Autodesk 3ds Max 2023 bible

Complete Beginner to Master Step-by-Step Practical Guide for 3D

Modeling, Animation and Visualization

SEYI SUNDAY O.
Copyright © 2023 SEYI SUNDAY O.
All Rights Reserved
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION TO 3DS MAX
CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS 3DS MAX?
WHAT IS 3DS MAX?
BENEFITS OF 3DS MAX
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 3DS MAX AND OTHER MODELING SOFTWARE
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 2
APPLICATIONS OF 3DS MAX
GAME DEVELOPMENT
VFX FOR FILM AND TV
ANIMATION
ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
ADVERTISING
VIRTUAL REALITY
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 3
ALL NEW FEATURES
SNAP WORKING PIVOT
RETOPOLOGY
IMPROVEMENTS IN MODELING
SAVING PERFORMANCE
AUTOBACK IMPROVEMENTS
VOLUMETRIC ON VIEWPORT API
Volume Display API
Instancing on Viewport/Rendertime API
GLTF EXPORTS
ARNOLD 7.1
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
NEW ICON
SUMMARY
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 4
FIRST LOOK AT THE NEW 3DS MAX 2023
RETOPOLOGY MODIFIER
AUTOBACKUP
UNWRAP SHORTCUTS
WORKING PIVOTS
SHEEN LAYER
GITF SUPPORT
REVIEW QUESTIONS
GETTING STARTED
CHAPTER 5
CONFIGURATION
UNITS SETUP
CUSTOM PREFERENCES
SCENE LIST
 COLUMNS
SETTING THE SNAP
RENDER ENGINE
THE VIEW CUBE
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 6
GETTING FAMILIAR WITH THE INTERFACE
TRADITIONAL APPLICATION MENU
THE COMMAND PANEL
THE VIEWPORT AREA
THE ANIMATION TRANSPORT TOOLS
THE TRANSFORM TYPE-IN AREA
MAXSCRIPT MINI LISTENER
THE MAIN TOOLBAR
THE SCENE EXPLORER
THE VIEWCUBE
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 7
UNDERSTANDING THE USER INTERFACE
EXPLORING THE SCREEN
CHANGING YOUR VIEWS
GETTING FAMILIAR WITH OBJECTS
UNDERSTANDING KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
HOW TO NAVIGATE IT AND HOW TO CHANGE THE LOOK OF IT
SELECTING OBJECTS
RENAMING A BOX
Changing the color of a box
TURNING ON/ OFF CATEGORIES
UNDERSTANDING LAYERS
CREATING A NEW LAYER
Deleting a layer
HOW A LAYER WORKS
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 8
THE FILE MENU
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 9
THE MAIN TOOLBAR
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 10
NAVIGATION
ZOOMING
FIELD OF VIEW
ORBIT
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 11
CONFIGURING VIEWPORTS
CONFIGURING PANELS USING VIEWPORT LAYOUT TABS
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 12
CHOOSING A TRANSFORM CENTER
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 13
CUSTOMIZING COLORS
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 14
IMPORTING AND EXPORTING FILES
IMPORTING FILES
EXPORTING AND UPLOADING GLTF FILE
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 15
PREFERENCES
REVIEW QUESTIONS
OBJECT CREATION AND MANIPULATION
CHAPTER 16
OBJECT CREATION
STANDARD PRIMITIVES
SELECTING OBJECTS
MAPPING COORDINATES
EXTENDED PRIMITIVES
COMPOUND OBJECTS
CREATING YOUR FIRST RENDER
SAVING A RENDERED IMAGE
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 17
TRANSFORMING OBJECTS
RESET
MOVING
ROTATING
SCALING
OBJECT SNAP
POSITIONING A COPY
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 18
WORKING WITH 2D LINES
WORKING WITH EDITABLE SPLINES
DRAWING WITH TOOLS
SMOOTHING CURVES
WORKING MODES
Vertex mode
Segment mode
Spline
REFINING YOUR OBJECTS
TRIMMING OBJECTS
EXTENDING OBJECTS
WORKING WITH BITMAP
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 19
CONVERTING FROM 2D TO 3D OBJECTS
IMPORTING IMAGES
MANIPULATING OBJECTS
CREATING TEXT
PRACTICE
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 20
CLONING AND ARRAYS
CLONING
ARRAY
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 21
DUPLICATING OBJECTS WITH CLONE
CLONING
Interactive cloning
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 22
DUPLICATING OBJECTS WITH ARRAY
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 23
GROUPING AND LINKING
GROUPING OBJECTS
UNGROUPING OBJECTS
MODIFYING INDIVIDUAL ITEMS IN A GROUP
Adding items to a group
LINKING AND UNLINKING
Working with Parent Object
UNLINKING
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 24
SNAP WORKING PIVOT TOOLS
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 25
UNDERSTANDING HIERARCHIES
REVIEW QUESTIONS
MATERIALS AND MODELING
CHAPTER 26
MATERIALS AND MAPPING
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 27
MATERIALS AND UV MAPPING
USING PICTURES AS MATERIAL
THE BUMP MAP
THE OPACITY MAP
Mesh
APPLYING MORE THAN ONE MATERIAL TO ONE OBJECT
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 28
MATERIALS AND RENDER SETTINGS
CUSTOMIZING YOUR SETUP
GETTING FAMILIAR WITH THE MATERIAL EDITOR
GENERAL RENDER SETTINGS
CONSIDERING DIFFERENT RENDERING ENGINES
FSTORM
WORKING WITH DIFFERENT MATERIALS AND MAPS
APPLYING THE BUMP MAP
Displacement map
 UVW map modifier
SUMMARY
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 29
ORGANIZING MATERIALS LIBRARY
PROJECT MANAGER
MANAGING FILES WITH EXPLORER
ASSET FILES
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 30
WORKING WITH SCENE EXPLORER
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 31
SCENE MANAGEMENT USING CONTAINERS
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 32
COMBINING SCENES WITH XREF
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 33
GRAPHITE MODELLING TOOLS
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 34
GETTING CREATIVE
HOW TO PAINT ON GRASS
HOW TO USE TERRAIN
PAINT DEFORMATION
SOME IMPORTANT SHORTCUTS
GROUND DEFORMATION
TIRE MODELING
MODEL A PERFECT COUCH CUSHION
MODELING WOOD PLANKS
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 35
FFD MODIFIER
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 36
SLATE MATERIAL EDITOR
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 37
USING THE COMPACT MATERIAL EDITOR
REVIEW QUESTIONS
LIGHTING AND RENDERING
CHAPTER 38
BASIC CAMERA SETUP AND NAVIGATION
SETTING UP YOUR CAMERA
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 39
BASICS OF LIGHTING
 WHY LIGHTING IS IMPORTANT
Key Ways of lighting an interior scene
Using an HDRI image
Using an HDRI map
USING SIMPLE V-RAY LIGHTS
POST-PROCESSING
Skylight portals
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 40
SIMPLE RENDER SETUP USING ARNOLD RENDERER
REVIEW QUESTIONS
ANIMATION
CHAPTER 41
ANIMATION BASICS
CAMERA MOVEMENTS TO USE FOR YOUR ANIMATIONS
Zoom
Pan
Tilt
Dolly
Truck
Pedestal
Jib/Crane
Orbit
Tilt/Pan
Dolly Tilt
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 42
PERFECTING YOUR ANIMATION SKILLS
MAKING A SIMPLE RUN ANIMATION
ANIMATING OBJECT VISIBILITY
HOW TO CREATE A WALKTHROUGH
ADVANCED ANIMATION OF CHARACTER RUNNING
MAKING AN ANIMATED CHARACTER HANDLE AN OBJECT
REVIEW QUESTIONS
MASTERING 3DS MAX 2023
CHAPTER 43
WORKSPACE SUMMARY
ADJUSTING THE WORKSPACE
VIEWPORTS
COMMAND PANEL
QUAD MENUS
TRANSFORMS
CHANGING THE POSITION OF AN OBJECT
Gizmo effect
Rotating your objects
Scaling
REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 44
5 AWESOME 3DS MAX TOOLS YOU SHOULD USE OFTEN
1. TRANSFORM TOOLBOX
2. LINE PIVOT
3. SELECT AND PLACE
4. THE SUBSTITUTE MODIFIER
5. SEARCH FUNCTION
 REVIEW QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 45
IMPORTANT KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
REVIEW QUESTIONS
INDEX
 INTRODUCTION
Are you prepared to push the boundaries of your creative potential? If that's the case, you've
arrived in the realm of Autodesk 3ds Max 2023, where the possibilities of your imagination are
virtually endless. This book will take you on a journey to learn how to use this powerful 3D
modeling, animation, and rendering software to its fullest potential.
The software program Autodesk 3ds Max 2023 is a tool that gives creative professionals the
ability to bring their craziest ideas to life. 3ds Max is the best place to learn about and experiment
with 3D design because of its user-friendly interface, extensive feature set, and nearly infinite
customization choices.
When it comes to letting your imagination run wild, 3ds Max provides boundless opportunities,
from the production of breathtaking visual effects to the animation of lifelike characters and
objects. If you are a professional in the fields of game creation, film and television production,
architecture, or product design, then 3ds Max is the software that you should use to bring your
projects to life.
This book will take you on a journey of discovery as you master the fundamentals of 3ds Max
and how to use them to build stunning 3D models. As you learn how to use 3ds Max, you will be
guided through exercises and step-by-step lessons that will help you improve your abilities and
gain confidence.
Using the information in this book as a reference, you will build visual effects that will blow the
minds of your viewers, animate realistic characters and environments, and render your designs
with photorealistic precision. Along the process, you will gain tips and tricks and explore the
latest techniques and trends in the field of 3D modeling.
In light of this, get ready to let your imagination run wild and immerse yourself in the world of
Autodesk 3ds Max 2023. This book will take your abilities and designs to new heights. Ready to
get started? Let's go

OVERVIEW
The book "Autodesk 3ds Max 2023" provides an in-depth look at the most recent version of
Autodesk's sophisticated 3D modeling, animation, and rendering program. It is intended to serve
as a useful resource for users of all skill levels, from those just starting out to those with years of
expertise, and it does so by giving lessons that are broken down into step-by-step instructions,
exercises that are put into practice, and advice from industry professionals on how to get the
most out of the software. This book is structured into five sections, each of which focuses on a
different area of 3ds Max: Object creation, modeling, materials and textures, lighting and
rendering, and animation. Before we go into these sections we have the introduction section that
is built to get you familiar with the software, especially for beginners who have no prior
knowledge about the software. In the modeling section, you will learn how to use 3ds Max's vast
collection of modeling tools to construct sophisticated 3D models, ranging from simple objects
to highly detailed characters and settings. These models can be created in any scene imaginable,
from spaceships to space stations to planets. The animation section discusses all aspects of
animation in 3ds Max, including rigging and skinning, keyframe animation, motion routes, and
particle effects. Readers will get knowledge on how to animate individuals and objects that
appear realistic, as well as how to incorporate dynamic effects such as explosions, smoke, and
fire into their animations. In the section titled "Materials and Textures," you will learn how to
generate materials and textures for 3D models as well as how to apply them to those models
utilizing both the built-in tools and third-party tools. This section covers everything from the
fundamental steps involved in creating a material to more sophisticated approaches such as
procedural texturing and shadier networks. The lighting and rendering section examines the
several tools and methods that can be used in 3ds Max to create lighting and rendering effects
that are realistic. You will get knowledge on how to produce naturalistic lighting effects by
utilizing technologies such as Global Illumination and Radiosity, as well as how to optimize their
scenes to reduce the amount of time required for rendering. Lastly, we included a bonus section
that provides you with important tools and all the shortcuts available in 3ds Max, as well as
summarizing important points. You will discover various practical examples and projects based
in the real-world sprinkled throughout this book. These are included to assist you in applying the
concepts you have learnt to your own tasks. This is the guide to maximizing the capabilities of
this powerful 3D program because of its extensive coverage and emphasis on practical
applications.

INTRODUCTION TO 3DS MAX

 CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS 3DS MAX?
In this introductory chapter, we are going to talk about what 3d Studio Max is. We are going to
talk a little bit about the Autodesk products since they're a little bit confusing especially if you're
new in the industry so we are going to focus on 3ds Max and talk about what makes it so special.

What is 3ds Max?

3ds Max, also known as 3d Studio Max is a computer graphic program used for creating 3d
models. 3d Studio Max was developed by Autodesk and the initial release was done in 1996.
However, since then, there have been quite a lot of changes and new tools. As a beginner, you
might have seen that 3ds Max has an insane amount of tools and features inside, this is because
the software is designed to be used by many other different disciplines in the 3d world. As we
mentioned already, some of the ones that can be used are going to be for cinema, as well as game
development, visualizations, and even product design.

Benefits of 3ds Max

The benefit of learning about 3ds Max, especially as a beginner is that once you get the logic of
the software, then it will be easier to move to any other 3d software since it pretty much follows
all the other 3d software and the logic inside is going to be about the same. This gives you a
good base for your skills and offers an easy way to find yourself around the new software that
you're learning.
As we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, 3d Studio Max is a 3d modeling software; this
doesn't mean that it is only for modeling but we would say that among all the Autodesk products
this software is one of the things that it's great at. So if you are doing hard surfaces, high polish,
or if you just want to create something that is in exact measurements and you want crisp nice
sharp edges, it's one of the best tools on the market for doing so.
You can easily create whatever you would like to do as a model then put controllers, animate and
move them around. The best part is that the software is specialized as well in doing good
visualizations. When talking about visualizations and getting realistic models and high-quality
assets and scenes out of your software, there are a couple of things that you need to look into.
First are the materials and the textures that you can apply and assign to your models.
Not only that, you can create UV sets which are going to be how your textures are displayed on
the models. However, there is quite a complex material editor inside 3d Studio Max where you
can create shaders, edit the textures and see how everything looks on your models so that you get
the result you need for your scene and it also comes with an amazing render.
Renders are part of the software which is involved in making the final image. What this does is it
calculates the lights, all the textures, and all the different components inside your material to
produce a final image.
Also, you can render a whole video which is going to be a sequence of the image but in the end,
it's going to produce and get a final quality image. 3ds Max render at the moment is called
Arnold which is inside the software and this is something that comes as a standard in the latest
versions of 3ds Max. Arnold is a good tool for getting awesome results. Some of the movies that
have been using Arnold as rendering are Avengers, as well Guardians of the Galaxy, and many
more which are high on special effects.

Difference between 3ds Max and other Modeling software

Now let's talk a little bit about the difference between 3ds Max and other modeling software,
using Maya as our main focus. As a beginner, you might be faced with the confusion of deciding
whether to go for 3ds Max or Maya. Maya is also modeling software but it is more specialized in
animation so it has more tools.
If you prefer rigging and animating more environment assets, for example, opening doors and
similar things like these, you can do that efficiently in 3ds Max but when it comes to more
organic and complicated actions, you can do that with Maya. Although you can still model and
create amazing artwork inside Maya and render them, in comparison to 3ds Max, Max is more
specialized in the modeling part while Maya is more into the animation part.
With that being said, if you're someone that's looking to get familiar with modeling and
animations quickly, then the 3ds Max is what you should start with and after you are done with
the 3ds Max you will easily catch up with Maya because the terminologies and pretty much how
everything works is similar and it will take you just a couple of weeks to get used to the other
software.

Review Questions
1. What is the meaning of 3ds Max?
2. Outline the benefits of 3ds Max to you.
3. Why would you choose 3ds Max over other similar software?
 CHAPTER 2
APPLICATIONS OF 3DS MAX
3ds Max is one of the most known software for 3d work. In this chapter, we're going to talk
about what it is used for and how it helps designers, artists, and studios to bring their visions to
life.

Game development
Making video games is one of the best things 3ds Max is known for and this has been the case
back in the 90s and the early 2000s when it was used to create some of the most iconic video
games in the history of game development like Warcraft, Tampa Raider, Halo 1, Halo 2, just to
name a few. For the most part, 3ds Max is used in the game development industry to create SS,
and for animation work, 3ds Max is good for creating high-quality video game assets and
modular game environments which is almost everything you see in a video game. Creating assets
is usually done using different software to get the best out of each of them but 3ds Max is usually
used for modeling UV and wrapping and texturing is mostly done in specialized software such as
a substance painter.
In terms of animation, 3ds Max can deliver great results, as big studios use it and rely on it to get
most if not all their animation work. Some big studios use it to work on all their franchises which
are known for their great navigation and fighting mechanics. Also, some of the best studios rely
on 3ds Max in part to create some of the most amazing video game cinematics such as blur and
unit image. There are a lot of game studios around the world that use 3ds Max in their pipelines
because it has proven itself over the years that it can do good work and handle big projects.
This software is trusted by game development artists and a lot of professionals use it to get their
job done. A lot of developers use 3ds Max even though there are other free software but
pipelines have been built over the years around it which means it became game development-
friendly by all the necessary tools and the support needed to produce good quality video games.
Also, lots of developers who have industry experience which means they worked for game
development studios in the past are now trying to work on their own games and there isn't a
better choice for them other than the 3ds Max because they have worked with it for a long time.

VFX for film and TV

When it comes to visual effects for film and TV shows, 3ds Max can handle several stages of the
pipeline including a pre-visualization layout, cameras, modeling, texturing, rigging animation,
simulations lighting, and rendering. 3ds Max can be relied upon to work on complicated scenes
with tens of millions of polygons in real-time. This is good for simulations using third-party
plugins such as thinking particles for particle simulation that can be used to generate a lot of
different visual effects as well as fume effects and Phoenix FD for fluid dynamics.
Autodesk has made significant progress in 3ds Max to create fluid simulations in the latest
releases and developing the native simulation tools for 3ds Max is a good step forward. As a
result, there are a lot of big studios that are using 3ds Max currently in their pipelines to create
amazing VFX-heavy movies. This was the case in the past as well because it was used in part to
work on the most iconic movies such as Avatar 2012 and The Last Airbender, just to name a
few. What makes 3ds Max suitable for VFX work is its ease of use and the number of plugins
that can give a much better result, compared to relying on 3ds Max tools alone. Some of these
studios that are using 3ds Max fuse effects also use Scanline, VFX and ILM.

Animation
When it comes to projects that can become the primary animation work, 3ds Max has everything
necessary for professional production so it is often used by a professional animator in working
on big-budget movies, video game cinematics, or films. It is also used by freelance animators.
Animation in 3ds Max revolves around keyframing bone properties making it easy to create
complex and organic motion. This software comes with two systems for animating character
models which are CAT and Character studio. Each of those is customizable with a wide variety
of applications. They are both compatible with motion capture, and file formats and together they
provide a powerful means of animating complex and detailed scenes. 3ds Max can also be used
for some short 3d animated films.

Architecture and design

When it comes to architectural work and design, you can use 3ds Max or 3ds Max Design which
is a special version catered for architects and designers.
For this type of work, 3ds Max excels like no other software because Autodesk (the developers
of the software) have been creating the best-clad software or computer-aided design software
since the 1980s, which means that they made sure that 3ds Max is good for architects and
designers. A lot of architects and architecture firms rely on 3ds Max to get their work done
because it is easy to use and then there are the robust modeling and rendering tools. Also, the
huge number of plugins available for 3ds Max users for this type of work allows them to get their
results to the next level. 3ds Max is especially used for architecture and design work because it
can be simple enough for people that don't have a lot of experience in 3d modeling and
rendering. It can also be used for big projects by professional architects or architecture firms
since architecture work is mostly about modeling and rendering and those two things are
probably the best points of strength for 3ds Max.
Using its semi-procedural modeling tools makes it faster and easier, and in addition to that, there
are a lot of modeling plugins that can complement the native tools for rendering. 3ds Max
recently integrated Arnold render which is a great render engine that was urgently created for it,
then it finally came back to it after Autodesk bought it to become the default for both 3ds Max
and Maya. In addition to that, there are some great plugins for rendering that can achieve
outstanding results like V-ray, Corona, and octane Redshift, among others. Some of them are
new and others have been around for a long period.

