3ds max Modeling Understanding topology dependence

3ds max Modeling Understanding topology dependence Now notice that it selected the back polygons too. So let's fix that, click to unselect all of those, and enable ignore back faces in the parameters for poly select, once again select some polygons, and if you need to add to the selection, use the control key, if you need to subtract, hold down the alt key. 

3ds max Modeling Understanding topology dependence Okay, so those are selected, now we can delete them. Back up in the modifier list, we can see that in the stack poly select is in sub object face, or polygon mode. So we want that to be visible, we've got that little box indicating we're in polygon selection mode. From the modifier list, choose the delete mesh modifier. And now those selected faces are deleted. So far this looks very similar to what we had in the previous movie with a non-destructive volume select workflow, but here's where things get strange. I'll just expand the modifier stack a little bit, and I can go down to the level of the box. Click on box, and I get a warning. A modifier exists in the stack that depends on topology. Changing parameters may have undesirable effects. The dependent modifier is poly select. 

3ds max Modeling Understanding topology dependence Are you sure you want to continue? Well most people when they first see this really can't decode what is being said, but basically the issue here is that the box is a parametric object, but poly select is selecting explicit polygons, and if you change the parameters of the box, it's going to actually kind of destroy your model. Alright, so I'm going to choose yes this time, so I can demonstrate what the issue is. And then we have our box parameters, and let's just see what happens if we change the length segments. Change that, and notice that we're seeing the model kind of adapt to those changes, and it's being pretty graceful there in this case when I change the length segments, but let's try changing the width segments. 

3ds max Modeling Understanding topology dependence And as soon as I do that, then I have a big problem. And the faces that I selected and deleted are just only here, and it's not extending far enough into the area I want. And if I go so far as to do things like change the length and height segments drastically, then I may get a drastically different result than I had before. What's happening is the poly select is explicitly selecting polygons based upon their ID number, and that's an invisible number. Each one of these polygons, or more precisely, the vertices attached to the polygons, have ID numbers . 3ds max Modeling Understanding topology dependence

3ds max Modeling Passing a selection up the stack

3ds max Modeling Passing a selection up the stack and any polygon that's not inside that volume is not selected. And we can do this with precision by going below the object. And we can drag that up or down. So I'm only selecting the faces that are within that volume and that are just at the very bottom of the object. And if I want to make sure I have a little bit of buffer so that there's no gap there, I can move the gizmo forward a bit just to make sure I've left myself a bit of breathing room there. All right, and with that selection made, we can now add another modifier.

3ds max Modeling Passing a selection up the stack And I'm still in face selection level here, and that means I'm going to pass that selection of faces up the stack, and that's indicated here by this little box, and it's just an indicator that we're in face selection mode, or face sub-object mode.And we can make adjustments to our gizmo position to delete certain polygons and not others. All right, I'll go back up to the top of the stack by just exiting out of gizmo and going back up to the delete mesh modifier. And that's the basic concept of non-destructive deletion of polygons using the volume select modifier and passing the selection up the stack.

3ds max Modeling Defining polygon level of detail

3ds max Modeling Defining polygon level of detail We would not really be able to tell the difference with our eyes, and that's simply because this area is flat here. There's no curvature, alright? So this is just a perfectly flat surface and there's no need for any segments running in this dimension here, because there's no curvature in that dimension, so if I increase that width segments, I'm just adding more polygons for no reason, so I'll bring that back down to a value of one. Likewise with the height segments, we can see that here, if we increase the height segments, we're just unnecessarily adding detail here along this dimension here, so let's set that back to a value of one.

3ds max Modeling Adding edges with Quickslice

3ds max Modeling Adding edges with Quickslice And in the parameters we can turn on limit effect and change the upper and lower limits. The lower limit can stay at zero and the upper limit I'm going to change. Set that to five centimeters. Just type it in here. Five centimeters. And now I've got the bend basically looking the way I want but I just need to reposition the bend gizmo. And this is kind of clever because when I move that gizmo you'll see that it's going to cause the upper area here to kind of come up to meet the back of the monitor. 

3ds max Modeling Adding edges with Quickslice So go into the bend sub-objects and choose gizmo. And snap in 3D to the grid points. And we want to move the gizmo in the y-axis. Negative 10 centimeters. Let's do that in the top view just for precision. And I have axis constraints enabled in the 3D snaps by the way, you can check on that. Right click on any one of the magnets. I'm snapping to grid points and in options, I'm snapping with axis constraints enabled. So I can click on the y-axis here and move it only in y by 10 centimeters and I can view the result at the bottom of the screen in the transform type in area. And there we go. I've moved it negative 10 centimeters in y. Release the mouse.

3ds max Modeling Deforming an object with a modifier

3ds max Modeling Deforming an object with a modifier In the box parameters, let's increase the number of length segments, set that to a value of 30 and press Enter. And now we have enough detail to resolve the modifiers we're going to apply. Let's also shift the object in space, just position it where it needs to be. Grab the move tool and set the X position to zero, press Tab, set the Y position to 20, and the Z position we can leave at zero. Now we're ready to apply a parametric deformer, and those are found in the modifiers category for parametric deformers, or we can also, of course, apply the deformer from the modifier list over here. With the object selected, I can click on modifier list, and I'm looking for taper. Scroll down, here it is, taper, and we need to change up some parameters. Let's give it some amounts so we can see what it's doing. So, with a positive amount, it's tapering the top of that box outward. Alright, give it a positive value of maybe one or something like that, just so that we can see the effect of changing the axes here. 

