should be enough. My system is currently set to meters, and this is a 1/100 scale model, that is 10 meters on a side. So I've set the offset value, and we're almost ready to do our conform.

Setting brush options - 3ds max Freeform Modeling

Setting brush options - 3ds max Freeform Modeling Alright, so go back to the move tool, and hold down shift to break the tangent handles, and make a little, plateaued kind of landscape, and see what that does. I'll click and drag, and now I've got an interesting shape to the brush. Alright very cool, now there isn't really a good way to save what's in this window. I mean there's all sorts of interesting things like pressure sensitivity and the display options, but there's no way to really save this in a meaningful way. All we can do is just, play around with this and it'll be stored in the scene, and we can restore the curve back to the default S curve, with this button here. Alright, so I will close this, now there is a panel here labeled defaults that may or may not allow you to load and save the brush settings, I've had mixed results with this, so I'm not going to demonstrate it, but it's there if you're feeling lucky, and also as an aside there's a toolbar called the brush presets which has nothing to do with this and will also not allow you to save any presets. 

download Setting brush options - 3ds max Freeform Modeling So, you're kind of limited, but you can get good results if you just go into that window and make some changes. Right, so I'll erase all of this by canceling it. Make my brush a little bit larger with control and shift, and actually give this, a real sculpt. Make this, something worthy of the tools, make the, brush smaller again with control and shift drag, and do another pass at details. Alright, so that's how we can edit the brush options and do our own custom brush shape, and in this case it's giving me a much more naturalistic feel to my landscape.

Setting paint options - 3ds max Freeform Modeling

Setting paint options - 3ds max Freeform Modeling Now regardless of the original state or the current state of the model, we're only going to be pulling those points vertically. So let's give that a shot. So I can paint here, maybe increase the offset a little bit, give it a little bit more distance per stroke, okay. And then exit out of push-pull. Go back into push-pull and paint some more. And we don't have the problem that we saw before. And that's because we're only moving the vertices in the Z-axis. We can continue to paint on here, and the surface will move up, but the surface will never self-intersect because we're only transforming in Z. And that's how to use paint options to prevent self-intersecting geometry.