Advertising
This is also a big market for studios because 3ds Max focuses on this type of work and can
handle different entertainment and design projects. It is used to produce professional TV
commercials and other types of commercials. For some of the biggest brands and companies in
the world, it can be used for pre-visualization, modeling, animation effects, and simulation
rendering.
Studios show their clients what they are going to do for them using this software for previews
just to give them a general idea of how the work they will do is going to look like, as part of the
pre-production for visually mapping out scenes and when the parties agree on a certain direction,
the production begins which generally speaking is not different than VFX or animation projects.

Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality or VR is an important part of mankind because it is a better alternative to the
technology we have in a lot of fields whether it be entertainment for video games and movies,
architecture, design in the medical field and psychology, military archeology, and many other
applications.
3ds Max Interactive is a VR engine that extends the power of 3ds Max to create an immersive
and interactive architectural visualization. The Max Interactive is tuned to the specific needs of
visualization workflows rather than real-time needs during games which is a smart choice
because they don't want to compete with the powerful game engines that have been established
for a long time.
Other thoughtful features include templates for various VR platforms that are packaged with the
necessary tools and scripts that make it easy for non-developers to quickly create mobile, PC,
and room-scale VR experiences without any advanced scripting knowledge.
There are a lot of people creating their VR projects using other game engines but with 3ds Max
Interactive VR engine, they are going to find it easier to do so especially if they find learning
how to use a game engine hard or they don't want to spend much time learning the game engine.

Review Questions
1. How does 3ds Max apply to advertising?
2. How does 3ds max benefit architects?
3. Mention other industries where 3ds Max is useful.
 CHAPTER 3
ALL NEW FEATURES
The 3ds Max 2023 comes with a lot of new features. In this chapter, we will see what changes
have been made in this version.

Snap Working Pivot

In Modeling, we have a new Snap Working Pivot. The artist can easily snap the transfer gizmo to
an edge vertex, edge center, or face center. The gizmo will also orient automatically following
the edge direction or the normal parameters of the face.

You can access these new features from the Quad menu, from the icons on the newest Snap Pivot
bar or assigning shortcuts to each action. You can also adjust this pivot orientation by locking
and unlocking certain axes with a double-click. Optionally, you can turn on a bounding box grid
for extra snapping positions. You can also snap to external objects. You can snap with a visual
guide or snap automatically to whatever your mouse is over for faster assignments.
Lastly, you can create point helpers or grid helpers from the working pivot position to be reused
later. If you model a lot in 3ds Max, this newest Snap Pivot feature will be super helpful for you.

Retopology
Retopology has been greatly improved. The 2023 version now comes with a Preprocessed Mesh
and this will digest the original mesh to reach the required polygon target faster and without
errors.

What you'll notice is that without Preprocess mesh it will take 84 seconds, whereas with
Preprocess mesh enabled its 4 seconds and the results are almost identical.
Retopology creates an incredible result for a total automatic retopology without needing to
preprocess te mesh. In the 2023 version, Retopology also preserves any geometry information
that you have in your model. It will preserve UVs, IDs, or smoothing groups; just select what
you want to preserve on the auto-edge options. A new Output menu is now available, allowing
exposure of the retopology mesh, the original mesh, or the mesh created by the new preprocesses
method.

Improvements in Modeling
Modeling methods such as the Occlude Mod on 2022.3 is also part of the 2023 version and it has
been further improved in performance and accuracy which is even better than before. You can
see here that it doesn't matter the relative size of the polygon versus the screen space, it will
always be accurate and faster than previous versions. Smart Extrude which was improved in the
2022 Version with partial cut-through functionality now has all these improvements also on the
Edit Poly modifier. Some additional fixes have been done as well on the Smart Extrude to
improve and enhance different objects.
Saving Performance
In Max 2022 updates 2 and 3, we had different saving performance increases but now in Max
2023, we have even more compression speed games.

You can see in the table in the image above that between 2022 and 2023 the increase in speed is
quite significant. This is without compression but in Max 2023, what changed a lot is when we
turn on this compression. Max now uses a new Zeta Standard compression engine and its data
entity is compressed right away when it is generated, greatly increasing speeds on savings. You
can create multiple scene tests where you can see that saving speed increases from 500% to
2500% on speed games. In Max 2023 as you will see, when you turn on compression it has way
less penalty and in some cases will be even faster than saving without compression. All these
tests are done using an SSD and if you have a slower hard drive you will experience an even
bigger difference when compression is on.
Autoback Improvements
Autoback in 3ds Max is now faster, thanks to all these improvements in savings but on top of
that, in the 2023 version, it received a lot of love. Now we have a specific Autoback bar with
icons to turn on or off Autoback, there is a timer with a countdown for the next Autoback and a
button to skip to the next Autoback.

Autoback is also smarter. The countdown will not start until the artists interact with 3ds Max and
if you're doing any action in 3ds Max during the last 15 seconds like moving a spinner,
performing a simulation, or on a model dialog, the clock will stop to prevent Autoback to kick in
while you are working. Right-clicking on the Autoback icon will bring you to the Preference
menu and here there are some new options as well. You have the option to activate "Compress
for Autoback files" and the option to "prepend the scene name" on the Autoback file. So each
Autoback file will retain the name of the file you are working on. If you are working on multiple
Max sessions, it is way more intelligent, preventing different Maxs from overriding the same
Autoback file.
We also have a new backup file menu allowing you to do an "Autobackup Now" and to open the
Autobackup folder. Additionally, all our toolbar commands can be assigned to hotkeys.

Volumetric on Viewport API

We also have a new API for displaying volumes on viewports in 3ds Max. This will be
accessible to any third-party developer to be used as the owner.

Volume Display API

The first one to use is Arnold. You will need to download the latest Max available from the
webpage that is using Arnold 7.1. When creating an Arnold volume you will see that you can
load any VTV sequence and finally be able to have a good representation of the viewport in the
VTV grid. You can tweak opacity and colors, and the visualization makes it very easy to position
your scene and look very good even without rendering.
Arnold volumes can also visualize any grid coming on your VTV and have different built-in
display options to be able to display the data that comes with it such as the turbo or spectrum.
You can have a gradient or a black body and you can play sequences. It's quite fast and looks
very good.
Instancing on Viewport/Rendertime API
The other new API is the "Instance on Viewport" and "Instance at RenderTime API." This is
very important for 3ds Max because as you already know, 3ds Max is a 3d app with more
renderers available. Until now, each renderer had to come up with its solution to Instance at
rendertime and then each third-party tool doing particles or scattering had different solutions for
Instancing at rendertime.

In these cases, each Instancer had to add support for each renderer for instancing at rendertime
individually or the other way round. This was a lot of work for developers to support each other
and one could only get partial support between tools as some renderers did not support some
scattering tools.
Now any new tool or renderer used in giving support to this new single API will get access to all
the other tools that also support this API. This will make life way easier for third-party
developers and all artists as they will enjoy more compatibility between tools and renderers to
Instance millions of objects without a very low RAM utilization.

GLTF Exports
3ds Max now supports Gltf exports. Gltf is a very popular open-source 3d file format. Now that
we have a new Gltf material, you can export starting message geometry with a bitmap texture,
and there is a correct viewport display of the Gltf material on the viewport in 3ds Max.
Arnold 7.1
We now have Arnold 7.1 with improved IPR interactivity, stability improvement, an
improvement on three-planer maps, faster per-pixel imagers, updates on materials, faster bloom
imager, interactive Gpu which is now faster, enhancements on USD and different API editions.

Other Improvements
There are a lot of other improvements such as:
● A new layout of UV hotkeys for more cohesion.
● More tools for Pipeline Integration and more improvements on Per-Viewport filtering. For
example, you can now have a playback while changing settings, and general fixes.
● All the false geometry and the maximum number of segments have been increased greatly.
● A new Max to viewport material conversion API.
● A new Autodesk Standard Surface Compliant mode for Physical material.
● Updates on EXR and Open Shading Language (OSL).
● Updates on security.
● Improvements on loading times when files contain a large number of missing plugins.
● A new and improved progress bar.
● Multiple actions are now doable as well, like changing object colors, disabling modifiers
in the viewport or render.
● Updated Python, improvements on Max script and much more.
New Icon
We now have a new icon for 3ds Max.
Summary
In summary, the new API that has volumes on Viewport will help tremendously when other
renderers and tools are adapted but now we have the 3ds Max API so it'll make it easier. Keeping
the UVS and all these new improvements is awesome and this is a game-changer for modeling in
3ds Max.

Review Questions
1. Mention 7 new improvements found in 3ds Max 2023.
2. Explain the new Arnold 7.1.
 CHAPTER 4
FIRST LOOK AT THE NEW 3DS MAX 2023
Now you have an idea of what 3ds Max is, let's now look at the features of this software that
distinguishes it from the previous versions.

Retopology modifier
Now, we process complex mesh data way faster using a new "Preprocess" option found here.
When active, the ReForm option will generate a simplified mesh that accurately follows the
input geometry. The remeshed data will then be used to generate clean quad geometry. This
simplified process removes the need to prepare meshes with modifiers like "SubDivide" or
"ProOptimize." Face count on the other hand controls the density of the mesh. If you try to make
it dense, you can control the progress at the left bottom corner. At any time you can turn it off
and on without a need to compute it again.
This new update also makes it possible to propagate existing mesh data, such as Smoothing
Groups, UVs, Normals, and Vertex color to the new Retopology mesh output. For example, in
the image below we have a photo-scanned model with the texture already unwrapped. Let’s add
the Retopology modifier.

By checking the Auto Edge option, you have the flexibility to transfer important mesh data such
as UV Channel, for example.
If you click "Compute," this way, the texture stays perfectly unwrapped in the new retopology
mesh. In addition, you still have access to the original unwrapped modifier’s result. It’s going to
be useful when working with photo-scanned geometries which are getting more and more
popular.

Now, we have a new selection method inside the Editable poly. If you go to Polygon Selection
and enable the “Occluded” selection mode, you will only select polygons that are visible in the
viewport.
You may think that you've got this option before with the “Ignore backfacing” option but this
option only excludes polygons that are facing the view with the backside. You can do a lot of
cool things with that. For example, you can select all the polygons from the top view and detach
the selection.

Then you can use the new object to create something like snow as you can see in the image
below.
Autobackup
We have all been there, you’re working on a huge project, super focused and suddenly, out of
nowhere, everything goes off. What are your options now? Depending on what type of person
you are, you'll either wait calmly for about 30 seconds, ortry to fix this. Turning backup off
completely is not an option, many times you can lose hours of work because of that. Thankfully
now, there is a handy solution for this issue. At the top of the workspace, we have the
Autobackup Toolbar. By default, this icon will be active when you open 3ds Max. When it’s
active, Max is looking for any changes to your scene state. When something changes, it figures
out that Autobackup should be done. As soon as you start working on something, the timer will
start the countdown. When the timer gets to zero, the Autobackup will be done. It’s awesome
that you have a visual of when the Autobackup will be performed at all times. If you want to skip
the Autobackup, you can reset it at any time using the Reset Timer icon.
On top of that, there are some improvements in Autobackup preferences. You can quickly access
Preferences by right-clicking on the Autobackup icon. In the previous version of Max, we had
only a few options. Now we can also "Prepend" the Autobackup with the scene name. So
instead of having AutoBackup01, AutoBackup02, and so on, you will get
SceneName_AutoBackup01, and so on. This is a great update because before now you could
have multiple scenes open at the same time and may not be able to find the correct Autobackup.

You can also “Compress on Autobackup.” This way, the file will save faster, and decide if you
want to display the timer or not. This small update, which is a favorite feature, will save you a
keyboard or two.

Unwrap Shortcuts
New and updated keyboard shortcuts have been assigned for various operations found in the
Unwrap section. For example, you can quickly do Loop selection with the ALT+L shortcut, or
create a Pelt Seam with the SHIFT+P shortcut. Shortcuts work in the UV editor as well, like
SHIFT+A for ‘Pack’. You can check all the shortcuts in the Hotkey Editor, under the Unwrap
UVW category. You can also change the shortcuts or assign new shortcuts to the options that
don’t have one. So if you are a huge fan of shortcuts, this update is much appreciated.

Working Pivots
Another huge modeling update after the previous version's Smart Extrude feature, which is
"Place Working Pivot”, provides a method to rapidly adjust the position and orientation of
pivots. You can access working pivots in three different ways: using the Toolbar, from the Tool
menu, or Quad menu.
This option lets you place the Working Pivot on any vertex, edge, face component, or mid-points
of those components on the active object in their scene. When you click and hold, you can also
choose the orientation of the pivot. You can combine it with a Smart Extrude which will provide
a really fast modeling workflow.

Another cool feature is the ability to create a grid for the working pivot. You can use it, for
example, to draw a shape on it.

With the usual Grid Snap Tool, you can align it perfectly to the center of the grid, which is the
location of the Working Pivot.

You will then extrude it and attach it to the model.

Now you can use Smart Extrude to create a Boolean. With these options, modeling is so easy
now.
Sheen Layer
The Sheen layer has been added to Arnold Material. It helps to render soft microfiber fabrics like
velvet, satin, and silk. In the past, we had to add a falloff map to do this, but now it’s much more
simplified.

When doing the Interactive rendering you will notice that this amount controls how strong the
effect is. And if you test different roughness values, you will see that low roughness keeps the
specular highlights at the grazing angle, and as it increases, the sheen reflection dominates. You
can also change the color of the effect by making it darker or lighter.

GITF support
Autodesk introduced Gltf support in the new 3ds Max. Gltf is a file format used to showcase 3D
models on the web and online stores. You can now easily publish 3D assets directly to Gltf for
use in web applications, online stores, while ensuring visual quality is maintained. You can find
the Gltf material under “General” in “Materials” and then you can apply it to your model as any
other material.

We also have access to the Gltf Material Preview which provides you with the ability to
accurately work on the asset in the viewport. It eliminates guesswork and gives you the
confidence that assets will look the same in different environments, outside of 3Ds Max. When
the model is ready for a Gltf viewer, you can then use the new Real-time Exporter to export
mesh data and its associated material. You don’t have to sit and wait for a client to come to you
with a request. Instead, you can, for instance, develop a workflow to showcase 3D previews of
products online.

Review Questions
1. What is the function of The "Preprocess" option?
2. Explain how Autobackup works.
3. Mention one important tool found under the Hotkey Editor.
GETTING STARTED
 CHAPTER 5
CONFIGURATION
In this chapter, we are going to be talking about how to get started in 3DS Max 2023. We are
going to start with what to do right after installation. We're going to show you how to take care
of all the necessary settings and adjustments to the user interface because depending on your
region, your settings might be slightly different. After you have your 3ds Max installed, you are
met with a user interface that looks like the previous ones. The first thing you're going to do is to
enable you to get more space there on the screen. You're going to remove the Modeling ribbon.
The Modeling ribbon can be turned visible or not visible with the button that asks you whether to
show the ribbon or not.

Units Setup
The next thing you're going to do is go into the unit setup. You'll go to “Customize,” “Units
Setup" and just leave the Display units to Generic units; the biggest mistake that people make
here is that they change the display.

Then you'll go to System units and make sure you use meters as system units, so one unit equals
one meter. This way, when you import something in meters it will come into the program on the
right scale.
Custom Preferences
The next thing is Preferences and under Preferences Settings what you should change here is
the Scene selection. This is something that all Autodesk programs used for many years but now
you have to turn it on. The "Auto Window/Crossing" means whenever you select something
with a window from right to left, it's a crossing window, and from left to right it's a window that
only selects what's inside the window. So just turn "Auto Window/Crossing by Direction" on.
Scene List
If you have only a few objects in your scene then this part over the left which is the list of all
objects in the scene is quite helpful. If you have thousands of objects then it makes no sense and
it might be a waste of space so what you can do is to make it smaller and if you want to get rid of
it you just undock it and close it.
Columns
Also, if you want to demonstrate something you may like to have two columns there on the right
side so you're going to enlarge the column space so that it fits. It fits two columns there on the
right side so when you have something with a lot of preferences then you can see all of those
preferences and you don't have to scroll up and down all the time.

Setting the Snap

The next thing is for you to make sure that the 3D snap is set correctly. So you can turn the 3D
snap on and off at the toolbar.
By the way, there is also a keyboard shortcut that you might want to remember from the start. To
turn on the keyboard shortcut for snap is simply an S so when you hit the letter S it turns on and
off, but to adjust the settings you have to right-click and adjust what kind of points or vertices are
snapped.

Grid point is something that you don't need at all so you can turn off Grid point and in this case,
it's better to only use a few elements. So you can simply turn off the Grid point and then turn on
the Endpoint. Don't hit "Okay" when prompted at first because that would clear all the settings.
Now your Snap settings are set correctly you can turn it off if you don't need to snap right away
or you can leave it always turned off and only turn it on with the S when you need it. The next
thing is speeding up your modeling, navigation, moving, and rotating. It is better to turn on the
Angle Snap, as this is something that you leave turned on because the Angle Snap means when it
is turned on you rotate every object in five-degree steps. This means it's quite simple to rotate
something 90 degrees because it automatically snaps to 90 degrees. You're going to turn on these
settings from the toolbar.
Render Engine
There are only a few more small things to do at the very beginning and one of them would be to
make sure what kind of render engine is turned on. The render setup is the icon that has the
teapot with the wheel at the toolbar.

Now if you check out the render settings, it starts with Arnold being the default render engine.
This is fine because all the things in the future materials, lighting, and environment settings we
are going to show you for Arnold rendering are included in the new version. So there's only one
thing that you might want to change and that is on the Arnold.

In the system tab, there's only one little button that's called "Legacy 3ds Max Map support." If
you turn on the Legacy 3ds Max Map Support, that means a lot of materials are supported that
have been included in previous versions otherwise those objects would be rendered in black if
you don't turn this on and also they are not available in the Material Editor so make sure that you
turn on the Legacy 3ds Max support. For all the other settings for Arnold renderer in terms of
quality and noise, we're going to show you later.
The View cube
This is something that 3ds Max users don't use and this is because there are plenty of keyboard
shortcuts so we don't need the View cubes.

To get rid of the Viewcube just hold your mouse on it, make a right mouse click, and choose
"Configure." Here you can turn off the View cube which is the precious screen space that we
don't want to waste with a few cubes.
Review Questions
1. What is the recommended unit when setting up your software?
2. Explain the importance of the column.
3. Explain the process of getting rid of the view cube.
4. Go to your Column section and create two columns on the right side of your
workspace.
 CHAPTER 6
GETTING FAMILIAR WITH THE INTERFACE
This chapter is all about getting familiar with the 3ds Max interface. We'll start by identifying the
main components of the interface and will also take the opportunity to strip the interface down a
little bit. For that, we will minimize the clutter and make it easier to focus on our work.

Traditional Application Menu

At the top of the 3ds Max interface is a traditional application menu. There are a lot of menus
here but if you're on a laptop or a screen with limited resolution then all of the menus may not fit
on the screen horizontally. If that's the case you'll see a double right-facing arrow (that's a
button).

When you click on that you have access to the other menus such as the 3ds Max Help menu.

The Command Panel

Unlike other programs, 3ds Max does not rely heavily on the menus. There are a lot of
commands in 3ds Max that is found elsewhere that isn’t in the menus at all. Most significantly,
over here on the right, we have an area called the Command panel and this is the heart of 3ds
Max. It is where you will spend a lot of your time and it's divided into six panels: Create
Modify, Hierarchy, Motion, Display, and Utilities.
The most important of the command panels is the "Create” panel which of course allows you to
build new objects, and "Modify" which will allow you to stack effects on a selected object to
change it.

