3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Specifying system units

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Specifying system units I set the System Unit Scale to meters now instead of the object being one meter on a side suddenly now it's almost 40 meters on a side. Nothing changed the View Port here, but the entire world is being interpreted as being a different scale. Usually you want this set to inches because that's a good compromise for scenes that are built at the scale of the human body. So if it's set to inches which is the default, then you can model objects that are very small like fractions of a millimeter. Can also model objects that are very large on the scale of kilometers. Below this is an Origin slider. This allows us to determine the accuracy at different System Unit Scale settings. So as we drag this around we're moving a virtual point towards or away from the Origin and the Origin is here over at the left and the farthest extents of the world are over here on the right. So a 3D scene is not really infinite and it's not infinitely accurate. As we get farther away from the Origin the accuracy goes down and paradoxically that's indicated by the numbers here going up.

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Specifying display units

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Specifying display units And in the dialogue, we have the display units scale, and you can see that it is currently set to generic units, and that's the default. And we see over here we have a length of 46.549. Just to prove that generic units are actually inches, I'm going to switch the display units scale over to US standard and from the pull-down list choose decimal inches and when I click OK here, we should see this update. Click OK and now it says 46.549 inches. Alright, those are generic units. You will almost always want to explicitly set your units per scene. I'll go back into the Customize menu, to units setup, and I'll choose metric, with the pull-down list here set to centimeters, and click OK. And now it reads out in centimeters. The size of the object did not change. We're merely measuring it with a different system. And if I wished I can type in values here to make this a cube exactly one meter on a side. Type in 100, press tab, 100, tab, 100 and press enter. And now that box is one cubic meter. If for some reason you do need to use US standard units in feet and inches, then when you go into that customize units setup and choose US standard, you can choose feet or inches as your units. If you choose feet, either with fractional or decimal inches, then you also have the ability to choose a so-called default unit, and that's merely how 3ds Max will interpret your data entry.

3ds max Selecting in window and crossing modes

3ds max Selecting in window and crossing modes So if I click and drag here, and I don't select the entire region, then nothing gets selected. So in window mode I have to draw a large window and get that object entirely within the window in order to select it. And that is useful if you're trying to select something and it's kind of in a jumble in your scene and there's a lot of other stuff going on. 

Using 3ds max Isolate Selection and Lock Selection

Using 3ds max Isolate Selection and Lock Selection Alright, so let's unlock it so you can select other things. And that's a useful tool. However, be careful because the keyboard shortcut for lock selection is kind of a dangerous one. It's the spacebar. So if you just tab the spacebar, then you've locked the current selection and you can't select anything else. I'll tap the spacebar again. What happens if I select nothing? I go out here and just click out here and select nothing and then press the spacebar 3ds max 2020 Isolate Selection and Lock Selection

3ds max Configuring viewport layouts

3ds max Configuring viewport layouts And we have solid backgrounds in these others. If you want to see solid backgrounds or gradients, you can do that from the menus up here, it's one way to do it. Go to Views, Viewport Background and then choose in this case Solid Color and that's for the current viewport. I'll go back to my Select Object Tool and I can select something and maybe zoom in with the keyboard shortcut I made earlier, Control + Shift + Z and now I can just work on just that one object. If I want to go back to my other layout, I can just click on the quad four button here and I'm taken back to that layout. Or I can click on my one large and three small, and I'm taken back to that layout. That was quick and easy. That's how to use the viewport layout tab's toolbar.

Using the 3ds max Scene Explorer outline

Using the 3ds max Scene Explorer outline So I can display everything except lights and so on. So I can go through here and just choose what I want to see and what I don't want to see. You'll be using the Scene Explorer quite a lot, especially to build hierarchies and drag and drop things to create parent relationships, but for now, it's enough to know that the Scene Explorer exists and you can get at from the button on the main toolbar.

Manipulating 3ds max objects around a transform center

Manipulating 3ds max objects around a transform center So I'll click and drag and I'm able to rotate around the common center of all of those vertices. I'll undo that with Control + Z. If we want to rotate each object around its own pivot point we can go up here to the flyout and choose Use Pivot Point explicitly. And now the manipulator hasn't moved, but if I rotate you'll see that each object is rotating around its own pivot point. Okay, I'll undo that. And then the last one down here at the bottom is Use Reference Coordinate Center and when that's active then you need to choose something up here in your Reference Coordinate System pull-down.Manipulating 3ds max objects around a transform center