Choosing a 3ds max reference coordinate system

Choosing a 3ds max reference coordinate system still rotate in whatever direction you want, but just like with the move tool local reference coordinate system is kind of fake and the fact that it always returns back to zero should be a dead giveaway that something strange is going on here. So I'm going to undo that with control z. I don't recommend using local mode if you can help it. It's got a lot of problems, not the least of which is called gimbal lock when the axes actually overlap and you can't rotate something. What I recommend for rotations in most cases is the gimbal coordinate system. And what that does is it allows us to visualize how the three axes interact. So I'll go over here to the perspective view. And if I rotate around the z axis everything looks normal. Nothing strange there. So I'll undo that. If I rotate around the x axis, again, it looks fine, nothing strange. I'll undo that. But if I rotate around the y axis, notice what's happening here. The red axis is actually rotating. So what's happening here is I'm seeing the effect of gimbal lock if I bring this red axis down until it meets the blue axis. Okay, so that's actually intentionally creating a bad situation. But at least we can see what's happening. We actually can tell by just looking what's going on. And if you're in gimbal coordinate system then when you rotate around one of these three axes, then that's what's going to get recorded in the animation. Whereas, if you're in any other mode such as world or local and you just innocently rotate around one axis, what you'll find is that your animation is rotating around two or three axes. So the gimbal mode is the most helpful because it actually shows you what's really going on and it hopefully will prevent you from getting into some dire situations. We'll look at gimbal mode later in the course when we talk about hierarchies and rigging. All right, so those are the key coordinate systems that you'll want to get familiar with. Primarily you have view, world, local, and gimbal.

 So if we choose screen, that is in screen space in all views. So if I go over here to the perspective view and move this in x I'm actually moving it not in world x any longer, as we can see in the top viewport, it's moving in x and y 'cause I'm moving relative to the view plane of the perspective viewport. All right, well I don't usually use that. One that you'll use a lot is local. And that's the space of the object. And in this case it's the space of a group. Which is an invisible container for a bunch of objects. We'll look at groups later, but this monitor is an assemblage of objects I'll put into a group. And the entire group has been rotated so that the local coordinate system will show us the axis tripod or the move gizmo oriented with the objects themselves and not with the world and not with the screen. So local mode is really useful if you want to, for example, push something forward or to the side in it's own space. Now that local mode is kind of fake, because if you animate this you will find that you're not just moving in y. 

That tripod indicates the orientation of the world grid, or the world coordinate system. So if I move this monitor in x in the top view I'm moving it in world x. If I move it in y in the top view I'm moving it in world y. But it's not the same if we go over to, for example, the front view. I'll right click in that front view so I don't lose my selection. And over here we see that y is still pointing up to the top of the screen and x is still pointing to the right. But it doesn't line up with what we see in the world axis tripod. In this front view the top of the view here is actually up in z, in world z or zed. So the manipulator or gizmo always stays the same in an ortho view when you're in view coordinate system. If I switch over to the left view, click there, y is pointing up and x is pointing to the right. So view coordinate system is the space of the viewport itself. And that's fine for an orthographic view. But in the perspective view we don't necessarily want to move in screen space. We usually want to move in world space. So if I go over to that perspective view and click there, we can see that the move gizmo is aligned with the world axes as shown here. So if I move in x I'm moving in world x. So the view coordinate system operates in screen space except for in a perspective or camera view where it operates in world space. Let's look at these other ones here.

3ds max Spline Modeling Creating a freehand spline

3ds max Spline Modeling Creating a freehand spline  I'll set that back to a value of three and then draw my curve as I really want it to be. And then right click to exit. And I've got a bunch of practice curves there so I can select all of those and just delete them. I've got our freehand curve. So reselect that. Go back into the modify panel and rename it chord. And we have some options here. Sampling. As we increase the sampling, my each whole integer, we will reduce the level of detail on that spline. So I can bring that to sampling of one, and we're seeing all of the original knots, or control vertices, with a sampling value of two. We're seeing quite a lot less detail. It's up to you to decide how much sampling you want to apply. We're going to eventually convert this into an editable spline, and move those control vertices around. So of now I'm going to leave the sampling at a value of two. That's how to draw a freehand spline.

3ds max Spline Modeling Creating a loft compound object

3ds max Spline Modeling Creating a loft compound object I can tumble around in the perspective view. Notice, once again, that that circle is in front of everything. Okay, we still have Get Shape selected. And we want to choose a different position along the path, for this next shape to be placed. And if you zoom in in the left or top view, very closely, you may see that there is a tiny little yellow X, or cross. You can see it here, in the front view. And that is the current position along the path. We can change that value here. Path Parameters, Path. And, as I drag that up, we see that tiny little yellow X move. So, send that to the end of the path. A percentage value of 100. And press the Enter key. And then click Get Shape. And select the circle, in any viewport. And now we have a loft, with two shapes. So, we can tumble around in perspective. We can see what we have. Alright, so we have all the basic elements now. And we can right click to exit out of Get Shape. And, with the object still selected, we can go into the Modify panel.