The Viewport Area

In the center of the screen is the 3ds Max Viewport area and that's where you interact with
objects in your 3d scene.
To navigate in these viewports there are some buttons down here in the lower-right and those are
known as the viewport navigation icons. As you'll see later in this book, you can accomplish
almost all of these functions from the keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys and that will be a much
faster and more efficient way to navigate.

The Animation Transport Tools

Next to the viewport navigation icons are some keyframe creation tools or animation
transport tools for playing back the animation.

The Transform Type-in Area

In the timeline here, we also have a Transform type-in area for plugging in values for a
position, rotation, and scale.
Maxscript Mini Listener
There's a helpline down here that gives us some hints and there's also a way to type in script
commands through this field here known as the Maxscript mini listener.

The Main toolbar

Directly below the main menu is an area called the Main toolbar and that's where you'll find the
most common commands such as Select object, Move, Rotate and Scale, and Render an image.

So once again if you're on a laptop or a screen with limited resolution then the entire main
toolbar may not fit on your screen. If that's the case, you may see some icons getting cut off over
here; simply hover your mouse over an empty spot on the main toolbar and you'll get a hand
cursor, click and drag and you can slide the main toolbar left and right to expose their remaining
icons.
Directly below the main toolbar is an area known as the Ribbon and this is primarily for
modeling. The ribbon is minimized by default but you can expand it by clicking on this button to
show the full ribbon and then you see some icons here.
If you go over to the Object Paint tab in the ribbon you'll see a bunch of tools there. If you're
not modeling you may want to hide the ribbon so that it's not taking up space on the screen and
that's easily accomplished from a button on the main toolbar toggle ribbon, just click that and the
ribbon will be hidden.

The Scene Explorer

On the left is a panel known as the Scene Explorer. This is an outline view of all of the objects
in your scene and your Scene Explorer would be empty if you have no objects there. The Scene
Explorer is one of those panels that you want to see when you want to see it and you don't want it
to be visible all the time.

To hide the Scene Explorer there are multiple ways to do that. We will use a method that will
also illustrate how to show and hide other interface elements and that's through the context-
sensitive. Simply right-click the menu on every panel, and you will see a textured bar, right-click
on any one of those textured bars and you'll get a pop-up or context-sensitive menu. From here
you can show or hide various interface elements, in this case, we will click on Scene Explorer
default to hide it and now it's been hidden, we can just move this over and reclaim that space. If
you want to get the Scene Explorer back there are various ways to do that. First, you can go to
the Tools menu and choose Scene Explorer. There's also a button on the main Toolbar toggle
which contains the Scene Explorer and that will also launch it.
As you drag the Scene Explorer around you can see that 3ds Max is allowing you to dock to
various parts of the interface. If you don't want that to happen then you can lock the user
interface layout, which is done from the customize menu; click on "Customize" then choose
"Lock UI layout" and now you can drag that around anywhere you want and you won't be
prompted to dock.

To turn that back off again, turn off "Lock UI Layout" and close the Scene Explorer once again.

The Viewcube
Finally, in the viewports, we have something called the Viewcube. This is a method of
navigation in the scene and an alternative to the viewport navigation controls down here. The
view cube may be problematic and we recommend that you disable it because it's very easy to
accidentally click it and it might be more trouble than it's worth so to permanently hide the view
cube, you need to go into the "Viewport configuration dialog."
One way to do that is from any one of the viewports click on the plus sign, then go to
"Configure viewports," go to the Viewcube tab and disable the view cube by turning off
"Show the view cube" and clicking "OK." Now it is hidden permanently.
There is a menu item for the view cube but it doesn't always work and the view cube may come
back the next time you launch 3ds Max but having done it through the Viewport configuration
dialog, we are certain that the view cube is permanently hidden. That's an overview of the main
elements of the 3ds Max interface.

Review Questions
1. Mention 3 options found in the command panel.
2. Why is the ribbon tab important?
3. Disable the Screen Explorer panel.
 CHAPTER 7
UNDERSTANDING THE USER INTERFACE
In this chapter, we go deeper into the user interface of 3ds Max. You are going to learn how to
navigate a 3ds Max scene and as we proceed you'll see how to create your first objects. Make
sure you have mastered the previous chapter in which you learned how to configure 3ds Max
after the installation.

Exploring the Screen

When talking about the User interface, the most prominent thing of course in the middle are four
viewports, these are the few parts that show you the 3d scene from different points.

To know what the content of every Viewport is you can always see here in the name. There's one
look from the top, from the front, from the left, and one perspective view of the scene around the
View cube. Starting on the top we have the standard Windows bar, and then we have the main
toolbar starting with undo and redo here and with the most common buttons and things to click
and choose.
On the right side, we have the command panel which is something that you can increase in size
so you can use two of those command panels. The command panel is made up of six categories
including Create, Modify and others.

Once you choose any of these, for example, the first one, then there is usually a second category,
in this case, object creation. There are different categories of objects and when you are in one of
those, there's usually a drop-down. So there are up to three kinds of hierarchies where the
commands in the command panel are hidden.
If you continue clockwise, you can see on the bottom a lot of things that are necessary or most
necessary for animation. We have the time slider here that we can move but again this is only
necessary for animation.

There are a few things that may be interesting as well. When you move your mouse to the top
view which is the active view you can see that there are some coordinates running. Sometimes
what you do is look down there, you'll see four coordinates and the rest here is basically for
animation.
The bottom right is all about screen navigation but you may not need all those buttons because
we're going to show you the keyboard shortcuts as we proceed.
As you continue clockwise and you get to the left side of the screen, you'll see the Scene
Explorer which is usually a list of objects in different categories including cameras and lights.

You can also change the size of it if you need more space or if the names are quite long but you
may prefer to have as much space as possible in your four views so let's get to the four views
before we show you how to create your first object.

Changing your views

It makes more sense to change the Active view and this is the one that has this slightly orange
frame around it. You can just click in any of the views but we would like you to remember from
the very beginning that switching views or turning another view active and switching the views
should be done with the right mouse click because when you have an object selected and then
when you change the view with the right mouse click, you don't lose the selection.
With that in mind, always remember to switch views with the right mouse click once the view is
active, and when you do another right mouse click you will get some options that are always
different depending on what is selected. Make sure you only click right once and not twice
because that will give you the option to get rid of the option. If you go to any part of the user
interface, for example, the command panel and you do a right click you can see which part of the
user interface is turned on and off.
For our illustration, if you look at the things that are turned on, we can see we have the main
toolbar turned on. We have the Viewport layout tabs turned on which is also something that is
here on the left side, and in your case, you can get rid of it if you hardly use it.
This way, you get to streamline your view and you can see that on the left side, you just saved
about a centimeter. We have the time slider for the animation on the scene explorer, on the right
side of the command panel.
You can always go and customize your user interface. That can be done by going to the
"Customize” menu and "Customize User Interface."

In the window that opens up you can always reset certain main tools.
Now we have just shows you how to do some basic configurations, remember, you can always
adjust some settings to come out the way you like it.
We had earlier talked about showing you the basic keyboard shortcuts to make things easier for
you but before we take a look at the first keyboard shortcuts we would like to switch to the Top
view and we're going to create a couple of boxes. So here in the Top View, in general, if you are
creating objects such as cinema 4D or Maya or even in a blender, for example, when you create
an object it doesn't appear right there at the origin in the center of your screen but you can drag it
to any point that you want it even with object snap.

Getting familiar with objects

What we are going to do is to go to create the very first standard primitives where it says box.
Usually, boxes are created because every kind of object is created slightly differently so you start
the command box and then it opens here.
Then you go into Top view, click and hold and drag the box, and then let go. With the remaining
mouse we move it, we can either make the box a positive height or a negative height. For this
illustration we're going to do all positive height boxes so we locate the positive height, click one
more time and that defines the height. One more time, click and drag the rectangle, let go then
define the height.

With this, we're going to create a couple of boxes here in our scene and then you will notice
something right away. Here we have a couple of boxes; there are a few things that you will
notice. If you don't want to select boxes or create boxes anymore, just right-click and then the
box command ends.
In our list here we have eight different boxes and they are all in alphabetical order with the
numbering of three-digit numbers at the end. You can also see that one of the boxes is selected
so if you click here on one of the names then you can see that the selection jumps from one to the
other box.
If you click into the space either here in the list or if one box is selected and you click into the
space in the screen here then it also loses the selection. You can also see that the top front and
left views are called Wireframe views. The Perspective view is shaded. It says Default shading
so you can see the colors. Also, when you create standard primitives in 3ds Max then they
usually has a random color.

If you did the same as illustrated and your boxes don't have random colors then it's very much
likely that you didn't do the changes to your user interface that we've shown in the previous
chapter. Remember to click "Okay."

Understanding Keyboard shortcuts

We now have the first thing that we would like to show you. We're going to do a couple of
keyboard shortcuts and here's a piece of advice: what you can do is take a piece of paper and an
extra piece of paper and write down all the keyboard shortcuts. Of course, there are lists of
shortcuts there in the help files but just make a quick list of the most necessary and common
keyboard shortcuts. The first one that we are going to look at is the background grid. Most
people see this as basically very annoying as it tampers with the view and you don't see a lot.
You may not use the grid for anything and if you use it you can always turn it back on.

The keyboard shortcut for the grid is G so with g you can turn the grid on and off. Instead of
using the keyboard shortcut G, you can also go up there where the names of the look of the view
are and click on the plus sign. When you right-click on plus it also allows you to configure your
view. For example, you can uncheck the “Show grid” option and it goes off but with the
keyboard shortcut G you can switch on your grid. You can switch to another view and use the
shortcut g and so on.
The next keyboard shortcut is to switch between a shaded view and the Wireframe view. You're
going to do it here in Perspective view and that is by using F3. So F3 is a wireframe and one
more time F3 is shaded, and with this shortcut, you can switch between the shaded and the
wireframe. When you are in a Wireframe view you can also use F4 to turn on the edges so that
it's shaded with edges. The Wireframe view is an amazing one because it makes the object even
more three-dimensional. So with F4, you have Edged faces as it is called.
If you go to your Top view and tap F3 on your keyboard, it makes it shaded. Tapping F3 one
more time changes it to Wireframe view and F3 together with F4 is the Edged faces. However,
in a Plan view like the front left you may prefer to stay in the Wireframe view. Of course, the
Shaded mode can also be changed into something else as there are different styles of default
shading available, one of which is clay. You can get it by right-clicking on the style of the view.

The Color Pencil and all the options available under the different shading styles are nice for
demonstration purposes but you can still go with the default shading if that is what you would
mostly work with.

One thing that is very important because sometimes the views are really small and you work a lot
is for example, in the Top view or one of the Perspective and other views, you may want to
maximize the view, and here's where your next keyboard shortcut comes in. This is used to
maximize the view and to do this have to press ALT and W.

So ALT + W makes the active view maximized or back in the tiled view. That is also the same
button on your bottom right. ALT + W is one of the more complicated keyboard shortcuts so
always keep it in mind. Also, in almost all Autodesk programs the left hand is always on the left
side of the keyboard and the most important shortcuts are the ones that you can reach with your
left hand. This way, it is easier to learn them by heart pretty quickly. Now let's say you're back in
your Viewport style and the next thing you want to do is to change the content of a Viewport, for
example, you don't want a Top view where it is and for some reason, you want a Front view
there instead. You can simply press F for a front view and with that, you can switch the content
of any Viewport by typing the first letter of the content, for example, T for top, F for front, L for
left, P for perspective, C for camera and so on.
Keep in mind that not all of them work, for example, left works but right does not work as the
letter R is something else in the keyboard shortcut. So it's mostly top, front, left, perspective, and
camera view.
If you want to have an Isometric view we're going to show you how to get that now. If your
active view at the moment is the Perspective view and you want to change it into an Isometric
view, you have to press U then it says Orthographic. So you as a user are the Orthographic view
and P is the Perspective user.

You can switch between those two as well but again you can always switch if you forget the
keyboard shortcuts, just right-click here on "Perspective" and here you can also pick the ones
that are not possible. For example, bottom is not possible with B so that doesn't have a shortcut.
You can see the shortcuts here again and in front of the left top User Perspective are the cameras.
If you have cameras there it's a C and so on. We'll go back to the Top view and as we started;
top. Front, left, and perspective. If you want to navigate in your viewport you're going to start
with the Top view. The most important thing here is that you have to press the mouse wheel or
the middle mouse button and then you can do a pan movement, so the middle mouse pressed
will give you a pan movement. You will also see it better if you go into the Shaded view.
To roll the mouse you can zoom in and zoom out, but it's an important fact that when you roll in
and roll out the cursor is the center of the zoom of the roll in and rolls out, so when you hold it
over there you can see it rolls differently than when you hold it up top. It is always taking the
cursor as the center there; again with "Pan" you can move it.
Also, there is a zoom extension so when with all your objects, when you hit the letter C as in
zoom on your keyboard; it will zoom to the extent of your drawing. This means with all the
objects shown when you zoom in by hitting C, it shows you the whole scene. When you have
two objects selected for example and you now press zoom or C on the keyboard it will zoom to
the selection but if nothing is selected it zooms to the extent of your drawing, and if something is
selected here click on it then assume it will zoom to the selection. Keep this in mind.
Let's get back to our four views and let's have a look at the Perspective view and maximize it. It
is a little different here because we are now navigating in 3d space so when you hold your mouse
button it is still a pan movement but you can see it's a shift in perspective because it's a
Perspective view. What is more important in the Perspective view is an orbit movement. An
orbit movement is flying around the scene and we recommend selecting an object. So click on
any object, usually something in the center; you're zooming out a little bit, again rolling in and
rolling out this zoom in/zoom out and you're selecting one center object.
Now to fly around or to orbit around (as it's called) your scene you press and hold the Alt key,
then press the middle mouse button and move it. You should move the mouse in a slightly
circular motion. It looks like a letter J so you don't go around the place because that will move it
all around you should just go in slight movements till you know which direction you're going and
then slightly move it to the point where you want it. Select something then use the middle mouse
button as it allows you to navigate around. Again, zoom in/zoom out is the same thing that is in a
Perspective view but the same thing also works in an Isometric view, so when you go to U (as
in User keyboard shortcut) and then Orthographic, you can do the same thing; select something
and hold the alt key and the middle mouse button. The only difference is that in an Isometric
view, the Pan movement is not changing but with the Perspective view it is a parallel movement
because all the lines are still parallel due to the parallel Orthographic projection. Keep in mind
that selecting it and using the middle mouse button to do that is the most important thing about
the User interface.

How to navigate it and how to change the look of it

Let's switch that back using F3 to the wireframe view. Now you know how to change the content
with the ladder or with a right-click on the name, you know how to change the look with F3 and
F4 and you know how to navigate it by using the middle mouse button rolling in/rolling out or
Alt and middle mouse button if you want to do an orbit movement.
Remember to always select something first when you do an orbit movement and if you have a lot
of objects you have to select one to make it the center of the orbit. Now if you do it in the Top
view using Alt and the middle mouse button you can see that it switches into an Isometric view
and it's no longer a Top view but now an Orthographic view because it switched from the Top
down into an Orthographic view. To get the Top view back, simply hit the letter T on your
keyboard. These are the most important things about how to navigate your user interface.

Selecting objects
Let's have a look at selecting objects. We already showed you when you select an object from the
list you simply click on one, but if you want to select more than one you just select one and press
Shift + the last one. In other words, the first one + Shift + last one select all of them or the first
one + Ctrl, and then you can select different ones. If you want to unselect one using Ctrl you can
also unselect it here.
That is from the list, however, If you want to select it in your view you select it by clicking on it,
and then to select another one you click on the one, you'll lose the first selection. So to get more
than one, hold your Ctrl key all the time and you can select multiple objects. If you hold your
Ctrl key you can see the cursor change into a plus symbol, with this, you can now select multiple
objects.
If you want to unselect one, it doesn't work with holding the Ctrl key and clicking on it again
because it's not deselecting it, which is the Alt key. So if something is already selected, clicking
on it is deselecting it but what is much better is to draw a rectangle from the right to the left and
it will select all objects. The window is crossed so everything is selected. If you go from left to
right only objects which are fully inside are selected.

Renaming a box
Also, when you select the object you can see it because it's highlighted here in the list as well but
the name and the color of the object are best done here in the Isometric or the Orthographic
view. If you select a box here, for example, box number seven, it will be displayed as box
number seven and you can see the color as well. This is where you can change the name. So you
can change that to your box and it changes the name in the list.
Changing the color of a box
Now if you want to change the color of your box, you can just click on this little color icon and
choose another one of the standard colors here and it will switch the color. You can only change
the name of one object at a time, this means that if you have two objects selected, you get a
notification that you have two objects selected and you cannot change the name of two objects at
the same time but what you can do is that you can change the color of both objects the same time
and both objects will have the same color.

The object color is not that important because you will place materials on it which might change
the color, however, this is just the object color that only shows up when you go to Wireframe
view because when you go to a Shaded view, only the materials will show up the textures and
the colors that you place the materials on it.
Turning on/ off categories
We have used the Scene Explorer and now we are going to show you something in the Scene
Explorer. We have a list of all the objects as long as all categories here are turned on and you can
see all of them. If for example, you turn off the category that says "Geometry," then in your list
all the geometry objects are gone and all the others are shown like shapes, lights, and cameras.

There's a simple way to filter the content because usually you would have thousands of objects
here and you may not be very consequent in naming objects so you can work with categories like
this and by turning on or turning off certain categories, you can then find your objects easily.

Understanding Layers
One other way to organize your scene to structure your objects is by using layers. In layers, you
can simply group or put objects into one layer and by simply turning layers on and off you can
save some time. Up here on the left side, you can see that it says "Scene Explorer" and if you go
to the right it says "Layer Explorer."
If you click on it, it will open your Layer Explorer. Where it's placed doesn't matter as you can
have it floating around if you want it to. You can also dock it if you need it more often than the
Scene Explorer, just bring it here or underneath it doesn't matter you can bring it underneath
here. Now you will see it doesn't have any layers in here and all of them are on layer 0 which is
the default but you can import your geometry from a different program or create a new layer.

Creating a new layer

To create a new layer, you can see the button for that. Simply click on the button that says
"Create new layer" and your new layer is created.
Deleting a layer
To delete a layer, select the layer, right-click, and select the "Delete" option. There's also a delete
button a bit further if you increase the size.
How a Layer works
Now you have your new layer, you're going to place two objects here on your new layer. That is
simple because as soon as you select your two objects the two objects will show up here just like
in a list then you can take it and drag it down onto the layers and now they are placed in Layer
One. All the objects on one layer can be made invisible and also, single objects can be made
invisible. You can return them, hide them or bring them back. So in the Layers, you can play
with them especially when you import something that is important or when you want to structure
your scene. For example, if you want to place all the elements that you don't need all the time
such as people, cars, or trees or maybe you want to put the environment or all the neighboring
buildings on your project on one layer, just create layers and turn them on and off. You can hide
the Layer dialog if you don't need it because it uses up a lot of space and brings it back only
when you need it.
Sometimes you may see an object here in the list and it's not there in the scene, we're going to
show you how it works. If you select one object and you do a right mouse click you will see that
there are also a couple of things that have to do with height. For example, if you choose "hide
selection" it's gone. Turning objects on and off is by hiding and showing objects and when you
hide objects you can see it's grayed out. You can hide two or three by selecting them, right-
clicking, and selecting "hide selection" and you'll see how they're all hidden.

