3ds max Creating and manipulating primitives

3ds max Creating and manipulating primitives If you want to exit out of that box creation tool, you can choose another tool from the main tool bar up here. For example we can choose the select and move tool. And now the selected object has a move manipulator, known as a gizmo, G-I-Z-M-O and that's just English slang for some sort of machine or small device. Okay so the gizmo is the manipulator that allows us to move objects. And we can click and drag on the arrows here to move it in the cardinal directions of 3D space in x, y and z which is elevation in 3ds Max. I can click on another object to select it, and it's highlighted in blue and once again I can move it. We can of course move it in the other view ports. I can go over the top view for example and I can click in that view to activate it and as I hover my mouse over that move gizmo we can see that it's also got a little bracket there. If I click and drag on that bracket in the top view port I can move the object in the x and y axis but not in z. Let's look at some of the other primitives. Over here we've got a sphere and that's a very simple one 'cause it only has a radius. Click on sphere, click and drag and then release the mouse and the sphere is created. Another way to exit out of the creation tool is to right click in any view port. And that exits the tool. If an object is selected you can go into its parameters in the modify panel. So with that sphere selected I can go over to the modify panel and access its parameters or attributes such as the radius and I can click and drag on the arrows here that's called a spinner. Just click and hold the mouse down and drag up and down and I can set the radius.

3ds max Customizing viewport and grid colors

3ds max Customizing viewport and grid colors , we'll look at that later. We can create and destroy tool bars. What we want to do is go to the colors tab and the top section here we have an element and the difficult element is viewports. Within that element we have a bunch of items. Scroll down within there and select viewport background. And the color of the viewport background is displayed here. But notice that this color does not match this color and that's because of gamma correction. The gamma is being corrected and that's actually shifting all the colors in the interface and so the color you choose here will not be the same as the one you see here. But you'll just have to get used to that until this whole custom user interface dialogue gets updated to actually respond to the gamma correction. We can go into this color swatch here and we can change the value. Let's make it brighter, I'll give it a value of 80 and click okay and if we want to see that take effect, we can click on apply colors now. And now we have a brighter viewport background but in order to really see the grid we're going to need to change the grid colors as well. So back in the colors tab, under elements. From the pull down list, go to grids. And we have set by color and set by intensity. We'll just leave it as set by intensity and set the intensity to a value of 80 and once again click apply colors now. Now we have a much easier grid.

3ds max Customizing a workspace

3ds max Customizing a workspace But I can also do that from any one of these textured bars. So I can right click and re-enable the command panel. Last thing I want to do to customize the interface here is to hide this element here, which is called the view cube. And I believe it's very problematic because it does things to your viewport sometimes without your intention and basically it's going to cause more problems than it solves. There is a menu item here under "views". We can turn the "view cube" off from here but unfortunately if we do that then it will just reappear the next time we launch the program. There is a way to turn it off permanently. We can go into one of the viewports doesn't matter which one. And on the left there's a plus sign. Click that plus sign and you get a popup menu and choose "configure viewports". And the viewport configuration dialogue go to "view cube" and disable "show the view cube". And click "ok". And now the view cube won't come back when we relaunch the application. Alright, so I'll turn off my scene explorer. And I can exit the program, and when I do that this layout or workspace will be stored automatically. If you want, you can store it explicitly. So you can go back into the workspaces "manage workspaces" and click on "save default state". And that just saves all of this stuff explicitly. And you can do that if you're worried about the application actually crashing because if we make changes to the interface and then 3ds Max exits unexpectedly or has some sort of abnormal termination then the workspace will not get saved. So you can do it explicitly if you want. And that's how to make basic changes to a workspace in 3ds Max.

Getting familiar with the 3ds max interface

Getting familiar with the 3ds max interface We have the time slider and the timeline. And that allows us to identify what time we are at, on what frame we're on. And currently I'm on frame zero out of 100 and I can drag that time slider to go to a different point in time. There are controls for the transport for animation. Here we have playback, rewind, and so on. And we also have some keyframe options here. We can create keys automatically or manually. And then in the far right, in the lower right corner we have some viewport navigation controls we'll look at later. Then also in the middle here of this bottom section of the interface, is a transform type in area, where we can enter in coordinate values or angular values in order to position, rotate or scale objects in the scene. That's a basic overview of the 3ds Max interface.

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Defining the home grid

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Defining the home grid . If this is on and grid spacing is one centimeter and major grid lines every 10 centimeters, I'll close the grid and snaps dialog, and in a front viewport here, I'll activate that view, and then dolly forward with the mouse wheel. So I'm seeing subdivided lines here, and I might think that those are centimeters. If I keep going, just dollying forward with the mouse, eventually those grid lines become subdivided, and we have another set of subdivisions within that. And if I keep dollying forward, eventually it will stop subdividing, and when it stops subdividing, I know that I'm at the scale of one centimeter. And if that switch that we saw in the unit setup panel were off, then it would keep subdividing infinitely, forever, and we would never know when we're at the scale of one centimeter. Because again, there are no numbers on the grid. And likewise, you wannna check on this and be careful about it. Because if I dolly back out with the mouse wheel and just innocently keep dollying back, who knows how far out I am here? You know, I might think that that's a centimeter, but if I draw out a box in this front view, I'm going to have an unpleasant surprise. I'll click and drag and then release the mouse and drag upward to finish that box, and then click. The box is completed. And then right click to exit that box. Select it and go into the modify panel. We can see that its size is ginormous. It's huge. It's almost 20,000 centimeters on a side. All right, so I'll delete that. I didn't really need it. All right, that's how to set up the home grid, and you want to do that before beginning any project, especially a modeling project, so you will know what the scale of your world is.

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Defining the home grid

3ds max 2020 tutorials Scene Layout - Defining the home grid Below the grid spacing is a field labeled major lines every nth grid line. What does this mean? Well, it means that we can determine the spacing of major lines based upon the spacing of minor lines. Okay, so I've got a minor line or grid spacing every one centimeter, and with major lines every nth grid line set to 10, I'll get a darker or major line every 10 times we go one grid space. And since the grid space is one centimeter, I'll get a major grid line every 10 centimeters. Below that is the perspective view grid extent, and that's the size of the grid in the perspective view. And right now it's only extending seven centimeters away from the origin. I'll set that to a value of 100 and press Tab, and now the grid extends 100 centimeters from center to edge. Below that is a very important switch that we need to leave enabled, inhibit grid subdivision below grid spacing. You really need that to be on, and the reason is that there are no numbers on the grid in 3ds Max to give us a point of reference to how far we are zoomed in or out in a viewport. So let me demonstrate. If this is on and grid spacing is one centimeter and major grid lines every 10 centimeters, I'll close the grid and snaps dialog, and in a front viewport here, I'll activate that view, and then dolly forward with the mouse wheel. So I'm seeing subdivided lines here, and I might think that those are centimeters. If I keep going, just dollying forward with the mouse, eventually those grid lines become subdivided, and we have another set of subdivisions within that.

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.