3ds max Spline Modeling Creating a loft compound object And it's called Loft01, let's rename it to Monitor Chassis. We need to make a few adjustments here. Let's open up the Skin Parameters section, in the Modify panel. And the first one we want to enable is Linear Interpolation. If you look in the left view, we can see that we're getting a curved interpolation, and we want that to be linear. So, enable Linear. And now we have a straight line on that profile there. Alright, then we have the overall level of detail. And, if we back out, in the front view, we can see that it's kind of coarse. So, let's increase the Shape Steps and Path Steps. And that will give us a better level of detail. So, Shape Steps is the level of detail around the shapes. So, set that to 20. And now we have more detail running radially. And Path Steps is the number of steps along the path. We can tumble around in perspective view and enable Edged Faces, or Wifeframe On Shaded, with the F4 hotkey. You can see the level of detail better. Increase the Path Steps to 20, also. And now we've got a good level of detail there. A couple of other things we want to play around with. If we go into Surface Parameters, up here, Smoothing is enabled by default. And we actually want to turn that off, in this case

3ds max Spline Modeling Creating shapes

3ds max Spline Modeling Creating shapes Under Options I am going to enable Access Constraints because that's my preference. The Home grid is set up to a one centimeter spacing. Let's create some shapes. Over to the Create panel and we have different categories of objects we can create, geometry is the default. Let's go to Shapes. And these are 2D splines and the first category is splines and there're a bunch of primitives here. Let's create these in the front viewport. We're going to be creating a simple computer monitor and we want to snap to the grid points, so enable the 3D snaps and getting closer in the front viewport with the mouse wheel, click in that view and then zoom in with the mouse wheel and keep zooming in until the grid does not subdivide any longer and now we know we're at a one centimeter grid because there're are no internal grid divisions. So, zoom back out a little bit there. So, I know that this is 10 centimeters across here even though there are no numbers on the grid and we'll begin by creating a rectangle primitive. Click on rectangle and drag it out in the front viewport and just try to make it so that the pivot point as you see there, the red axis tripod, just try to make that picot point land in the middle, the origin. Release the mouse and then right click to complete that rectangle. With it still selected, go to the Modify panel. I've got some values I want to plug in here. In the rectangle parameters, we have the length and width here.

We'll set the length to 41 centimeters, press tab and set the width to 72 centimeters, press Tab once again and we have the corner radius. Let's take a look at that. I'll navigate around in the front view with the middle mouse, get in closer on that corner with the mouse wheel. Drag that corner radius spinner around and see we're creating a rounded corner. Set that to a low value of 0.5 centimeters, .5 and press Enter. That's going to be the monitor chassis and we also want to interpolate that shape with another shape. In the back of my monitor, I want it to have a round profile, so I'll create a circle. Go back to the Create panel and we have a circle primitive. Maybe get in a little bit closer in the front view. Click and drag at the origin to create that circle and with snaps turned on, as long as I'm snapping to that x-axis there, I'll get whole numbers for the radius. And I can see the radius in the parameters at the bottom of the Create panel there. I want a six-centimeter radius. Release the mouse and right click to exit that tool.

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Referencing scenes with Xref objects

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Referencing scenes with Xref objects   But remember we added these two Xrefs if we go into here their combined size is almost 25 megabytes. But the impact on the disk here was negligible. We did not actually add anything to our disk storage and if we want to we can unload those just as easily. We can go back to that window, file, reference, Xref objects select one of them and you'll know it's selected if you can see the entities listed down here. And we can simply click the X button to remove that record. Are we sure we want to do this? Yes, all right that's the basics of working with Xrefs. You may encounter issues if you make changes to the Xref file. Those changes will not be recognized when you load your master scene. In other words if I went into plant house O, 6 and made changes and then came back to this master scene those changes would not be visible. And that's a very, very strange effect because you would expect that if it's merely making a link that if you changed the contents of that link that will ripple through to here. But in fact that is not the case. So just before warned, if you do need to make changes to your Xrefs, it very important actually that you go in here and actually remove the Xref record. Actually delete it. Then you can make changes to that Xref file then come back into this master scene file and re-reference it. And that's really the only way to make sure that any changes will be updated. There is a button here that's labeled update but frankly it doesn't work, so I wouldn't trust it. So that's the basics of working with Xrefs in 3ds max and that completes our chapter on scene layout.

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout Merging scenes

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout  Merging scenes With the group selected and the move transform tool active, go down to the transform type in area at the bottom, and type in a value of negative 180 for X, press tab, and the Y value will be 110 centimeters. And if I want to zoom in on this, I can right click to give focus to any view port. And then press the Z key to zoom in. Alright, very cool, so that's how to merge a scene. And now when I save this file, that model will be in this file permanently and that will add to the size of the scene file on disk.

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Managing display layers

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