Let's say you're having hundreds of objects and these objects are hidden, it is a lot of work to
select them all and make them visible again here in the list. That is why we also have the right
mouse click and this is not only to hide selection but to also "unhide all" that unhide all objects.
So if the scene is getting more complex and you want to hide something, let's say you don't want
to hide the whole layer, instead, you want to hide just one object, you can do this using the
method above. You can also select one or a couple of them and hide all the others. Right-click,
"hide unselected" and the other one will be hidden. Another thing we want to look at is
"Isolation." Let's say you want to work only on a box, either a blue box or a green box, and to
work on this green box all the other things are not necessary, we have a keyboard shortcut for
that and that is Alt+ Q, which opens up the Isolation mode.
Now you have isolated your object with Alt+Q, the only problem is that you want all your others
back so how can you get all the others back? You already guessed it. You can either do it by
turning them on here in the list (turn them visible) or right-click and "unhide all." Try isolating
again by selecting a box and then doing the Alt+Q. There is also a button in the middle called
Isolate selection and by clicking on it you get all the things back. If you take one object and hide
it manually, and then you select this object and you use Alt+Q it will isolate this one object. Now
if you go back out of the isolation you can see that this one object is still hidden. You can see
that after going out of the Isolation mode it returns to the same state of hidden and not hidden
objects.
Let's do it again: First, hide objects, use Alt +Q to isolate an object or objects, then go out of the
selection mode by right-clicking, and selecting "unhide all" (the ones which were hidden will get
unhidden) then select one Alt+Q or use the button to get out of the Isolation mode.
In the user interface in earlier versions, you could go into the Isolation mode with Alt+Q and
then one more click at Alt+Q gets you out of the isolation mode which was quite handy. Now
you have to go down here and click there.

Review Questions
1. What is a viewport?
2. How do you select an object?
3. Draw a box, change the color to blue and rename it as "Blue Box."
 CHAPTER 8
THE FILE MENU
The File menu here is like the basic menu which you can see in all other software which includes
options like saving, opening, importing, exporting, and other options. In this chapter, we are
going to start with some basics and we will go through some advanced tips and tricks. The first
option we have is "New." If you make something in your Viewport but you just want to start
again and erase everything, you can simply go to "New." After that, you can choose to save it if
you want or just start and choose "Don't save."

In this new viewport, we have reset it so it goes to the default template of your box. Another
option we have here is "Open." If you have an existing Max file, this option allows you to open it
or open your most recent files. We also have all the backup files where you can access the
location.
In Max 2023, we have a new toolbar for Autobackup. It is a very cool feature and we will talk
about it later.

The next option which is also an important one is "Save." You can just hit Ctrl+S, then choose
"Save." You can save it in a previous version of 3ds Max if you need it or just with the latest, so
you choose the name and then save it. We also have the "Save as" option. This is if you want to
save your file with another name.
There is another option here. If you are going to do a project and at some point, you decide to do
some alternative or from this point, you can't go back, you can just put another name. For
example, if you have your project named "Villa 1" and you hit the plus icon, it automatically
saves as "Villa 2" so you don't have to put numbering as it will automatically do it for you.

We also have "Selected." Let's talk about "Save selected." If you have a few objects or elements
in your viewport and you just want to save a box separately in a new 3ds Max file, you'll accept
"Save selected" and it will save that one box but it won't save all the scenes. The other option
we have under the File menu is "Archives." If you hit "Archive," it will put all the references and
texture materials like an image file or linked file into one zip file, from here, you can send this
file to a client or your co-worker so that they can start working on it with all the necessary files
and which when they open the file nothing is missing. This option is very useful as it enables us
to put all associated assets into one file. We have the "Import" option here and under that, we
have other options like Merge, Replace, Link Revit, and Autocad.
In Import, if you have a non-native 3d file that is not from 3ds max, for example, let's say you
have a file from Revit; you are going to upload it using this option. It depends on the format
though. If you are going to import fbx or avg, you are going to upload them here. Note that the
import setting is different. So let's say you want to import from AutoCAD, the options you have
is a whole different thing.
Let's say we want to import materials, we can import the camera daylight system, lights, and
beam info (though we want only the materials), and then when we hit "Ok," we will have our 3ds
Max model the viewport directly from Revit.
For the Merge option, what this is going to do is simply merge an existing 3ds Max scene from
a different file. If you have a native 3ds Max file and you want to just merge it here you can use
this one. Let's go over to "Replace." This is useful if you want to replace an asset or object in the
scene with another one from a different 3ds Max file or another format.
We have Link Revit which is a very useful one too. It is simply a live link for if you change
anything in your Revit file and save it, it will change automatically here also in the 3ds Max.
There are many views and we have some other options here. You can choose the view you want.
We have just one 3d view so we are going to choose this one if we want to read a skill but it's not
active, therefore you can't use it so we are going to simply attach the file. So if we go to the Revit
file and add something else, we are going to save the file. We will go to the 3ds Max file,
References, and Manage links; if you see a small flag there it means that in the original file,
there is a change in the origin file so you can just reload the file. Instead, we'll see all the new
changes there in the "Options." Autocad also works the same way.
We also have the "Export" function which means you can export from a 3ds Max file to another
format like fbx object or dwg, (there are a bunch of formats that you can choose to export your
file, especially if you are working with another software). You can send it to something like
Motion Builder or Mudbox and a bunch of other things with the import. You will get to know
them as you become more familiar with them and you will learn to use them.

Review Questions
1. Mention 7 actions that can be carried out using the File menu.
2. Why is the function of the "Archive" option?
3. Create a box, come and pyramid and save only the box.
 CHAPTER 9
THE MAIN TOOLBAR
In this chapter, we are going to talk about the 3ds Max main toolbar as shown in the image
below.

The first two comments are for undo and redo. They are the same as in any other software,
however, if you right-click on one of them you will see a list in which you can choose the step,
activity, or action you want to go back to and since we haven't done anything here we don't see
it.

Now let's try to make some adjustments or move, and then let's check it again. You can see we
now have a few steps that we can go back to. It also works for a redo.
The next one is Link and Unlink. With Link, you can connect two objects and make one of them
the parent and the other one the child with this parent in relation. If you do any change to your
parent object, it will affect the child too but the relation is one-way relation, which means if you
make a change to the child it won't affect the parent.
To use this feature, you have to click on the "Link" button, select your object, hold and drag, and
drop your mouse cursor to the current object. Now you have linked the objects together. If you
move, scale, or rotate your parent object it will affect the child too. This also works on animation
and it is useful in many ways. The other option will simply unlink two objects. The next one is
"bent to a spacewalk." A spacewalk creates a force field that will deform other objects and
create effects like wave blowing, wind bumps, and so on.
With "bend to a space warp" you can link your object to that field or that space. For example,
let's make one spacewalk to see how it's going to work. We will go to the "Create" tab of the
Command panel and go to "Space warp."
From this menu, you can choose which category you want to select for your space warp. We'll
select "wave" for illustration. If we click and drag, we can make our field and if we release our
mouse and move it now we can control the way. To leave that command, we will click and right-
click. We have so many options here; you can modify your wave field. We are going to make
another object like a teapot and then bend them together as you can see; now the two objects are
the key part. It's getting a very nice effect so you can see we can make this kind of effect and feel
and bend the object to that field so it's just an effect on that object.
The next one is the Selection filter. With this one, you can specify the selection to work in a
certain category and affect the other ones. For example, if in your scene you have geometries,
shapes, and light, you can limit your selection to one of these categories, let's say just two
shapes. However, if we have other geometries, we can just select the shape. For example, if we
go to the “Geometry” menu we can just select geometry. This is very useful in that if you have a
large scene with many objects and you want to select just shapes or lines, you can use it.
The next one is the "Select object" feature. This feature helps you to select without doing any
modification like moving or scaling; it is just for selection. The next one is "Select by name"
with the shortcut H. If in your scene you have many objects, you can select them by their names.
You can easily select it with your "select by name" window, then select from the scene here if
you find your object. You can also select it from the list for example, and if you have any type of
shapes like geometry, light, or cameras, you can filter the selection.
If you don't know where the object is, let's say you are somewhere in your large scene, you'll go
to "select by name" and select your object. Now that it is in "Selected" mode if you hit Z it will
zoom extend your object and you have your object. The next feature here is the selection region.
By default, it's rectangular shape so if you click on your viewport and drag it you will see a
rectangular shape and it will be your selection region. If you click and hold you will see the other
options such as circular shape. We also have Font selection that enables you to select your fonts.
We have Lasso spray. You can use them in different situations but by default, it is rectangular in
shape. For selecting, we have two modes: window and crossing.
If your selection region crosses any object it will be selected but if you click one time on this
icon and you start your selection region, only the objects that are inside of this window will be
selected. The next one is the Move command. If you select "Move" and then select an object, the
Gizmo will appear. The Gizmo has three axes X, Y, and Z. You can click and hold on one of the
axes and start moving your mouse and your object on that axis. However, if you want to move in
two directions at the same time, for example, in the X and Y directions, you can go over to this
rectangular area, click and start moving. You can also go to those two but if you want to move in
all directions at the same time, you can click on the middle of the gizmo and start in every
direction.

At the bottom of the Max main UI, we have some input boxes. You will see some letters in front
of them and these are the axes (X Y Z). If you put a number you will be able to move your object
along that axis with the amount or value that you want. For example, we will put 1 meter here.
If you look closely, you'll see the Spinners here. If you right-click on them it will clear the input
and reset it to a default value. So you can put any number or value and it will go in that direction.
Also, if you right-click on this icon you will have the menu or you can also press F12 and the
menu will appear.
We have two options here: Absolute world and Offset world.

Absolute World is the location of your object in the 3ds Max worldwide viewport. With this,
you can specify a value or a point in this on the grade that we want to be with this. You can
specify a gripping point on the grade, for example, 1.
On the other hand, it doesn't matter where your object is, you can move it from that point with
the specific value. Let's say we want to move it from this point to 1 meter on the x-axis and we
don't know which location this is, so this is also a useful thing because if you select the rotation
or scale, the shape of the gizmo will change but the basics are the same, you have the axes. You
can then use this to input from the bottom and you can use this menu to do all the things that you
could do. While you can do moving and scaling, we also have another option here which is to
scale by percentage. These displays the percent for the scale and from our illustration above you
can see we were working on a percentage of 100 for our object. If you want to double it you have
to put in 200 and so on.
Another feature we have is "Select and place." With this feature, you can simply select your
object and move it without limits and you can also use it with the snap tool. So when you select
your object, the Gizmo is at the bottom center of your geometry. For example, when it's here, if
you want to scale it will start to scale from the bottom so if you go to your Command panel and
Hierarchy tab, you can hit "active pivot only" and with that, you can now change the pivot
point to the center of the object, for instance, or just move your pivot point wherever you want.
If you hit it again it will be active. Now if you scale your object, you can again come here and
replace it and it will go to default. In 3ds Max we also have the Transform toolbar. You can
access it from "Edit," and then you'll see the Transform toolbar from here.
In the "Align pivot" section you can align your keyboard to many more maximums in the X Y
Z direction or center origin of the X Y Z direction. Originally, if you want to put in great work
from the lack of the center of your object you have something very useful and that's the Rotation
feature. With it, you can rotate your objects. You have some degrees you can choose from, you
can change the size of your object, and you can know exactly the size of your object. If the size
of your object consists of weird numbers and you want it to be rounded numbers, you can put
those numbers here.
Looking at our illustration again, we will set this number all but it's more in the z-direction. This
size is giving us the size of this bonding box but how can you see the bounding box? If you click
Shift Chair you can see the bounding box of your object. This size is the size of the only box.
Now we will right-click on the "Scale" or use the shortcut W and as you can see in the image
below, it is no longer 100 percent.
We change the binding box but for this one, it didn't release it and it didn't re-calculate the
binding box; this will cause some problems if you export your object to other software but if you
go to Settings and preset x4, that's reset selected and now as you can see they are 100. If we go
to the Modify tab, we can see that we have a modifier for Reset x4. This is very useful especially
when you want to export your object to other software.
Now let's talk about a new feature that 3ds Max 2023 offers and that is the "Snap working tool."
You can access that by going to Tools. If you click on the top edge of this menu you can snap
here. You also have it in your right-click menu since you have all the options here. Also, if you
right-click on the space of your toolbar you can select the Snap working tool. Let's make some
modifications to our object to make it more interesting. If we select "Place working pivot" we
can place our pivot point on the surface aligned to this work surface. So if we click and release, it
will automatically align our pivot point but if we click and hold, we can rotate our pivot.
If we move our object, it moves but the pivot point will still be in the same spot. Now if we hit
"selection pivot" it will go back to that object. If we hit "line working pivot," we can rotate or
align it to this one edge that we are interested in.
If we go to "Reset working pivot" it will be again independent and we can move another object
of our scene from that point or again rotate it from that point. If we move from Align pivot to
Working pivot it will adjust the pivot to the current position and orientation of the working pivot.
Notice that all of this is happening in the "Working pivot system" which includes Place,
Selection, Location, Align, and Reset.
If you come here and select "View" it will go to the default system of 3ds Max Pivot in which
the z-axis is always on the top. We also have other coordination systems which we will talk
about in a moment, the Place pivot point binding box. If you are in "Place" mode it will give you
additional 24 points to place or snap your pivot point. This is very handy if you want additional
points to work with. The cool thing is that it is created from a working pivot, now we have a
pivot here and we can start working on this grade. From our example, it is very cool and very
empty and this one would make a helper point which it is called.
You can use it to snap or do anything you want. If you change the view now it will stay here.
Let's say we want to place this object to a point, it is going just one axis. Importantly, as you'll
notice we wanted to move this object but it was moving in the Z direction; so if we click on one
axis it will just move on that axis, if we click on these two and start moving it will move on that
axis, so sometimes you would want that. If you flip three of them and you don't want it to
accidentally change, you can turn off the Gizmo temporarily and start working and now if we
move it, we will be moving it in every direction without the keys interfering because if we
accidentally select that one we will be just moving in a particular direction. Also, if you just want
to move that one and you don't want to mess it up you can turn it off, but with the shortcut
Shift+X.
In earlier versions, it was the shortcut X but now that is for global search. If you want to make a
shortcut for this, you can go to Customize Hotkey Editor. In our "Customize" section we have
specified Shift+X for this one and we will be enabling it in the Coordination system. The next
feature we have is "View screen" and what this does is it will orient the pivot point to a screen.
Looking at the view we have the World, we have the Parent, and Local. Before these working
pivots we used to work with locals and as you can see in the image below it is oriented to the
face of the objects.

Let's go to view one box. What it does is the first one will use the pivot point center, the second
one will go to the center of our object, the gizmo will go to the center of the object and the last
one will use our transform coordination system. This is it for the pivot point. The next feature is
"Select and manipulate." If you're in Active mode, and you select "Select and manipulate"
you won't see anything because you have to be in Edit mode to see some options.
Let's make a plane and let's see how it's going to work. We will add some statements and then
add "Edit value modifier" and set one edge. Now we have "Select and manipulate." If you hit
one object it will shift your selection to the loop and will shift it in range. If you hold Ctrl it will
add to your selection and now if you release the control it will shift all of your selection.
Sometimes this can be useful but most people may not use it. For the keyboard shortcut, there are
two kinds of shortcuts in 3ds Max: the ones which are in the main UI and there are some which
are useful when you are in Edit mode; these are with the same keys as when you are in the main
UI.
For example, let's go to the "Add keys" and then to "Material Editor." It is searching out keys
so it is assigned material to selection. We will go to the Material Editor and we can use that as
well. We'll select this object and hit that option.

As you can see from the image above it's not assigned the material instead, the angular snap is
activating. If we search again, we'll see that angular snap is still activated for the same material
and we have this in a few categories, so what we can do is activate this one. Now if we are in
Materials, the Material Editor will work and not the global shortcut. If we turn it off, the glue
will show that we'll start working again. The next feature is the 3d Snap. If we make an object,
we can snap into a 3d world and move our object wherever we want in the 3d world. If you click
and hold, you'll see the other option. This one is 2ds. It will work just for the X and Y axis but it
won't work on the Z axis. The next one is 2.5 snap. This will allow us to snap in 3d dimension
but we can create a 2d object that snaps in 3d.
As you can see from the image above, they are not in the same direction or orientation. We will
go to the front and then try to make a line in this 3d dimension. As you can see from the
illustration above, we are snapping in 3d space but we have a line drawn in 2d. This is a very
useful feature. The next one is Angular snap or Angle snap. It works mostly with rotation. Now
if you start to rotate your object you are freely rotating but if you want to rotate with a certain
angle you have to activate this.
If you right-click you can specify which angle to snap, for example, we will use 10 degrees and
now we are snapping in every 10 degrees. The next one is the percentage and obviously, it's
going to work for scaling. As you can see from the image below we are snapping with each
percentage.
You can graph. If you right-click you will see here we will just be mapping in which 10 or 20
percent. This is also very useful. The next one is the Sniper snap target. When this is off it's
going to randomly increase or decrease. If we set the Sniper on 10, for example, what that means
is that if you activate an object it will add a value of 10 to the current value and now we are
going with each value of 10 this Sniper will have it everywhere. However, if you click and hold
and move your mouse, it wouldn't work but if you just click, it will start affecting you.
The next one is the "Selection set." Let's see what that means. We are going to make about 10
copies of some objects, then we are going to select them and go to "Manage selection set." We
are going to create a new set, name it "box" and then add all these boxes to that Selection set.
Now we will do some modifications and change them. Let's say they are trees, for example, we
want to select them all but now it's not very easy to do that as you can see from the illustration
below.
However, if we come here from the list and select "box" we now have all of them selected. The
next feature is Mirror. First of all, you have to select your object, and then select "Mirror." We
have Transform and we have Geometry. We usually use Transform because Geometry won't
mirror word space modifiers especially if you want to mirror your object but you want a non-
mirrored word for space modifier so you can mirror in x-axis or both axes such as XY, YZ or
XZ. You can specify the distance that you want to make this copy (let's say 1 meter), you can
choose "No colon" then select "Copy" and "Instance" which is interchangeable a copy of your
original object, meaning if you add some modifiers or changes to your original object it will
change both original and copied version because it is a two-way relation.
If you want to make one of them unique and not affect the other you can right-click and "Make
Unit." The last feature is Reference. Reference is a one-way instance, which means that if you
change something to the current, let's say you add a modifier to the parent, it will pass to the link
and reference it to the object but if you add a modifier to the reference object it won't be passed
to the original object. Now if we add another file here, it's not passing through the original one
but if we add one here, you can see we have two of them. The next one is Align. With this
feature, you can align two objects together. For example, going back to our illustration, we are
going to select this object and align it. We will select the word one then we can choose to align
just in one direction such as Z and let's say a minimum of all current objects and a minimum of
the target object. Now they are overlapping.
If we change it to maximum, it's on top but if we change this one to minimum it will go to the
bottom of the object. There are some other options that you can go through after which you hit
"Apply." We can do another alignment from this position, for example, let's align it on the y-
axis, add the minimum and maximum values here, and then apply and again, you can align the
position centers. The next one is the Scene Explorer. What this does is show you every object
that you have in your scene. You can filter them, select them, delete them, type their name, or go
through the other functions here and you can type it here if you have a large monitor. We also
have the Layers. Here you can create layers, modify, and add an object to layers and you can
take it here. So for example, after we make a new layer and now this is our active layer. We had
an object selected when we created it and that will automatically move the object to that layer. If
we select another object and hit "Create" it will create it and move the object. If you want to
create without moving you have to select nothing at first before you create a new layer after
which you can now select some of the objects and drag inside the layer. Another thing you can
do is to use the "Add to active layer" option and from there you can move the object into your
active layer. We have many other options in this layer, one of which is the toolbar. Here you can
use the toolbar layers and it is very useful. This one will show and hide the ribbons which we did
earlier, remember, if you hide the ribbons it will give you more space with your viewport. If you
are modeling, you will have some options otherwise you can just turn it off and you'll see well.
We have the Curve Editor which is a graph-based editor for animation.
We also have the Symmetric view which is like a node-based scene explorer. With this feature,
you can make a relationship between objects. Just select them and you'll have access to
everything in your scene materials like objects. We have the Material Editor on the left side.
We have the Maps and Materials. We have the Viewport which is a node-base. For example,
you can add a fall-off material and you can add other things here. We have the node-based
material editor and on the right, if you click on each material or each manual you see the
settings. If we double-click on this one we have something useful. This setting is if we right-
click or double-click on one object. Here, we also have the older version of our material editor
which is a compact one. If you are working on a complex scene and you want to see your
material you can use this one which is still very popular. Some may not like it but a lot of people
are using 3ds Max for this one because it is very handy when working in complex scenes but you
can use the Slate Material Editor. We have the Render setting. Here we can specify in the
ranging and we have all the settings of our render including render frame or frame buffer for
render. This one's for 3ds Max itself. We have the Corona rendering. This is a rainbow of the
corona. If you have a V-ray, it is different.
If you hit this one it will start rendering and if you click and hold you can have Interactive
rendering. We will go deeper into this later in this book.