3ds max Modeling Deforming an object with a modifier We have the primary axis and the effect axis. In this case, we want the primary axis to be Y, and now we can see that we're getting a taper effect in the Y dimension of the world, and the effect over here. We only want to be in one dimension, not two. Right now, we're actually tapering both horizontally in this dimension, and vertically in this dimension. If we look at this in an ortho view, we might be able to see that. Alt + W to go to a four viewport layout. And observe this in the left view, and if you get in really close, maybe with Control + Alt and middle mouse, you can see that the object is thicker over here and thinner on the other side here. Well, we don't want to do that, we only want to taper it in one axis. So let's set the taper axis effect to a value of X, and now we can see that it's the same height throughout. Alright, we can make this even fancier by giving it some curve, so play around with this curve amount and we can get a nice curve taper effect. I've got some values I've experimented with already, so I'll plug those in. I'll give it an amount of 2.2, and a curve amount of negative 1.6. Next, we can position the center, or the gizmo, in order to change the effect here. So, in the taper modifier, we can open that up and there are some sub-object types. There's gizmo and center, and in this case, they'll pretty much do the same thing, so it doesn't really matter, but let's choose gizmo. And I just want to move that gizmo in the Y axis to reposition it, and that will change the effect.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Creating doors

3ds max Polygon Modeling Creating doors We might draw it on some crazy direction, but the rotation will still read zero. And that, in turn, means that we can't effectively fix an incorrect door orientation by changing the rotation value, and that, in turn, means we need to create the door very precisely to begin with. And likewise, if we don't create that door precisely, the length dimension or the width here won't be correct, and the door won't fit into the hole. And in this case, we need to make sure that the Y position of the cursor matches precisely when we make our first two clicks to determine the width of the door. So the Y dimension here needs to equal the Y dimension over here. All right, so let's go now and create our door. Doors are found in the Create panel under Geometry, and from the pull-down list, we can choose Doors. And there are three types, Pivot, Sliding, and Bifold. This will be a pivot door, so we can click on that button. And then as we move the cursor around, we can see the values changing in the transform type in area down here. So move over to one side of the door here, and when the cursor reads out an X value of 600 centimeters and a Y value of 150 centimeters, then click and hold the mouse button down and drag over to the other side, and then watch that readout until the X value equals 600 centimeters and the Y value equals 300 centimeters. Then release the mouse, and we've set the width of the door. Move the cursor without holding the button down, and we're setting the depth of the door. The actual depth amount is not important at this point because we can change it later. But we want to have some non-zero depth amount. Click the mouse button once, and that sets the depth. And once again, without holding the mouse button down, move the cursor, and we can set the height. And again, the actual height doesn't matter at this point because we're going to change it later. So click once again to complete that door, and then right-click to exit door creation. With that door still selected, we can go to the Modify panel and change up its parameters. We already have the correct width of 120 centimeters. Let's set the height to 200 centimeters, and that will fit it precisely within the hole here. And I can orbit around, take a look at the backside here. And the depth parameter is actually quite important because the door itself is offset from the object's pivot point by the depth distance. And I want to set this up so that I can actually rotate the door if I want, or I could use this open parameter here. I can click and drag on that spinner and open the door up procedurally, and we can see that it's swinging in the wrong direction. We can fix that by just enabling the flip swing option there. Okay, if we get in closer, we can see this axis tripod indicating the pivot point of the door primitive, into the correct position, so I'll tumble back around to the front and grab the Move tool. And I can bring that forward using the snaps, and I just want to make sure that it has an X position value of 600 centimeters. Another artistic parameter here is the door panel, and for this modern office, I don't want any door panels. And back in the parameters for that pivot door, I can set the Panels to None. And now, it's essentially a box. But if we rendered this now, we might not even see that there is a door at all because the edges are lining up perfectly. The walls and the door are touching precisely on three sides. And we can help that out and make that door more visible and more realistic by just chamfering the edges of the door. And so that we can see it better, let's turn on Isolate Selection, and then with that door selected, go to the Modify panel and add a Chamfer modifier. And with that chamfer added now, we can see that we're getting rounded edges here. I want some basic chamfered edges rather than these rounded filleted edges. In the Chamfer Options here, we can scroll back up to the top, and we've got Corner Options. Set the Mitering type to Tri or Triangle. And now, I've got some nice chamfered edges rather than filleted or rounded edges. I want to reduce the Chamfer Options amount to 0.3 centimeters, and now, I got a little bit of a chamfer there to catch the light. Very good, we can turn off Isolate Selection. And to help this out even more, we can actually create a gap around the door. Let's make a one millimeter gap all the way around. And to do that, we can go back into the Boolean. The wall east object here is a Boolean, and we did that in a previous movie. Let's just select that door east, and we can see here that we've got a Boolean object with some operands. And to make this very clear what's going on, let's look at this in a orthographic view. Alt + W to go to the four viewport layout. Go over to the left view and right-click in that view, and then Alt + W again to maximize it, and use F3 to go into Shaded mode, and get in really close on that corner so that we're down to a sub-one centimeter value. All right, so there we go. This grid line is one centimeter, and we want to make the box operand a little bit larger. So we can go over here to our operands and select one of these boxes in the operand area, and then it's displayed in the modifier stack as a sub object type. And we can select it there, and we'll get a typology warning, but we're not actually going to be changing the structure or typology here. We're just going to change the dimensions a little bit. So in this case, we're not going to have any adverse effects from this.

3ds max Polygon Modeling Cutting with Boolean subtraction

3ds max Polygon Modeling Cutting with Boolean subtraction Now we need to add the other operands. And in the operand parameters we can see that the currently selected operand, wall east, is of the type union, 'cause that is lit up in blue. And when we need add another operand we need to choose an operand operation over here. So we'll click on add operands, and then click on one of the boxes and its defaulted to a union, which is going to add the volumes together. With box01 selected in the list here, switch that over to subtract and now we've got a nice hole there.