3ds max Polygon Modeling Layering deformers in the modifier stack

3ds max Polygon Modeling Layering deformers in the modifier stack If we scroll down to edit geometry rollout, we'll see Quickslice, and let's do this in the left Viewport, because Quickslice operates in screen space, it's going to chop a series of edges along a plane that is precisely orthogonal to the current Viewport. So, maximize the left Viewport right click in there, and then maximize with Alt + W and then activate the Quickslice tool with three D snaps enabled, and snapping to grid points, and we just want to chop right through along the origin line here, and that's the z-axis. Click and hold the mouse down and then drag out. It actually doesn't matter how long this line is. because the plane that's doing the cutting will extend infinitely in all directions. The only important thing is we're not going at an angle. That's why we have snaps enabled. So, once you've got over where you want it, you can click again, and then that cut has been made. Right click to exit out of the Quickslice tool. Go back to the four Viewport layout with Alt + W, and we've got that edge loop created. All right now that object is legal for a Boolean operation with two holes to be cut.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Creating polygons

3ds max Polygon Modeling Creating polygons And then use the middle mouse button to navigate. Click on one, click on another, and click on the first vertex once again. And a polygon is created there, and it's also selected, meaning that it's going to be displayed in shaded, in a red color by default. And that's controlled with the F2 keyboard shortcut. If I turn F2 off then the selected polygons are not highlighted. Turn that back on with F2. Just repeat that process for the other three polygons here. Maybe I'll switch back to shaded mode. Click on a vertex, click on the second one, and then the third one, the fourth one, and then the first one again. And then that process just one more time over here. One, two, three, four, and one. And that's how to create new polygons based upon existing vertices and open borders.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Using the Modeling ribbon

3ds max Polygon Modeling Using the Modeling ribbon So I'm going to cut using quick slice and again I don't need to be in a sub object mode but I do want to be snapping to gride points so I'll enable 3D snaps. And we have the most common tools here in the edit section and here's quick slice, so just click on that. And I want to get in close here so I can be at centimeter accuracy and as we saw in a previous movie, quick slice will chop through the entire model even if we draw very small line here. So click once to create the first point and I said earlier that you need to hold the mouse down but you don't actually need to hold the mouse down so, don't hold the mouse down. And then click again to create the second point and now we have a new edge loop running through that model. You can see that if we get in close here on the perspective view. Cool, so that edge loops done, we want another one here on the other side of the door so just use the middle mouse to navigate get over there to the other side of this double door. Click to create a point, click to create another point and now we have another edge loop. We need one more edge loop running horizontally so click and click again, and now we've got the topology that we want in order to delete that polygon there to punch a hole. I'm done with quick slice so I can either right click, in the view port to exit out of the quick slice tool or I can just go to a different tool such as move or select object. Alright so, there are many many tools on the ribbon here, and it's your choice whether you want to use the ribbon or the modify panel. I'm going to restore that modify panel cause I might need to get at some of the other elements on the command panel. Once again I can right click on any textured bar in the interface and re-enable display of the command panel. That's a quick introduction to the ribbon

3ds max Polygon Modeling Using the caddy to set options for an inset polygon

3ds max Polygon Modeling Using the caddy to set options for an inset polygon   I'll choose inset settings, and the caddy appears in the center of the viewport, but we can click on the little textured horizontal vertical line there and drag that over, and now we can actually see this little bit better. And the inset tool options are displayed. The only thing we really care about is the inset amount, which is here. Let me just type that in. I'll put in a value of 0.3 centimeters. and to see a preview of that, press the Enter key. And now we're seeing the inset polygon, and it's .3 centimeters away from the original polygon. Now, if I press Enter when we don't have focus on this entry field, if I click off of that and then press the Enter key, the action will actually be performed, and that's the same as clicking on the checkbox here. The difference is if I press Enter, then the command is performed and the tool exits. If I click on the OK or checkbox here, it will also perform the command and exit. And there's also a little plus sign here. If we click on that, then the command is performed, and then we will be ready to perform another command of that same type. So if I click on the plus sign here, then I get a kind of weird result, because now what we're seeing is the inset polygon has been created and then the newly-created inset polygon is having another inset applied to it. So at all times when we're looking in the viewport here while the caddy is up, what we're seeing is not the current state of the model. We're actually seeing a preview of what it will look like after this command is performed. That does take a little bit of getting used to, and the only exception to that is if nothing is selected. So if I click out here, nothing is selected, then we seen no preview. If I select some other polygon, now we see an inset polygon there. All right so that's how the caddy works. If you just want to perform the command, then choose OK. If you want to perform the command and then perform subsequent commands of the same type, then press the plus sign. And you want to exit without performing the command, just use the X button here. All right, we've created our inset polygon, and we can exit out of sub object mode. That's how to use the caddy to access the options for tools in editable poly.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Transforming sub-objects

3ds max Polygon Modeling Transforming sub-objects I'll undo that with ctrl+z. A handy feature of 3ds Max is the ability to select edge loops or a series of connected edges by simply double clicking. And if I double click on that same edge, notice in the perspective view, that more than one edge got selected. My selection went around corners. So that's an edge loop. But I actually want to move all of these edges, and I can't actually double click to select them all, because 3ds Max doesn't know which direction to take that selection, because there is a complex topology here, where this edge is actually meeting with one, two, three, four other edges, and it seems obvious and intuitive enough for a human, that we want the edge selection to continue this way, but 3ds Max is not that smart. So, we can do this a different way, we can move all of these edges by moving their vertices. I'll go into vertex sub-object mode, and that allows me to select individual points on the model. I'll click to de-select anything that may have been selected, and then drag a selection rectangle around all the vertices in the middle here. 