Review Questions
1. What is an Active layer?
2. Explain the term "Helper point."
3. Create 2 boxes, a square and a rectangle. Select the rectangle and place it on the
square.

CHAPTER 10
NAVIGATION
In this section, we are going to talk about navigations and we will start with those icons that fall
here. We are going to talk about shortcuts as well.

Zooming
The first one is zooming and the shortcut is Alt+Z. If you press the icon you will have this
command activated. If you left-click and move your mouse you're going to be able to zoom in or
zoom out.
Another way to do that is if you Press Ctrl+Alt and move your mouse by pressing the middle
button of the mouse which is the wheel (Ctrl+Alt+middle button of the mouse), you have the
same result. The second one is to "zoom all." What this does is that whichever zoom you are
going to do in the active viewport will do it in all others all other viewports as well. The next one
is "Zoom Extend selected." What it does is if you select one object and press "Zoom Extend
selected" it will bring it to the center of your viewport and zoom it out. There's also a shortcut
for this and that is the Z. If you select your object and simply press Z you will have the same so
if you press this one and hold it, there is a pop-up menu. There is another icon here, "Zoom
Extend" and what this does is that it extends all of your objects and not just one selected object.
This is very handy.
For example, if you are moving around in your scene and you press this icon, you will find your
object. Also, if you press Z without selecting anything it will do the same thing. So if you select
the object and press Z it is Zoom Extend and if you are not selecting anything and pressing Z it
will zoom extends the next one and it will do the same thing with the four viewports.
If we select that object and hit it, we zoom select this object in our four viewports. We are going
to again deselect our objects by clicking an empty area of the viewport and it will be deselected.
If we now go to press and hold it we are going to select the second one, which is the Zoom
Extend in all four viewports without selecting anything. The next one we are going to look at is
the zoom region and what this does is quite obvious, in that it zooms a particular region which is
in one viewport.

Field of view
If you are going to use this one it will break your Perspective view. It will be changed but if you
want to go back to being a perspective you have to simply change the viewport and come back to
Perspective again.
For example, we are going to hit T and it will go to the Top view and then we'll hit P and it will
be perspective again. The next one is Pan View. If you select each command and you are in the
middle of something and you want to go out or cancel, you can right-click to do that. There's no
need to use the pan always because if you hit the middle key of the mouse you have the pan
function and if you release it, the hand will go if you press and hold on the icon.
The next one is 2D Pan View which we already talked about. What it does is you can zoom in
on a picture without going inside the Perspective effect and the perspective won't change. Now if
you want to go out you come here and just uncheck the tick and you are out. The next one is
walking with a white walk-through. You can walk inside your scene. If you are in a video game,
if you press W it will take you forward and if you press A you will go to the left, D takes you to
right and S to the back. You can also use the arrow keys and it will do the same thing. If you
want to go around your screen, this is a very good option.

Orbit
With this, you can orbit around your scene but it will work like it has more functions when you
select an object. For example, we are going to select an object and zoom extend it. Now if we hit
"Orbit" it will work better.
There's another thing about this orbit in that you can orbit around an axis. Going back to our
illustration, if you come to that scene you can orbit from this axis or the other axis, so it presents
you with some options to use this axis and this is very handy sometimes. You may just want to
go around your model and it has a few options that are very similar to each other.

If you don't want to use this Orbit you can simply hold Alt and the middle button of your
mouse and you can orbit into your scene without the other options that this orbit has. If you
select one object you can go around it much better and it's sometimes very annoying to work
with this one so most of the time you will use this command Alt and the middle button of your
mouse. If you're using the wheel in your mouse you could go up and down, you can zoom in and
zoom out
Review Questions
1. What is the difference between "Zoom All" and "Zoom Extend" functions?
2. Mention 3 types of views.
3. In your workspace, make the Perspective viewport your active layer and apply the
"Zoom Extend" feature.
 CHAPTER 11
CONFIGURING VIEWPORTS
By default, 3ds Max Viewports are laid out in a traditional four Viewport configuration. We
have a single Perspective view and three Orthographic panels and they're all the same size but
we can change the size. We can also lay out the viewports with different configurations.

If you hover your mouse over one of the borders between viewports you'll see an arrow. You can
click and drag and resize the viewports any way you need to. If you click in the center you can
also resize it.
Right-click in the center and choose "Reset layout" and it'll be restored to all the viewports
being the same size.
Configuring panels using viewport layout tabs
If you want a different layout then you can do that from the "Viewport Layout" tabs panel over
here on the left. For example, you may want to have one large viewport and three small ones,
one way to do that is from the little arrow here, go to "Create new" in the Viewport Layout tab
and you see a list of Standard viewport layouts. Here, you can see one that has three small ones.

Let's say we want to have the big one on the right instead of the left, we'll click on that
corresponding option there and now the Perspective view is large and the orthographic views are
small. Additionally, we have a "New" Viewport Layout button over here and we can switch
between layouts quickly with just a click. This is very helpful.
We can change what's displayed in each one of these panels. Up there you'll see there's a label
for each one of them, you can click on that label and then choose something else. Let's say we
want to see the Top view instead of the Bottom view, we'll switch it back to the Top view and it
switches back.

For a more traditional viewport layout and once you've set that up you may not need the
Viewport Layout tabs anymore there. You can hide that; right-click on one of the textured bars
on any panel and you can disable the Viewport Layout tabs.

Review Questions
1. What is the standard viewport layout?
2. Explain the process involved in creating a new layout.
3. Create a new viewport layout tab.
 CHAPTER 12
CHOOSING A TRANSFORM CENTER
When you transform an object or objects, you also have the option to choose the center around
which those transformations take place. In other words, you can have an object rotate around
another object or you can have a bunch of objects rotate around their common center and that's
the default behavior.
If we go to the Rotate tool (for this illustration, we are using the View coordinate system), Over
there on the right we have a button and that button will change depending on what we select.
Right now the tooltip says "Use pivot point Center."

Now if we select multiple objects, let's say we drag a rectangle and select all of these, that button
will change and it will say "Use selection Center." You can see that the Rotate Gizmo is in the
common center of all of those objects or more specifically, the Rotate Gizmo is placed at the
common center of all of the pivot points for those objects are the anchor points.
So we can rotate all of those around their selection center or we could go up to this button which
is a flyout, hold that button down and choose a different option.
The one on the top is "Use Pivot Point Center" and when we activate that now, each object will
rotate around its own pivot point or its own coordinate system. Finally, we also have "Use
Transform Coordinate Center" which is the bottommost icon on this flyout and in this mode;
you can choose what you want to rotate around. To do that you have to choose a reference from
the drop-down. If you just have "View selected" which is the default then you're just going to be
transforming around the selection center but if you choose something else you'll get a different
result. We'll choose "world" and now the Rotate Gizmo is positioned at the origin or the center of
the world.

We can rotate all the objects around the origin if we want. We could rotate all the objects around
some other object and to do that we would go up to the drop-down list here and choose "Pick."
Once we click on that, then we need to select the object that we want to be our reference. For this
illustration, we will click on the cone and now that's the center for transformation. Now when we
rotate, everything's going to spin around that cone. So if you choose "Transform Coordinate
Center" here at the bottom, then you also have to make a choice here and if we want to we could
switch back to "View" and that's going to default back to "Use Selection Center" or we could go
back to that cone that we picked earlier and rotate around it

These rules apply to objects as well as sub-objects or parts of objects and they come in very
handy when you want to manipulate a whole bunch of faces or vertices.

Review Questions
1. What is Rotate Gizmo?
2. What are the rules of choosing a transformation center?
3. Create three objects, a cone, sphere and pyramid. Move the circle, rotate the cone
and decrease the size of the pyramid.
 CHAPTER 13
CUSTOMIZING COLORS
In a previous chapter, we defined the spacing for the home grid and we learned about the
difference between major and minor grid lines. We saw that due to the default color scheme, it's
very difficult to differentiate between the major and minor grid lines so in this chapter, we are
going to customize the colors of the viewport and the grid lines. Go to the Customize menu and
choose "Customize user interface."

In this dialog go to the "Colors" tab and at the top, we have a drop-down list that's labeled
viewports and in the section below it scroll down until you find the "Viewport background."
Select that and now you see the color currently assigned to the viewport background. Notice the
difference between that color swatch and the viewport background itself; this is an artifact of the
gamma correction of the display in 3ds Max. This color swatch is usually not accurate, you're
going to have to experiment a little bit to get the viewport background color you want. Click on
the Swatch and the Color Selector launches. You can change the value here but you won't see
anything change here, you need to define a value and then click "Apply colors." For this
illustration, we want a value of 100 so you'll just highlight that Value field, type in a value of
100, click "OK" and then click "Apply colors." Now the viewport background has been changed
and you can navigate around in the view. You can dolly back with the mouse wheel and now it's
clear. You can see the major grid lines are darker than the minor grid lines. You can also
customize that color. Back in the "Customize User Interface" dialog you have your colors tab
selected from the Elements drop-down list. You'll choose Grid Lines and this brings up grids.
Now you are met with options such as "Set by color" and "Set by intensity." The latter, "Set by
intensity" is easier to work with so going to do that once again you already know what you want
so you're just going to plug it in, give it an intensity value of 19 and click "Apply colors". Now
you've got a much clearer indicator of your grid spacing, these have been made a bit darker. You
can save this. Currently, if you exit 3ds Max and relaunch it you will get these colors once
again. If 3ds max crashes or exits unexpectedly then this might not get saved so you can save it
explicitly. At the bottom of the "Customize User Interface" dialog we have a "Save" button.
Click on that and you'll be taken to a mysterious folder. Simply go to the "Save" in the drop-
down list and just select that you can see it's saving into the Program Files "Autodesk 3ds Max,
English, US, UI" folder.
We have a default file name of "Max start UI.C al Rx" and that's the 3ds Max file format for
Interface colors. Notice that there's already one in here labeled "default UI" and that is as the
name indicates the default User Interface colors. You don't want to overwrite that in case you
want to get back to the default colors. Now the file name has been entered in here as "Max start
UI" and because it's labeled "Max start UI" that means the next time you launch 3ds Max this
color scheme will be invoked and not the default one so you'll click Save and that's been stored.
You can close the "Customize User Interface" dialog and that's how to change up the colors of
the viewport background and the gridlines.

Review Questions
1. What are color swatches?
2. What are the options available for setting up your preferred colors?
3. Change the color of your Front viewport to Green.
 CHAPTER 14
IMPORTING AND EXPORTING FILES
As you use this software, you will have to import or export files so this chapter is dedicated to
showing you how to import and export files from to and from 3ds Max.

Importing files
In this section, we are going to look at how to import ArchiCAD into 3ds Max. What you'll do is
first, in your ArchiCAD program, make sure your work is in 3d mode, then go to "File" and
"Save as." In the window that opens up, go to the file type and look for the file extension which
is "3dStudio File." There are various files here but the 3dStudio file is the one that is compatible
with ArchiCAD.

After selecting the file type, you can now enter your file name and save it into a particular
location like your desktop, where you can easily locate the file. After you press "Save,"
something will pop up.
Make sure "Elements types - surface" is selected and the drawing unit here should be set to 1000
and in mm, then press "OK." After converting to a 3ds file, we can now import our file into 3ds
Max. In your 3ds Max, go to "File," then "Import."

Under "Import," you will see other options there such as "Import," "Merge," and "Link." The
difference between Import and Merge here is if you want to bring in a file and you want it to
override the existing setting on your scene, you'll use Import. But if you have a setting on your
scene and you just want to bring in an object, you'll use Merge. In other words, Merge is used for
bringing in an external object into an existing scene without touching the settings of your scene
but Import overwrites the existing settings on your scene so it is always advisable to use Merge.
You'll click on "Merge" then locate your file, and double-click to open. You will get a prompt
asking you to confirm you want to merge your object. Click "OK."

With that, you'll see your object on your screen. You can enlarge or maximize your view then
press C and you'll see your scene displayed. This is where you can start working on your object.

Exporting and uploading Gltf file

This section talks about how to export the gltf file format from 3ds Max. First, you'll open up the
gltf viewer and then go to Max.
With your object loaded on the screen, go to the Material editor and search for gltf. Drag the
material and hook up all the textures.

Now let's export. Select the object and go to "File," "Export" then "Export selected."
Give it a name and from the drop-down menu choose the gltf file format. Click on "Save" and
click on "Export."

Your gltf is exported. You can now proceed to check with the viewer.
Review Questions
1. Mention 2 external programs that work with 3ds Max.
2. Explain the process involved in exporting a file.
3. Using any of the objects you have created, export the object as Gltf file.
 CHAPTER 15
PREFERENCES
In this chapter, we will show you how to set up your options and preferences especially if you
are opening 3d Studio Max for the first time. As you open 3ds Max for the first time, you'll be
presented with a lovely animated splash screen and unless you want to see it every time you open
the software, uncheck "Show this welcome to screen at startup" and then you can hit the X to
close things out.

3ds Max works with four discreet views of the same model space, in this case, most often we're
only going to want to see one view at a time so know there's a faint yellow line around the
outside of the current Perspective view and that's the one that we're going to hold onto at the
moment. If you mouse down to the lower right corner you can hit the maximize viewport toggle
or hit Alt + W on our keyboard and now we can see that we have maximized our viewport and
taken real advantage of our screen real estate. The other thing we want to do is there's a grid
visible on the screen. It is eminently unhelpful and in most cases, it is set up to display 10 by 10
units. You're going to hit the letter G on the keyboard to get rid of them. Now we can come up to
the Edit menu, the Tools menu, the Customize menu and we have the Preferences menu.
Within this Preferences menu there are a lot of tabs so let's just go through the ones that you
would need. The first thing you're going to do, especially if the computer you're working on has
a decent amount of operating memory is to change the number of undo levels from 20 to 50.

You will notice everything starts getting slow but as you reduce the number of these undo levels
it will reduce the RAM load on the machine. After that, you can tab over to Files there and
change where they want to do a full backup or just incremental saves. You can decide to leave
things alone but this is also where you can change how often the backup interval is. 5 minutes is
way too often so you can change mine to 15 especially as file sizes and models start getting
larger. Under Viewport, you can change the way that certain things are shown or displayed. The
important thing here is to check your display driver if it's showing something that says Nvidia or
AMD. You're good if it says anything about Intel graphics, you need to make a change and make
sure you are using the discrete graphics card that's embedded within the computer. If your
computer does not have a discrete graphics card you can still use 3ds Max but it's just going to be
in Slower Interaction mode.
You're going to leave that alone but note, if you come from other software modeling packages
you can change the way the mouse feels and looks under gamma. LUT stands for LookUp
Tables but in looking here at gamma we want to make sure that when you squint your eyes the
outer checkerboard shading here and the inner gray square blend into one another and you can't
see an edge. For now, the current gamma of 2.2 is fine on your monitor. Under the Rendering
tab, the only thing that you want to double-check here is to make sure we're set for true color.
You want to make sure your super black threshold is at 15. If you notice you're doing darker
scenes, especially nighttime scenes and you're losing detail in your shadows, reduce this
threshold.
Under radiosity, the only thing that you may need to do here is to make sure that the automatic
process is turned on. For animation, we're not going to do too much here. The same thing is true
with inverse kinematics which replies to animating characters. Under Gizmos, this is where you
can change the size of the icons on-screen that help you move and adjust objects. Note: here, you
can change relative size percentages if they're too big or too small.

Review Questions
1. What happens when you don't set up your preferences?
2. Mention one important setup that should be done in the Preference tab.
3. Being back the welcome startup screen that was hidden.

OBJECT CREATION AND MANIPULATION

 CHAPTER 16
OBJECT CREATION
In this chapter, we are going to show you a couple of methods on how to create objects. We are
going to start with a simple object by adjusting its parameters. We're going to add a few extended
primitives and then we will try some Boolean operations. At the end of this chapter, we are also
going to show you how to render a picture, how to set up the perspective, render it, and save it.

Standard Primitives
Let's get started with some of the standard primitives. We already showed you how to create
boxes and we have worked with boxes a lot. Let's start with creating one box here and also in all
the views. You're going to turn off the background grid and back concrete.

We will go through all those standard primitives starting with the box and then proceed to the
next one which is a Sphere; before we proceed we're going to quickly show you what happens if
you compare it there in front view.
Before you proceed to create a sphere you will see that the sphere is created from the center and
that means if you create it in the Top View which is where we always create our objects, the
center of the sphere will be on the x, y plane and you will notice that half the sphere is going
down. That's why you don't create it this way but before you start dragging it you're going to
choose the sphere and you'll click "Base to pivot." That means when you create it now it will put
the Pivot Point in the base of the sphere and they will both stand on the same ground plane.

The next object you can create is a Plane. The plane is just like a rectangle, you can draw it but
it's a two two-dimensional object only so it only has length and width, and no thickness.
On the ground plane, you can now put all your other objects; for example, there on the right side
at the top you can put a Cone.

You'll start by dragging out in a circular shape then let the mouse go and define the height. Click
again and now you can have the cone go either inward or outward. You'll go all the way in and
make the top one zero. As we proceed we are going to take a look at the parameters a little bit
later. For now, let's look at another sphere called the Geosphere. With the geosphere, you can
also do "Base to Pivot" so you're going to put the sphere right next to the other sphere.
To understand the difference between the two spheres you're going to look here in your
Perspective view and you're also going to turn on F4 so you'll see all the edges.

You'll notice that the Geosphere is based on triangles while the regular sphere is based on little
rectangles. Every one of those rectangles here in this sphere looks nicely smooth and every
rectangle here is flat but in the geosphere, the only flat thing is a triangle and every triangle
which is towards the next triangle already has a slight angle, so the creation method is based on
the geometry and is slightly different. Let's add some other tubes. There's a Pyramid just like the
cone, a Cylinder with a simple shape, and a Teapot. The teapot is a standard object that has
been in 3ds Max for quite a while, it is a little bit more complex object (it has a handle and it has
a lid) and it also casts shadows on itself; it has been an object to test performances and if you
have thousands of teapots you can bring your graphic card to the limits.

We've got two objects left here in the Standard primitives, one is the Torus and the other one is
the TextPlus element.
The Torus does not have the "Base to Pivot" option so when you create the torus it will always
stick into the ground plane and only half the torus will be seen but as soon as you go to the
parameters (which we will cover later on) and you know what its radius is, you can lift or move
it up and see the same amount of the radius and then it will stay there.
The last thing will be the TextPlus. With this element, when you click into the scene it'll just
create a piece of text. In the former versions of 3ds Max, the text was only available here as a
shape but in the geometry now TextPlus can also be added and it automatically adds it as a 3d
geometry. So when you add the TextPlus, there is a parameter that you can use to change the
font, for example.

It also has an "Extrude" option which when you hit will give it a height. We'll talk about more of
these when we cover shapes and how to turn them into 3d geometry but here is a standard feature
already with the font style and other features so let's just leave it there as a 3d text for now.

Here we are with all of our Standard primitives placed. Every one of those has a lot of
parameters that can be adjusted. For example, we have the tube, when you select your tube and
you select "Modify" which is the second category there in the Command Panel at the top, you
see its parameters.

Selecting Objects
If you select two objects you don't see any parameters because it says two objects selected, so
"Modify" only works if you select one of them. So you'll select the tube here and you have the
two radii (radius one and radius two) which are the inner radius and the outer radius. You have
the height if you want to change it, then we have the height segment which tells you how many
segments the height will be divided that depends on what you're planning to do with it, so if you
are bending or twisting it you want to have more height segments and if you are not planning to
do anything with the tubes you can as well reduce them to one because below one doesn't work
and you need at least one segment. The cap segments are the segments of those little edges up
there (this is usually one) and then you have the number of sides.

Almost all the primitives have sides somewhere which means it's a tube but it's not perfectly
round, it's not an object that has been created out of a circle extruded but it is a standard primitive
and it has a limited amount of sides in the case of a cylinder, 18.
If you want to render this and you want to get close to it you should for sure give it more than 18
sides because you can see all the edges so if you want to make it smooth you should go all the
way to double or four times. Let's go for 50. As soon as you use 50 sides you can see how it
starts to get smooth and you can see this depending on how close you are there.
The round objects like spheres and torus also have some other parameters such as a slice on
function. We are going to show you the slice-on function with the tube. When you hit the slice
on and then you choose "Slice from" and select 2, then you can only use half a tube because
those values are in degrees.

If you put 180 degrees then it starts at 0 and it's only 180 degrees, it will then use the 50 sides all
on one half and that means it's even twice as fine but then it is a good way and it works with lots
of them.

Mapping Coordinates
There is also something important we want to look at now and that's also a setting that we did at
the very beginning of one of the previous chapters. Every standard primitive that is created in
Max already has something that's called Mapping Coordinates. It means if you put a material
and a texture on it, it knows how to place the material on it. It might not look good but it knows
at least how to put it in place with textures on it.
Also, you don't want the “real-world map size” button to be turned on because that means the
mapping coordinates that are automatically created are real-world map size and this means that
every texture is only one meter in size so if you put a texture on it, it will be quite small
depending on the size of course but it will be one. That means when you have real-world map
size you always have to place square textures on it so that the pictures of the texture will cover
exactly 1 by 1 meter and usually, textures don't do that. You may also want to change their sizes
later on so make sure real-world map size is not what's turned on and generating map
coordinates is usually turned on by default.

This is how you change the values. All of them have different values, of course, a pyramid is
much simpler since it's only length, width, and height and the pyramid can also have segments so
if you want to refine the pyramid then you can define segments here three times. Moving on to
the teapot, usually, when you place a teapot here it also has some additional parameters or some
checks. You can define it by asking: does the teapot have a body? Does it have a handle, a spout,
and a lid? Do you want an open teapot and leave the lid away? Also, if you place the teapot it
doesn't look good when it only has eight segments so teapots usually should have more than
eight.

In the Previous Max versions it had only four segments for the standard teapot so eight is already
good but we would suggest that you go up a little bit to make it a little bit more detailed. We
already talked about the TextPlus so let's go to the Torus. The torus has two radii. One radius of
course is from the center that defines the doughnut shape and the second one defines the radius
of this tube that is played around. For illustration, let's go for a radius of 10; note that the other
radius doesn't matter. So the radius here is 10, you can also use more sides if it doesn't look
good, and for "segments" we'll use 50 segments. 50 segments are in one way and the sides are
the other way. Now the rate radius is 2:10, so if you take your torus now you're going to right-
click on "Move" and you're going to change its height to 10. That means now it stands on the
ground planes.

If you look from the front you can see that all your objects perfectly align by standing on the
plane.
Extended Primitives
You can go through the rest of the objects as there is not only standard but there are also
extended primitives where some things are a little different.

Let's go for something simple. Here's an Oil tank that is a cylinder with capsules on it. The
capsule is always perfectly rounded while the oil tank can be adjusted. This includes the radius
up there and the parameters as well. When you go to "Modify" you want to make sure that the
sides are enough so that it looks nice and smooth 30.
The spheres are fine and they usually look good, however, the cylinder does not so from the list
in the image above you can see some of the extended primitives.

Compound Objects
One thing that we would like to show you is a little bit more complicated object and that is how
you're going to take your sphere and torus and make a copy of it. That's something you should
already know how to do, so you'll take your sphere and your torus and you're going to make sure
that they overlap so it looks a little bit like a ring or a molecule model.
Now move them away from the platform. Here there are two objects and what we would like to
show you is in the category "Geometry" and "compound objects." Later on, we'll go a little
further into this but compound objects are objects that are made out of more than one, and in our
case, we would check what's called "Proboolean."

You have to select one and then it's only available so if you don't select any of the two objects it's
not available; you'll select the torus, then click on Pro Boolean, and now you have to choose
what kind of operation you would like to do. If you want to do a union that means they will be
welded together. The intersection is talking about what they have in common. If you're going to
do subtraction that means the next one that you pick will be subtracted from it.
For our illustration, we'll choose "subtraction" and then click on the sphere. We'll start peaking
off either by turning it off or using the right mouse click. Now you can see that the torus
suddenly has the sphere subtracted and it has been nicely closed.

Note that there's also a Boolean but they don't work well. Pro Boolean has the big advantage that
you can do it more than once. This means you can get another standard primitive. To illustrate
this, we're going to use a cylinder this time. With the cylinder, we will adjust it properly to make
sure it nicely overlaps. Again, we will click on the Boolean, go to "Modify" and in the list here
we can still add more operands to the list.
In this case, we want another subtraction, and then we'll start peaking and thereafter click on the
cylinder.
Now if we go for the first one that says union you can see it doesn't do anything. It subtracts the
sphere and it subtracts the cylinder. Don’t forget to turn off the "start picking."
The big advantage of this Boolean is that it works well, and the operation looks nice and smooth.
What we have in the image below is how it looks with the edges on but you can also edit it later
on. If you select it and you go to "Modify" you can still start to pick new objects, change them or
kick one out.

What you can also do is to click on the cylinder for example and up here when it says
"operands" now you have a cylinder. Now when you click on the cylinder you can still see its
parameters, so that is the cylinder that went as an operator into the pro Boolean. You can make
some changes to the cylinder; for example, if you adjust the radius you can see that the hole that
it cuts is changing. You can also move it and when you do so you have to click on "Operands,"
then on "Cylinder" and then you can move it. Notice the difference: If you click on cylinder here
this is to access its parameters but when you click on operands and cylinder here you can move
it, so it's both the cylinder and the sphere. If you want to adjust the parameters of the sphere you
have to click here and then you'll see the parameters of the sphere. You can then make it larger
and smaller. So in the ProBoolean, you can easily access all the operands that went into the
Boolean operation.

The last object we have is called constructive solid geometry. This is a geometry in which the
operands can be adjusted at any time.

Creating your first render

Now we are going to show you how to create your first rendering and first render. In the first
rendering, we're going to render whatever we created here. The first thing you're going to do is
switch to a Perspective view, so you hit P for perspective and you're now going to adjust your
perspective. Remember: select an object, with the middle mouse key you can orbit, with rolling
you can roll closer. You can change the zoom value and adjust it here so that you see something
like what we have below.
Now we're going to render a picture. Of course, you will spend much time with render engines
and how to make the right adjustments but for now, there are no materials in the scene so it will
be just a little preview. Before we render our picture which in this case is the teapot, let's check
out the parameters.
You can see the teapot with the wheel; that opens the render setup dialog which is the most
important thing. Right now it's already set (remember we did that in the first chapter), so this
means the render engine is set to Arnold.
The next thing that we would like to change is the size of the picture that will be rendered, which
is the output size. The image we are using for illustration is pretty small (640x480) so we're
going to change that to 1200x900.
1200x900 is the same aspect ratio as before so whenever you rent a picture now it will be
rendered 1200x900. For all the other settings we are going to leave them as defaults then we hit
"render" and that creates a picture.
You can see it up here in the progress bar and as it's rendering you will see little things that run
around; they're called buckets or render buckets. You can also see that the classic object colors
are the same as in the rendering only that it looks as if it's shiny plastic. The lighting that you see
here is a reflection. There's a highlight in the sphere; that is only where you would see a highlight
and that's because we have some kind of default lighting. It's like lighting that comes from the
same position that you are looking at because if you look at the scene from a different location
like the back side this is not the one. If you want to render it again you don't have to use the
render setup. You can also use the render with the little spark here that's called render
production (it's rendering with the same settings that you did before).
Do not click on the cloud render. If you do so, it prepares you to render in the cloud and this is
something that you haven't configured correctly.

The problem with this is after you click accidentally on the cloud, the next renderings would all
want to render in the cloud. You have to click on Render setup again and make sure up there it
says "Production rendering mode" and it says Arnold.
As we proceed in this book, we are going to show you how to use the active shade but we are
working with the Production render mode and Arnold. So when you accidentally click on the
cloud next time, you have to go to setup and set the target to production rendering mode and
Arnold.
Here you can render and you will see that when you render from this side the highlight or here in
the material is now at a different location because it is again, coming from the point that you
look at the object, so it's more of a default lighting there.
If you want to make sure that the whole ground plane is in the picture you have to do something
that is up there, in this case, it should be a Perspective view. What you would do is right-click
and here you will see something that is called "show safe frames."
A safe frame is usually a rectangle that will show you what the picture will look like. The aspect
ratio, length, and width are the same as your rendering size, and even if it is smaller it doesn't
matter, it's only the aspect ratio. Also, here you should make sure that nothing sticks out because
if one aspect sticks out of the picture, in the final rendering it will also stick out so make sure
everything is inside even though it is maximized. Now we will hit "Render production" and it
will render our first picture.

Those pictures render very fast and you can see that down here it says the render time is about
seven seconds. If you change something and suddenly the render time goes up you can compare
that to your picture. After deciding the one you want to keep, you're going to save it.
Saving a rendered image
To save it, you will go to the "Save image button."

Now when you want to save the image there are two ways to save it; first, if you want to just
have a preview or something that you quickly want to send to someone you can make a jpeg out
of it, so just render it as a jpeg. You can also do a png if you want to.
But as soon as this is a picture that you want to keep or take into post-production, that needs to
be in better quality. Do not save it as a jpeg because all the cheaper compression will be rendered
into the picture. Instead, you want to keep it as good quality and you may even want to print it
and for that, you have to change the background and always use a tiff image. You will choose
"tiff image," and you can call it whatever you want.
After you have done so, it will ask you the color depth that you want to save. The usual one
would be 8-bit. 8 bit-per-color means that every red, green, and blue channel will have 256
colors. 16-bit of course is much more and 32-bit is even more. Let's keep it 8-bit for now.

You will also be asked to confirm if you want to store the alpha channel.
At the top, there is a button next to the RGB, which when you click, shows you the alpha
channel. The Alpha channel is a grayscale picture that defines where objects or foregrounds are.
Whereas the background is always black, the foreground is always white and when something is
partly transparent like a part that sticks out, then it can also be gray. That is the Alpha channel.
Before you store this Alpha channel you have to save a tiff image, then make sure you choose 8
bit-per-color and then it will be saved with it. If the rendering takes more than seven seconds
especially if it is a seven-second rendering, you can as well save it as a jpeg (it doesn't matter
since you can reproduce it anytime) but if it's something that takes a little bit longer then you
should save it as a jpeg if it's a really important rendering and you want to make sure that it will
be saved. You can also define a saving location. In the beginning, remember where we set the
size to 1200x900, if you go further down there's also an option for output. You would click on
"files" and then define where it will be saved and it will automatically be saved to that location.

In this chapter, you learned about the creation of simple objects and adjusting their parameters
under the Modify option. We even played with the compound object type pro Boolean, created
the Boolean operation and put it all together in a Perspective view, and saved it after which we
rendered it.

Review Questions
1. What are mapping coordinates?
2. List 7 objects that are used in 3ds Max.
3. Create a plane. On top of that plane creates a teapot and a capsule.
 CHAPTER 17
TRANSFORMING OBJECTS
In this chapter, we are going to show you how to work with transformations. This includes how
to move, rotate and even scale your objects in your scene.

Reset
If you have some options which you want to get rid of, that is, you don't want to save them, you
can do a reset. Simply go to "File" then "Reset."

You'll get a prompt asking you if you want to save it. Click "No" then click "Yes" to confirm
that you want to do a reset.
For this section, we would like to start with something that you can do to have the same layout of
Viewport and the same settings in all parameters and that is to do a reset.

Now you can see you're back to the same layout that we started with, except that the View cube
has already been removed. Removing the View cube was something that you did to the user
interface and that will be stored, so the next time you start your Max version the View cube will
still be gone unless you decide to add it again.
Let's create one or two objects and we're quickly removing the background grid. Remember, we
use the keyboard shortcut G to quickly remove the background grid. We're going to create two
boxes with similar sizes and different colors. Then you're going to switch to your Perspective
view and maximize it with Alt+W. We'll also slightly orbit our view to the right to make it
simple. Lastly, we're going to create a purple box and make them a little bit more different, so
you now have purple and green boxes as your two objects.

Moving
The first thing we would like to show you is how to move your objects in a 3d space and then
later you would learn how to do it in 2D spaces. Let's get started by moving the green box for
example. You have to select the box and up there in your main toolbar you choose the "Select
and Move Tool."

The select object tool only allows you to select objects but not to move them. Once you are in the
"Select and Move Too" you don't have to go back to the "Select Object Tool" because you can as
well select them without moving as you can always stay in the "Select and Move tool." Now
once you hit the "Select and Move Tool" you will get what's called a "Transform gizmo." It
shows you the three X, Y, Z, in colors red, green, and blue like RGB and to move your object in
the very beginning you should only move it in one axis at a time.
So move your mouse onto the one axis that you want to move it then switch to the other and
move it along the other axis. Now move it up in c and so on. It doesn't matter if it is forward but
always keep it in the beginning and when you're not quite secure in moving objects, always
move them in one axis at a time. That is a pretty simple way to move objects.
You can do the same thing in the Top view. Remember that by hitting T on your keyboard you
quickly switch to the Top view. In the Top view, you only see two of the axes because the third
one Z is pointing up toward you. Again, select and move them along one axis, and if you're now
getting used to moving objects you can also move them two xs at a time. To do that, you'll grab
them right in the middle and you can see both x's light up. Then you can move it in two x's at the
same time; never try to move it in three axes at the same time because we don't have the input
device for that. With a mouse, you can only work in those two spaces so moving 2D in two axes
is the maximum that you should do. Now if you look at x and y from the top you know that those
are the x, and y of the real world.
Let's now go to the front by hitting F for Front View. After going to the Front View you may still
see x and y, and that is because before now you moved it in c and you are looking from the front
right now so this should be c not y.
The reason is that the coordinate system is always adapting to your view so only in all those six
sides (front, left, right, top, bottom, and back) will the x's always be called x and y because this is
the coordinate system in which you are currently working in as soon as you are in a 3d space,
and for example, you can do that by using the middle mouse key to rotate it into an Isometric
view.
Once you are in an Isometric View you can see the real-world coordinates which is something
that is in AutoCAD, the same thing here is in 3ds Max so whenever you look in a Plan View
from the top, front, left and so on, then you see only x and y axis but make sure that the real
world is slightly different and only in a 3d view can you see the three real-world XX, XY, and Z.
That is how you move an object. This is not very precise because you were moving it just by
pulling it in a certain direction and you may not know how far that is. The next way to do a little
bit more precise movement is that instead of pulling it along on one axis, you should go up there
to the "Select and Move" button and do a right click on it. When you right-click on it, it opens
the "Move, Transform Type in" and this is where you can type in instead of pulling it, let's say in
the x direction.

So instead of pulling it five units in the direction of x you can also go in there type in 5, then
enters and it will move five units in this direction. Also if you want to pull in y direction and you
want to go minus 10, simply type in -10, and then it will jump minus 10. So you can use both
offsets or you can type in the Absolute coordinates. Keep in mind that there are more than three
digits after the comma though it'll just be showing you three digits it's more precise than that. For
example, if you want to move your whole button to the origin then it would be zero, zero, and
zero. You can also switch between the axis with the tab so on your keyboard, with the tab key,
you can jump between them and it is much faster like this. For the second one here you're going
to move it to 0, -50, and 0 and now they are both here, of course, the origin of every single object
is the one that is at zero, -50, and 0.

Right now the coordinates are in the center of the bottom plane, but you should note that it is
different with every object that you create. As we proceed in this book, we're going to create a
couple of objects and you will always have different pivot points. The pivot point right now is
here in the center of the ground plane. A sphere for example has it in the center, a doughnut has
it in the center and the pyramid has it similar to this one so it's always anchored somewhere on
the object and the box has it in the center of the ground plane, that means those coordinates are
the center of the ground plane here. That is the next step in working a little bit more precisely.
Instead of moving it freely you just type in the coordinates, which are either the absolute
coordinates or the offset especially if you want to offset it a certain amount.

Rotating
The same thing we just did for moving also works for rotating. Here, if you select it you switch
to a different tool, so instead of the "Move" tool you go to "Rotate" and now you have three x's
again as circles here which are red, green, and blue. That is red is rotating around the x-axis and
if you have moved and then you hit escape, it will jump back.
When you rotate it around the c-axis and you want to jump back you hit escape or around the y-
axis with the green button. Again, do not rotate it more than one axis at a time because if you
grab your Rotation Gizmo (as it's called) in the middle you can freely rotate and you have no
control over the rotation. So if you want to move it randomly then it's fine but not for precise
movement.

You have just seen how you can rotate it freely with this tool. The next step again which has to
do with a little bit more precise movement is something we also explained earlier and that is
using the Angle Snap Tool.
Ensure you have turned on the Angle Snap Tool and you can do that with shortcut A. With the
Angle Snap Tool on, when you do a rotation you'll notice that now the box rotates in five-degree
steps. That is quite good.

If you want to rotate something 90 degrees or 180 degrees this way, that is a fast way of doing it.
You have a very precise movement so the Angle Snap is something that you should have on all
the time because it will allow you to do quite precise movements of the rotation movements of
an object.

If that is not enough, if you don't want these five-degree angles, if you want to precisely rotate it
like 32 degrees, make sure its rotation is set back to zero. You can also do a right mouse click on
top of the rotation angle and get the same rotational transformation. So if by accident you rotate
it weirdly around or you see the rotation Snap is not working, or when you grab it it's doing five-
degree steps, or it's just freely rotating, you can simply reset it. If you want to reset all the
rotations you can go in here which is the absolute rotation and you just set those values to 0 0 0
and you're back to the original rotation. You can do an offset as well. For example, we are doing
an offset here around the z-axis of 32 degrees and there it is. You can precisely rotate an object
by typing in its rotation angle either by absolute word value or rotation offset.

Scaling
The last transformation we are going to cover in this chapter is scaling an object. There is a scale
button for this.
As we mentioned earlier, you are to only rotate an object one axis at a time or move only along
one axis at a time, but for scaling, in the beginning, only scale all three axes at the same time. If
you go to the center you can scale it on all axes at the same time because if you scale along one
axis you will distort the object massively or when you do it in two axes at the same time you
don't want to scale an object at all.

If the box is not big enough, then you have to find another way to make it smaller, usually with
its parameters. Here you can change the parameters anytime because scaling is just like rotation
and movement is just something that is an attribute that is put on top of your box. Let's imagine
you're having a box 10 by 10 by 10 and you scale it to 200, it now has the size of 20 by 20 by 20
but its parameters will still be 10 by 10. We are going to show you this example quickly. We are
going to create a box and then we're going to modify it. We're going to do this much more
extensively in the next chapter but for now, let's just proceed with the example.