3ds max Polygon Modeling Transforming sub-objects And now I can move them all up to create a little bit of a gap at the door there. Get in really close with the wheel. My grid is currently set to 1cm increments, and that means I won't be able to use snaps to move this just 1mm, unless I change my grid settings, but I can just actually type in the value I want the selected component to move in. Before I do, I want to choose the coordinate system that I'm going to move them in, and the default coordinate system is view, and that can be a bit confusing, so I'm going to switch that to world. And now all transforms will be in world space. View space, of course, is the 2D plane of the current viewport, or in perspective view, view space is actually world space. So now I'm going to do all my movements in world space for the move tool. And I want to move those selected vertices up in Z by 1mm, and one way to do that is from the Transform Type-In dialog. I like to use this because I can see the absolute and the offset values at once. Right click on the move tool, and we can see the absolute position and the amount of offset we are going to create. I'll get in very very close in that front view, and this is a single centimeter per grid increment. I move it up in Z, or elevation, by 0.1cm. And now that's been moved up by 1mm. Likewise, with the other points here, I want to move these to the left, and these to the right, just to give a 1mm gap for the doors.

subdivision surfaces - 3ds max Modeling

subdivision surfaces - 3ds max Modeling If we disable that modifier, then we see the original polygon mesh. I'll re-enable OpenSubdiv. And if we want to see the actual level of detail, we can disable the Isoline Display switch here, and now that's the actual level of detail of this model after it's been subdivided. If we change the number of iterations here, we will increase or decrease the level of detail. At an iteration level of zero, we see a mesh that's identical to the original polygon mesh or control cage. And as we increase the iteration's value, we get more detail on the surface. All right, let's go back to basics and start from just a box so that we can get some key concepts around subdivision surfaces. I'm going to reset 3ds Max from the File menu, I'm not saving any changes, and just create a box from the Create panel and go into the Modify panel and set its length, width, and height all to 100 centimeters. Back out a little bit. Looks like I've got selection brackets. With the J key, I can turn those off, and turn on edged faces with F4 once again. And now we've got a simple cube with only six faces and we can verify that by looking at this statistics in the viewport, press the 7 key on the keyboard, and it says we've got 12 polygons. So that counts each one of the triangles, so each one of these quadrilaterals is composed of two triangles, so six sides times two is 12 polygons or 12 triangles. Now let's add the OpenSubdiv modifier from the Modifier List, scroll down a little bit, OpenSubdiv, and it has a default iteration value of one. And now we have 24 polygons instead of 12. We've actually doubled the number of triangles. 

3ds max 2020 subdivision surfaces - 3ds max Modeling As we increase the iterations, we'll see that number jump and now we've got 96 triangles. If we want to see the actual level of detail once again, we can disable Isoline Display. And as we increase that value once again, we're getting more and more detail. And with an iteration's value of four, we already have over 1,500 polygons. We went from 12 to 1,500. Usually, you want that iteration's value to be around two or three for most applications. All right, now we understand how that works. We can disable the statistics with the 7 key once again. One of the most key considerations with subdivision surface modeling is quadrilateral polygons. You want to have quads everywhere if possible. Try to avoid polygons with more than four sides and try to avoid triangles if you can. I'll show you an example. Just go over to the Create panel and create a standard primitive cylinder. Click and drag, drag up to set the height, right-click to exit, go to the Modify panel and add an OpenSubdiv modifier. And it looks quite odd at the top and bottom. And this is not really a good situation. If we turn Isoline Display off, we can see that it's actually quite ugly geometry. As we increase the number of iterations, we can see that this is going to be very difficult for us to work with if we want to actually shape this in a model. So I'm going to go into this cylinder parameters and make a couple changes here. Most notably, I'm going to set the number of sides to a multiple of four and that will make it easy for me to divide the cap of the cylinder into quadrilaterals. All right, so we can see this is happening. Let's disable OpenSubdiv and set the number of sides to 16.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Constraining sub-object transforms

3ds max Polygon Modeling Constraining sub-object transforms Click attach again to finish the operation and we still need to weld just as we did before we need to weld all those vertices so we can go into vertex sub-object mode and actually just select all of the vertices just to be safe, maybe get in really close, make sure we don't get any undesired effects and then once again open up the weld caddy. We can do that from the modify panel here. Here's the options button and we have the weld vertices caddy and we got a value .001 meters left over from the previous operation and that's probably fine, I don't see any problems. We can go ahead and just click okay. And all those open seams have been welded. We can double-check that by going into element sub-object mode and just click and you'll see that the entire object is a single element. Alright, we've completed the chair base, exit out of sub-object mode and then also change the name because it's no longer a single leg. We'll call it chair base and that's how to use the sub-object constraints in editable poly and it concludes our chapter on polygon modeling.