The image above shows our box selected and we will switch from "Create" to "Modify." Now
we will type in 10 by 10 by 10.

The image above shows our 10 by 10 by 10 cubes. Now if we use the Scale Tool here by going
to "Select" and "Scale," we're going to scale it larger. You can see under "Modify" it still says 10
by 10 by 10 and this is because of the scale factor. If we right-click here on the scaling, an
additional value is put on top of the object so the object still is a 10 by 10 by 10 cube which has
been scaled 243 as shown in the image below.
If you need to scale it you would rather change its parameters because then you can still see its
size and later on some additional modifiers will work correctly. So just trust yourself on that one.
Try to avoid scaling as much as possible. The reason you may want to scale something is if you
import something in the wrong scale, if something has been drawn in centimeters and you're
working in meters, then it's 100 times too big and then you would want to scale it. So try to avoid
scaling as often as possible but you can also right-click on the scale and you can always reset it
back not to zero this time, but 100, 100, 100, and here is the original scale with no damage done.
We have just looked at how to move, rotate and scale. Let's just forget about scaling for a while
and just use "Move" and "Rotate." Here are the keyboard shortcuts for these transformations
because we need the Move, Rotate, and Scale especially "Move" and "Rotate" a lot, which is
why your left hand should be on the keyboard shortcuts Q, W, E, R, because Q is select, W is
move, E is rotate and R is scale.

Object Snap
The next thing that you need to be precise about in 3ds Max is to use Object Snaps and that is
what we will cover in this section. We are going to quickly create three boxes each with three
different colors.
Next, we would stack those three boxes on top of each other so that always, one point will sit on
top of the other. We're going to place the largest one in the bottom then put one with the bottom
point at one point and the last one here on top of this one.

To use the Object Snap you have to turn it on and you'll also have to turn off the Angle Snap so
do not confuse that? You can easily turn on the object snap by locating the icon which is the
number 3 with the magnet. A shorter way to do this is by using the keyboard shortcut S.
When you have the Object Snap turned on the next thing is it has to be configured correctly. We
already showed you how to do that in previous chapters but to make sure you are also configured
correctly right-click on this icon and it will open the "Grid and Snap" settings.

In the "Grid and Snap" settings you have to unclick "Grid Points" because you will not use those
and then turn off the grid so it's not visible and you don't want it jumping to something that you
don't see. Also turn on "EndPoint" and if you need something additional like a Midpoint or a
"Pivot Point" those are quite common there so you can always turn it on but by default you
should only turn on "Endpoint" since it's better to have fewer points selected. By turning on "End
Point," when you hold your mouse you can see that suddenly when you are close to an endpoint
it will snap to it.
Now take one box and put it on top of the other. Make sure you are near a corner so that it will
light up and the mouse is on top of the object otherwise it will not be moving. It has to be on top
and then you just move over there, wait till it snaps then you drop it.

One more time, select somewhere near the corner and it lights up, remember to be on the object
and with the move icon you drop it up there and it snaps. When you do something like this
always make sure you orbit your object slightly to make sure it's all perfectly matched there. You
can put it on top of the big one so that the Midpoint here snaps to the Midpoint of the top edge.
If you don't have Midpoints turned on and if this is something you need more often go in there
and turn it on. We will show you how but note that this uses up both hands so be careful how you
do it. First, you select it, then to get a midpoint which is not the Standard turned on, you hold the
Shift and the right mouse key because the shift right mouse key and all Autodesk products offer
you some standard snap. Here you’ll see some Standard Snap points or the most common ones
are here and Midpoint is part of them so you click on Midpoint.
Now the next snap that you're using is a Midpoint so you can see it is snapping at endpoints but
it's also snapping at the midpoint.
You can then click and move your thing. The problem is if you're going on to this it also snaps to
a midpoint so by using shift and right mouse click you see it now stays on the midpoint. If we
use the Standard Midpoint it'll not turn it on but it'll just use it once.
We're going to quickly see how that works. So we'll select Shift and right mouse click and
Standard Midpoint. Now we're going to take Midpoints and when we move it over initially, it has
no midpoint but it only has endpoints. While we're still holding your left mouse button we're
doing Shift and right-clicking to Standard Midpoint and you may not click it because your finger
is still on the mouse button holding it that's why you have to drop it.
Now it's set to Midpoint. If you are just trying this for the first time you'll think that it is a lot but
if you try doing it quite fast, that is by using the Shift and right mouse click, and choose a "one
time only," this is when you turn it on and then you have midpoints there with Standard
Midpoint. You only have one midpoint and the next one is the Standard Endpoint. At this point,
this may sound confusing especially if you're just starting but try it, play with it and that will
work well.

Positioning a copy
There's one more thing we would like to show you. You have moved, rotated, and scaled but you
always moved the original and moved the box as it is and now what you're going to do is instead
of moving the original, you're going to move a copy. There's more than one way to copy in 3ds
Max. 3ds Max is a program in which everything can be done in more than one way.
This may be quite confusing for beginners but we will show you a quick way to get a copy. If
you want a copy of a box and do something with it just select it and use the Move function to
move it away. Before you move it, hold the shift key and that means it moves a copy. One more
time, hold the shift key and move a copy.

Now let's do the first number of copies. If you move it by using the shift there and you choose
three copies, then obviously instead of getting one copy with the same distance you will get three
copies. That is how you create multiple copies.

When you pull it, you're just doing one copy instead of more than one. You can choose if the
new object that you create is a copy, an instance, or a reference. For beginners, you would do
an Instance or reference since they mean the same thing. We are going to show you what a copy
does and you're also going to see what a reference does.
Now let's do the same thing one more time. Make a second copy first and from this copy, you're
going to make a reference. The difference between a reference and a copy is when you have a
copy like those two boxes and you take the original for example, go to "Modify" and change its
height, you can see the copy will not change. When you take a reference and you go to change
the height you'll see that the reference changes. So all the parameter changes that you do to a set
of reference copies.

Also, when you select one box and here it says box you have to just click there. When you
change the reference copy it will change the original so as soon as you do copy they are copies
but no more linked together.
A link means something else in Max and they may not be connected but when you do a
referenced or instanced copy then they're usually referenced. When you select the copies it says
box here under "Modify." Where the parameters are it says box and when you select this one it
says box in bold letters that is the difference. If this is bold that means it's a reference copy and if
you change it something else in the view will also change.
If you don't want this anymore or if you made a reference copy by accident you can always select
one of the copies and there's a button that's called "Make Unique."

So once it's still connected as a reference copy (because it has bold letters) press the "Make
Unique" button and they will not be linked anymore. Keep in mind that if you change one the
other one won't be changed. That is a good tool to get a quick set of copies. You can use multiple
copies and try to define if it's a copy or an instance and if there are multiple copies remember
that the copies have their names numbered and you can simply identify them with that. That is it
for the second part about transformation involving moving, rotating, and scaling. You have seen
all the different ways and the more precise ways which include typing coordinates. You have
also learned about Object Snap, Rotation Angle Snap, and copying an instance or reference.

Review Questions
1. What does it mean to position an object?
2. Why is scaling not advisable when working with objects?
3. Create a box and an instance of that box. Move the original box in the direction of
the y-axis.
 CHAPTER 18
WORKING WITH 2D LINES
In this chapter, we're going to talk about 2d lines and show you how to work with them in 3ds
Max. Note that we're going to work mostly in the Top view. We're going to start by selecting
"Top view" and you're going to use Alt+W to maximize the view.

Working with Editable Splines

Where do you find the 2d lines in 3d Studio Max? You'll go to "Create" and choose the second
tab which is "Splines."

We have two different types of objects here in the Splines category. Let's pick for example the
ones like a rectangle or circle first. So you're going to get a circle which you will have to click
and drag. If you want a rectangle, click and drag a rectangle, or the ellipse, click and drag the
ellipse. When you select those objects, let's say the star for example, and then go to "Modify"
which is the second tab here, so create and modify are the ones we use the most.
When you go to modify it you will see that the star still has its parameters so you can change the
radius and the points. For this illustration, let's go for five points, and for the radius, we'll do the
filet radius.
The same thing applies to the rectangle: after you select the rectangle you can choose length or
also edited length width and corner radius.
For the circle that's much simpler. It's just the radius and the length and width of the ellipse. You
can see that those objects are still influenced or defined by their parameters which we see under
"Modify."
The second object type that we find in the 2d Splines is the simple line and the line can be used
to draw a general line. It's either a line that has corners or a line that has a smooth (or what they
are called basic points), you can draw whatever line you want.
Remember that you're going to get rid of your background grid and that is with the keyboard
shortcut G so you see a little bit better. Now the big difference when you now select these line
objects is that if you select your general line and you go to modify you will find out that it
doesn't have length, width, or radius and other parameters like the other parametric objects, but it
has a lot of options and the most common thing that you see is on the very top. Here you can see
three different levels or sub-levels under selections which are the vertex, the segments, and the
splines. So you can edit those lines on different levels, you can edit the corner points, and you
can edit the segments between the corners and the whole spline.
You will find these only in the line object so the big difference is now between the parametric
objects where we still have the parameters and the general line that has those three levels. You
can also edit any parametric objects the same way that you would edit a line but with only one
difference, you have to alter it so that it still has its parameters. There are two ways to do this: the
first one would be that you select the objects and there is what's called the "modifier list" or the
"modifier stack." Where it says "modify a list," you'll go to the name in this case the star and
when you click on an editable spline you'll see a line.
To make the star as editable as the line you'd simply have to select it then go to the modifier list
and pick the modifier that's called "edit spline" and from now on it is an editable spline; it can be
edited as you get to see the same three ways which are on the vertex level, on the segment, and
the spline level. That is one way to do this which is by adding an "Edit spline" modifier.
Later on, there might be some limitations on when to use the "Edit spline" modifier but that is in
general a very good solution. To get rid of the "Edit spline" modifier you can just click on the
"remove modifier" from the star and now it is a regular star again with all its parameters.
The second way is simply to select the star, then use right-click with your mouse and choose
"convert to editable spline." So from now on it changes the parametric object star into an editable
spline in the shape of a star and you have the same three levels here where you can edit your
shape. This may destroy the star geometry and make it an editable spline just like the line is.
You may prefer this second method but for some reason or later on, when you add more
modifiers the "edit spline" modifier would be better in general, if you are not planning to use it as
a star any more than just right-click and convert it into an editable spline.
You can do the same thing with a circle. Just convert to editable spline and now it's the same
thing. This also applies to the ellipse in terms of converting to an editable spline. You can also
select more than one object or select all of them, right-click, convert to editable spline and now
they are all splines. So much for the difference between a parametric object and an editable
spline.

Drawing with tools

Let's see how we can draw with those tools. We are going to start with the most general one
which is the line tool. To draw the line tool you simply click on the left side and the line will
start. When you use short clicks with your mouse you will get corners and every time you click
somewhere, of course, you can use the Object Snap which is the 3d snap function and you can
also hold your Shift key which forces the line to stay parallel to the x and y line axis.
To stop the line, simply hitting the escape key stops where you last clicked on a point. The next
thing is when you click and drag your mouse you can see that it creates a curve and how long
you drag it defines the handle of the curve. So if you click and drag it you will get a handle.

Smoothing Curves
Now here's one thing that you may like to change. Let's say you've drawn a simple line and
created a smooth curve or a curve with handles so it's supposed to be smooth, but when you
zoom in you see it's not smooth and it's just a couple of straight lines which does not look good.
You can change that and when you change it once it will also change for all the future lines that
you draw. To do that, select your line and go to "Modify." At the end of the stack, you will find
the "Interpolation" option. Click to open it up.
With your line selected, if you increase the steps of the Interpolation you'll notice that the line is
getting smoother especially when there are turns. Now if you don't want this to increase it all the
way, but you just want to get a nice and smooth line you can keep that to 6 which is good, or
instead of that, just click "Adaptive."
Adaptive means that automatically wherever it is necessary to get a smooth curve it uses more
steps of Interpolation and where it needs less (because it's less of a straight line) it uses less
Interpolation. To see the difference, when you zoom in after applying the "Adaptive" you will
see that is a nice and smooth curve and when you unclick the "Adaptive" you'll see how awful it
looks, so if you want a nice and smooth curve up, ensure you have "Adaptive click to clear"
turned on.
Now when you have an adaptive curve and you start a new curve you see that the new one is
adaptive right away, which means it has a nice and smooth curve so if you change it once the
next one will also be here in "Adaptive" at "Interpolation." Keep that in mind.
Let's look at a few more things for the line. First, when you start drawing a line and you make a
wrong click by accident you can always use backspace on your keyboard to go one step back.
We already mentioned that with the Escape key, you can stop the line but with the Shift key, you
can force it into a parallel x and y plane. So far we have looked at how to create lines, let's now
create a few of the simple objects here. We are going to do a circle, an ellipse, and a rectangle
and edit them later on. You would see that the rectangle also has an Interpolation not turned to
"Adaptive" and the circle is also not in "Adaptive" so it's not very smooth. You can select all
three of them in this case, right-click, convert to an editable spline (so now they are all editable
splines), and then under "Interpolation" you can turn them to "Adaptive." For the circle, it is
necessary to make it adaptive so it's nice and smooth. With the ellipse, you can see that when you
turn it to Adaptive it is now smoother than it was. As for the rectangle, it may not necessarily be
adaptive as long as it doesn't have any curves so you're going to keep that. To save some memory
or make it simpler for the program you're not going to turn the rectangle into an "Adaptive" but
you could also do that and it will not change anything. Let's now get started with the possibilities
of how to edit a spline. We are going to do it with a simple line, so we'll start by creating a line
and then create short clicks. Now we have straight lines, we will go to "Modify" and see what we
can do in those three levels. You can start editing in one level by simply turning it on, for
example turning the Vertex on. When we click on Vertex you'll notice that this is slightly bluish
here and also as a warning sign you see up here that there are four dots in the line next to the
name. When you click on the Segment then you see there's a segment sign and so on.

Working Modes
There's also a shortcut for those levels, and that is 1, 2, and 3 on your keyboard. So if you need to
get in, just press 1 for the first level, 2 for the next one, and 3 for the last one. When you hit 3
one more time than the level is turned off so when you get into the first level with 1 and you hit it
one more time that takes you out of that level.
Vertex mode
Let's now do it step by step starting with the Vertex mode. In the Vertex mode, when you are in a
selected move you can select a vertex (a corner point of your line) and move it. When you select
only one vertex it only makes sense to move it; you can still do Move, Rotate, and Scale but one
point cannot be rotated and also not be scaled so you can only move it to a different location.

What happens if you delete a vertex? If you delete one vertex the two neighbors will do the job
and will continue; you will still be connected. If you select one point right now always catch the
points with a little window, don't just click on them because later on, it might be possible that
there are two points at the same location so use a window and catch it to see that. When you use
a window and catch it, down there it will display the vertex number in the spline. For example,
you will see something like "this is vertex number 5 out of spline number 5."

So to delete that particular vertex, select it with the window and when you hit "delete" it will be
deleted and the two neighbors will be now connected. If you undo (Ctrl+C) the process you will
find it back again. The next thing that you can do at the vertex level is change a point from being
a linear point. If all you have are linear vertices and you want to change them to be smooth (or
one that has a handle), or if you want to turn a vertex from a corner into a smooth point, you
need to select it, then hold your mouse on it and make a right mouse click. You will see
somewhere it says Bezier, Corner and Smooth.
If you turn it for example into a smooth point, you'll see it's no longer a corner anymore but it's a
smooth point.
You may be wondering what the difference is between smooth and Bezier. A Bezier point is also
a smooth point but the curve in it is defined by a handle (one handle) and you can define it by
dragging it. The influence of the handle on the curve is long but if you bring it closer it's a
shorter influence.
When you right-click and choose "Smooth" then it's an automatic handle and the curve is defined
by how far the neighbors are away. This means when the neighbors are closer it's a softer curve
and when you're further away then it's a longer curve.

There's also a fourth one and that is the basic corner. A basic corner has two separately
adjustable handles; you can adjust the different handles separately or you can just bring it back
into a corner or back to the original position.
Segment mode
Let's now head on to the next level, the segment mode. With the segment level, you can do much
more, including scaling and rotating.

You can also select the line between two vertices. After you have selected them by clicking and
they turn red, then you can move them. When you move them the two neighboring segments will
adjust themselves to a different position.
Segments can also be rotated, so you can also go to "Select" and "Rotate" and that allows you to
rotate your segment or you can go to "Scale" and that will scale the segment, which means it will
either make it shorter or longer. Another difference is when you select the segment and you hit
"delete" it's not going to close or the neighbors will not do the job. If you delete a segment you
will get a gap in your spline and you will end up with two splines (spline one and spline two).

In the Segment mode, you can also select more than one segment and do the same thing (move,
rotate, and scale) at the same time.
Spline
The third level is called the Spline level and because it is only one spline, all you can select is the
whole spline.
Now let's do what we did before: you'll go back to the segment level and delete one segment
out of the spline and now you have turned your spline as we mentioned before into two splines.
Now it makes sense because in the spline level, you can separately touch both ends of the spline,
remember the object that is called box01 is still the whole thing, they have the same color and
properties and when you select it, the other one will get selected at the same time. However,
when you go into the Spline level you can select the splines by themselves. That is what the
spline level is for: when you have more than one spline in an object you can separately touch
those. Now you're going to delete the spline, you're also going to delete those objects and we're
going to show you something with the rectangle. If you select it you can see it is already turned
into an editable spline, so if you now create your own rectangle make sure you right-click, and
convert it to an editable spline. Next, you'll go into the segment level and delete one segment of
your rectangle.
After that, go out of the segment level. You can see that now it's an open spline and it's not
closed anymore. The next thing that we would like to show you has to do with the level you need
to close it. There's more than one way to close it. You could create a new line but the best way to
close something like this is simply with a straight line. In the Vertex level, you'll find that there is
a button on the right side that's called "Connect." With this button, you can click on one then
hold your mouse and drop it on the next vertex, so between two vertices you can connect it and
then also close it this way.

So let's say you're deleting a segment and there's a hole in the Vertex, you can go to the
"Connect" button, click and hold, then drag and close it. That is the simplest way to close with a
straight line. While that is not the only method of closing an open Spine, we are going to show
you another method that may seem complex but it's just to make sure that you also know a
different way to do it. This method is using the "Create line" option. You don't need to be in any
level at all because the function of "Create line" is available even though you're not in one of the
sub-levels. What this function does is that it allows you to draw another line but what you want
is to precisely snap to those corners, so while you have the "Create line" turned on you need to
have your 3D Object Snap turned on. A simple reminder: a right-click on Object Snap. Keep in
mind; it needs to have the "Endpoint" turned on and not the "Grid point."

Now go to "Create line," and turn on your Object Snap. You'll see it snaps after which you can
click once and over here click twice. It will ask if you want to "weld" it which means the two
points will be joined together. You are to say "Yes" after which you can create a line simply by
creating a new one.

When you click on an existing point it will ask you if you want to weld it. To check if it is
welded, go into the Vertex level and draw a window around the object. It should give
information about the object, for example, 'Spline one, vertex two.' In the Vertex, you're going to
turn off the Object Snap. If you select one point with a window, as we mentioned before, it's
possible that there are two vertices at the same position and they may be at the same position but
if you have two lines or two points there, when you select them with a window it will display
that two vertices are selected.
Now you have to make those two welded together into one otherwise it's not a closed line but it's
still open because it has two points here at the same point. Now that both are selected it says
"two vertices selected." You will click on the "Weld" button and what the weld button does is
that it welds together points that are closer than 0.1 units away. This means if you select points
and hit "Weld" and nothing happens, that is because they are further away than 0.1, in the case of
our illustration those two points are zero apart from each other because they are at the same
position.
We can now select them, then hit "Weld" and now if we select them again it doesn't say "two
vertices selected," instead, it says "Vertex one of Spline one is selected." In this example, you
can see that we did the "Create line" just to draw a new line. You also saw how the automatic
welding worked for the second point but it did not work for the first point so we went into the
Vertex level, selected both vertices, and welded the temp together.
The next thing that we would like to show you at the Vertex level is what to do if you want
additional points. What would you do if you want a point somewhere in the middle?

Refining your objects

You have to go into Vertex level to find the button "Refine" and with this button turned on when
you hold your mouse and you are somewhere on a segment you can click to add more vertices to
the line.
Keep in mind that those vertices will appear anywhere; the Refine function is not to snap or
define where they are but with this button, you can just add more vertices. To get rid of those
vertices, you already know how that works: just select all the vertices (you can use the Ctrl+A
shortcut), right-click and now you'll turn them all into corners. However, if you select the ones
that you just created by hitting "Refine," just select all those points and hit the delete button and
they're gone.
There is another way to refine or to get more vertices in a controlled way and that is not at the
Vertex level but at the Segment level. If you can select the segment you will find a button called
"Divide." If for example, it says "divide one" that will divide it exactly once and then you'll get
one extra vertex.
If you select a small segment and you choose "divide two" then it will be divided into two points,
making a total of three segments. So you can select any segment and just define how many times
it should be divided. Keep in mind that if you choose to divide five times you get six segments
out of it. That is a little bit more controlled because it's usually right in the middle where the
divide function works. That is another thing that is possible at the Segment level. The next thing
we would like to show you is how to make use of the "attach" function. Let's get a circle.
Remember, the Interpolation for the circle should always be "Adaptive" to make it nice and
smooth. So for this illustration, we are going to two circles and a star, making it three objects,
with three names (star, circle, and circle) and three different colors.

Now we are going to start with the first circle. We'll select the circle, right-click and convert it to
an editable spline. We don't want it to be parametric as a circle; instead, we just want the regular
spline with its three levels there though what we are planning to do is not even in one of those
levels. The next thing is the "Attach" function. With this function, you can take one spline and
attach something else to it. For this example, we will attach the second line or the star, and after
we do that we only have one object left. This means that those two splines that are created as an
extra object are now part of the object called "circle one" but with the "Attach" function and if
you have more than two objects to attach you can use "Attach multiple."
When you use "Attach multiple" you will get a list of objects where you can choose hundreds of
objects altogether. This is especially handy when you import some geometry or some shapes that
you want to use, for example, lines on a parking lot or circles for columns or something else that
you want to import; with the "Attach multiple" function it's much better.
Now you can see we have one object and with this one object, if we have to touch one circle or
the star separately, we can always do that by using the "Spline" option. With the Spline sub-
level, you can always select one of the splines that used to be an object or even the one that you
used to start with. Also, in the Spline level, you can still grab them, delete them, scale them,
move them, and rotate them. When you go out of all the levels the object itself is still one object,
with one color, and later on, becomes one material. Let's do a little bit of combination between
objects and then we could do a little exercise to practice playing with 2d lines on your own, you
could spend hours just working with 2d lines. For this illustration, we will take something really
simple. Take two rectangles and make sure they overlap a little bit. As two objects, you want
them to be one object. You can start with any of the two, then right-click and convert to editable
spline. Know that only when you turn it into an editable spline will you get all the options
available for splines. Now you'll use "Attach" or even the "Attach multiple" and that opens the
window that gives you all the objects that you can attach.
If you try to put something like a sphere there, if you want to do "Attach" for the rectangle and
you go to "Modify" and choose "Attach multiple," it will not show you the sphere because the
sphere is not possible to attach. You can only attach other lines but you cannot attach the sphere,
only something like the rectangle. Keep that in mind.

Trimming Objects
Now your rectangles are attached and if you have both of them drawn in Top view they may
intersect because they are both on the x and y plane (since those points do intersect) but if you go
into the Vertex level those points are nonexistent and only the corners are there so how can you
delete everything here in the middle, for example, and make one object out of it?

The first thing is that in the Spline level, there is a button called "Trim." When you go to "Trim"
you can click and trim objects. After you have trimmed a part of the line then this intersection
will be calculated. The only problem is that when you go out of trim, those points are not welded
together because that is not done automatically so this point here is one point from this element
and at the same position one point of the other element.
When you go into the Vertex level and you select both of them with a window you can see two
vertices selected and if you want this to be a closed nice object, you have to weld those two
points. You can do it at the same time, remember, you can only weld objects that are closer
together than 0.1 in distance and since this is further away you want to make sure that this is a
perfect piece of geometry without any open vertices or with double vertices.
You can always go into the spline level, select the spline, and then it should select the whole
thing. Now if you can recall, in the Spline level, before a part was from one spline and the
second one was from the other spline but now it's one Spline. You will see it displayed as "Spline
one" and it is closed as well so you know that all points are perfectly welded; always check that
because if you want to do something with the geometry, for example, if you want to make this
the floor of your room, you want to make sure that it's a closed polyline. That is an option where
you can trim something.

Extending Objects
Now just as you can trim, you can also extend. Let's quickly see how you can do the extending of
an object. For this illustration, we'll be working with a circle. So you have a circle and inside the
circle, you're going to draw a regular line and you're going to draw it from the outside to
somewhere in there.
If the line is too long you can do some trimming off so it only goes to the circle, and then there's
the second line that needs some extending to go until it hits the circle but first you have to attach
both.
You can start with the circle or with the line but notice that when you select the circle there is no
"Attach" on the modifier because it is still parametric but when you select the line there is an
"Attach" here and you can attach the circle and now it becomes one object. Make sure it's set to
"Adaptive."
You can now go into the Spline level and you'll choose "Trim for this piece" and then you'll use
"Extend for this piece" and one more time "Trim for this piece."
You're going to have to weld those points because when you go out of the trim area in the Spline
level these are still separate objects so to make sure they are one object you have to weld those
two points. To do that, go to Vertex, select both of them, and hit "Weld." If you now go to the
Spline level you can see its one spline that is there and it'll indicate that it is closed.

These are the most basic functions when you deal with 3d lines.

Working with Bitmap

Now we would like to show you a little example of what we can do with the lines in 3ds Max.
To do that what you need first is that you're going to download a picture and we will quickly
show you what to do.
For this illustration, you're going to download any logo of your choice. To place your logo into
3ds Max in the Top view, you'll go to "Views" then "Viewport background" and you're going to
bring in a "custom image file."

The best way is to just open the "Configure Viewport Background" window. In this window,
what you want here is a user file so you're going to search for the logo which you downloaded.
Note that the aspect ratio of your picture should match the bitmap so it's not going to get
distorted. You're also going to turn on your background grid so that you can see it.
You can move your background grid, for example, if there is an object on it such as a big box,
you can move your whole scene and the picture will always be in the background. This is a nice
quick way to draw something but it's not the best way. You can also do something else with it,
such as use it for modeling purposes but for a quick drawing it's quite good. You should also
remember that you're not supposed to pan your view because that will change the look.

We are going to start from the top and we're going to start with an ellipse. We'll go to "Create
shape," select the ellipse, and then we're going to draw a big ellipse.
We will start with the inner ellipse here and fix the size by making it larger or smaller. Now if
you turn off your background picture you will be able to see it but right now you're going to
draw a little bit more. We'll use a line to draw those objects there, starting a little bit from the
outside.
For our illustration, we are also going to draw the two lines for the ears of the head. Since we are
dealing with the curve while using the line it does not precisely work so we're going to modify
and select the point or the vertex, then pull out a little bit more so it's giving us a perfect curve.
We don't need the second curve here because it's a mirrored version of it, instead, what we need
is one more curve and that is down there. Here, we need a drawing or a line that looks like our
initial image so we first draw it and then use the Escape key to stop it, and then go to modify it
into a vertex level and adjust it later on.
We will now adjust the handles so that we have a second handle there. What we have now is our
big ellipse; the inner one and then we need two more. We are going to select the ellipse which is
still parametric and what we can do at this point is to turn it into a regular spline by converting it
into an editable spline, after which we can select our ellipse and use the outline function. After
it's selected you will find the "Outline." Here, you will now click on it and drag an outline to the
inner ellipse. So you now have an inner copy of it and one more time drag it to the outer ellipse.
With that, you just made three ellipses out of one. You can now turn off the Outline so you don't
see anything but to make it simpler you can also turn off your Viewport background and just use
a gradient color so that it's gone. With that, we now have what we have drawn in lines, as shown
in the image below.

Now we need to copy those two things but first, we have to ensure that both of them are selected,
then we'll use tools to mirror them but not in the same location because we don't want to mirror a
copy. Now we can use the offset and we are going to use the offset in the x direction so we can
get a copy of it.
For our illustration, we just looked at the ears and then made sure that those points have the same
intersection. Now we have four lines for our ears and our three outlines, let's start with the ears
up there. We are going to attach them all and we are going to start with any line. What we would
now do is attach the ears and the wings on the left and right sides and for the tail part.
After that, we will now go into the Spline level and trim a little bit. Here, we are going to trim
away everything that is above the ears and everything that is above the tail. Remember, once you
have trimmed you always have to go back into the Vertex level and weld the point that you just
trimmed, so we will select those two and hit "Weld." Now our two lines are ready, the next thing
we have to do is to add to the inner of the two ellipses or three ellipses.
However, the problem is they are all one object because when we select the ellipse with the
outline what we created is one object with three splines so in the Spline level we will select the
inner spline which is part of the ellipse object but we just you want it to be a separate object so
while it's selected in spline level, we are going to use "detach" as it now creates its object while
we're still here.
While we are still here we're also going to detach the outer ellipse but this time we are going to
"detach as copy" because we want to keep the object having two ellipses but we want the outer
ellipse as an extra object. Now, remember we still have shape 2 which is the outer ellipse so we
are ready to assemble everything. We will select the head and tail of the object and attach the
inner ellipse, so it's now one object. Then once again we will go to the Spline level to trim this
piece then we proceed to weld after trimming.

In summary, we just went into the Vertex level, hit Ctrl+A on the keyboard, selected all the
vertices, and hit the "Weld" function because it only welds the ones that are close together. All
we need now is the exterior and we are quickly turning this into a 3d logo but in subsequent
chapters and sections you will know more about how to turn 2d lines into 3d models. Finally, we
can also add a custom color and our logo is ready. Going into the Perspective view you can see it
is just a very simple rendering of our chosen logo.

Review Questions
1. Explain the term "Adaptive."
2. Explain the difference between Vertex mode and Segment mode.
3. Create a 2D line, convert to Editable Spline and add 3 vertices.

CHAPTER 19
CONVERTING FROM 2D TO 3D OBJECTS
In this chapter, you are going to learn how to turn those 2d shapes that we have created in our
last section into 3d geometry. So let's get started. Again, just like in our last section, we are going
to do most of our work in the Top view so you are going to maximize your Top view and you're
also going to turn off the background grid so it's not going to distract you.
First, you'll go to "Create geometry" and create a couple of shapes including a line. Let's say
you've got a couple of lines, now what could be a little disappointing is that when you have 2d
lines and you want to render them you quickly press the Render button but when you're
rendering the image, you will see that the 2d geometry is not visible. So in Renderings, by
default 2d geometry is not visible; that doesn't matter if it has to do with shapes that are created
in 3ds Max or if the shapes are imported from any other program, for example, AutoCAD.

Importing images
Let's say we have created an object, for example, a quick and simple floor plan, and it's a 2d floor
plan in AutoCAD. What we want to do now is to show you how that could be imported into 3ds
Max.
The AutoCAD file has been saved as a dwg. File called Floorplan and now we are about to open
it. There are two major ways to import the AutoCAD file: what you can use is the entity. That
means every shape in AutoCAD will become a shape in 3ds Max so you get a lot of lots of
objects there, or if you have organized your shapes already by layer you can also use layer.
Manipulating Objects
Let's start with the entity first, though you can always come back into it by layer. We've got our
floor plan and we are going to put it into a three-dimensional Perspective view.
You can see we have lots of two-dimensional lines and those lines, of course, can be moved
along with every object in 3ds Max, and with Object Snap every object from AutoCAD becomes
an object in 3ds Max.

The first thing is to make lines. We can also include some other lines and shapes so we have a
line, a circle, and a rectangle. If we hit the "Render" button you'll see it renders invisible which
tells us that the lines do not render. However, there are a few ways to make lines renderable.

If you want to use them, for example, as wires or as lines on the ground or some shapes on the
wall you can make them renderable. Let's see how you can achieve that.

There are several methods to do this, but the first one is you select the line and then go to Modify
and we know that with the editable spline, this line can also be made renderable. In Modify
function, at the top is "Renderings'' and you can choose whether it's renderable in the renderer or
also in the viewport, so either way, you can see it is also there in the Viewport when you click on
both but what it does is that it turns the line into a 3d geometry by giving it a certain thickness.
You have two choices: you can have a circular radial thickness or a rectangular thickness so it
creates a small wall just to make it renderable.

That said, if you just want to see it or use it as a wire, you can use a certain thickness, in this
case, it's 2.5cm because you have imported the file and that's in meters or you can also choose
how many sides you have. If we zoom in on the shaded view you can see that with edges it has
12 sides. If you want to make sure you don't use too much geometry it's good enough to use six
sides because we want to just make the lines renderable so we just look from the top for
example, and when we hit Render, it will always render in the thickness and you do not if it has
six sides or 12 sides.

You can also see that this is half the geometry so by not using 12 sides and just using 6 or if you
want to have sharp edges you can as well use a rectangular thickness. That is the first way to
make a line renderable.
Remember we said there are so many ways to do this; let's now proceed to show you another
way. The next way to do it is not by choosing "renderable" there but by using a modifier on top.
This is a concept that you may not get to use a lot but you can place modifiers on top of your
object.
When you select an object, you can see inside this list right now we only have the object itself
which is an editable spline but you can place a modifier on top of it and the modifier comes here
in the modifier list. It only works every second time and in the list, the modifier you're looking
for is called "renderable spline." What this does is that it turns the line that you have used into a
render ripples button so it's the same thing enabled in the renderer and viewport. It has the same
parameters (radial) you can choose the thickness of 0.02; you can choose how many sides (six),
and other options.
The big advantage of this renderable spline compared to the one where we do it here in the
settings is that those modifiers, at any time, can be turned invisible. So right now when you
render it is rendered visible and when you turn the modifier off it's not visible in the rendering.
Another advantage is that you cannot only turn it visible or invisible, but you can also remove it
quickly if you don't want it and this modifier can be copy-pasted from one object to another. So
if you have your settings made for this one modifier you just right-click on the modifier and
choose "copy" and after you have copied the modifier then you select any other object, and
choose to paste it.

Not only can you paste the modifier as a copy, but you can also use "paste instance." That means
it's an instanced copy which implies that when you change the original it will also change the
copy.
Instance copies can be recognized with an italic font and from our illustration above you can
see that the first one is now also italic because it's linked together. It doesn't matter, however, if
you select the copy or the original, if you change it to make it thicker for example, of course,
both elements will change and that is a good way.
If you have it applied to more than one object you can do this method. If for some reason you
only want to change one you can always take the modifier (remember when you turn it off it also
turns off all the others) and here you can turn it on or make it unique.
This now tells us that the one with the modifier on it is still in italics but when you hit "Make
unique" it will remove the italic, that particular one becomes unique and if you change the
thickness there the other one will not follow or will not get the same thickness. There are a
couple of advantages: modifiers can be copy-pasted, they can be removed and they can be turned
on.
Now if you want the line to not only be radial or rectangular you can also use the third way to do
it and that is by placing another modifier. This is not the renderable spline modifier but a
modifier that's called "Sweep." The Sweep modifier not only has rectangular and radial profiles,
but it also has all kinds of different profiles you can use including the built-in section.
The image below shows a list of all the possible shapes that you can use.

For example, with the White flange turned on you have certain parameters. Let's do a length of
0.1 a width of 0.1 a thickness of 0.02 and a corner radius also 0.02. With these parameters, you
now have a steel profile which is now your line turned into a profile. You can also use this for
any shape that you have. For example, we have a line that is drawn (we're going to turn on
Adaptive so it's nice and smooth) and now not only can you use a ready-made shape in the
Sweep modifier, but you can also draw your own.
We will now go to drawing our shape but before that let's talk about how to close a shape. To
make sure your shape is closed you just have to click the Endpoint on the starting point and it
will ask if you want to close the spline. All you have to do is click the "yes" option. After that,
you're going to use this line and give it a Sweep modifier. Under "Modify" you'll go to "Sweep
modifier" only that this time you're not going to use one of the ready-made, built-in sections but
you're going to use your own custom section. So we will go to pick and click on the little shape
there. We can also rotate it if we need or change the alignment to make it different. If you want
"banking" that means you will turn the curve.

Now we've got our simple shape, so here you can see it has just used our shape there to create a
3d geometry out of the path. That is the Sweep modifier effect and as you can see, is a very
simple way just to make lines renderable or give them a certain shape for wires for small objects.
We are now going to do a few more things that are a little bit more practical. The first thing is
that we are going to repeat once again what the difference is between a closed and an open
polyline. When you use a regular line tool (we are looking from the Top view) and you draw any
shape, if you click with the last vertex onto the starting point, it will ask you if you want to close
to which you should say "yes."
That is the best way of course because now you have a closed polyline. For the next step, closed
polylines are important so if you do the same thing one more time and this time you click on it
and you say "no" then it expects you to continue with the line but if you hit the Escape key it will
stop but it's not closed, though it will look like it is closed. How can you check if a polyline is
closed or not? After selecting it, go to "Modify" and check out the Spline level because in the
Spline level, you can select the spline and it will give you details about the spline, such as the
spline number and if it is closed or not.
Let's do the same thing for the other shape. We will select it, go into Spline level, select the
spline and you can see (as shown in the image below) it is telling us that this is Spline number
one and it's open.

If this is the case you want to make sure that you close it but how can you find where it is open?
The best way to do so is when you zoom in you can see right away the point where it is open. If
you want to close it now, there's a "Close" button somewhere. You will see it when you are in
the Spline level but what happens when you hit the "Close" button is that it closes it from the last
point to the starting point. This means it will create the connection here and in some cases creates
a loop there which is self-intersecting and this is something that you want to avoid at all costs.

So if you have this whole spline here and you want to close it we would suggest that you delete
the last segment and now you can go into the Spline level to check again. You can see it's now
open as there's a big gap and when you hit "Close" what it now does is it creates a new last
segment and closes it. You could also do the same thing that we showed you in the previous
chapter and that is to go into the Vertex level and choose "Connect."
With the "Connect" option you can create, click and drag onto there it automatically creates the
last section and welds it together and now if you check it you'll see it's closed; that is closing it
manually and could be a lot of work which is why when you create shapes in a different program
for example in the CAD program you always have to make sure that the lines that you use for the
walls or the windows are closed polylines. This is because the thing that the Max program
doesn't like is polylines that are not closed. Also, there's another thing that the Max program
doesn't like and we are going to show you later. Now let's explore what effect a closed polyline
has. Note that we are showing you this so that you get to see the difference if the polyline is self-
intersecting. When it is self-intersecting, it is also a closed polyline but it won't work for the
purposes that we are doing because it is self-intersecting so the difference between a self-
intersecting polyline and a closed non-intersecting polyline is that you cannot define where
inside is and where outside is.

When it is a closed polyline there is the inside and there's outside there all visible but when you
walk on this line there the inside part is on one side and then at another point, it jumps and
suddenly the inside is now on the other side, so it doesn't know how to fill it into a solid
geometry which is why this one will not work for the next step. Let's leave it there and we will
show you what the next step is.
The next step is a modifier that helps you to turn a closed polyline. We will go into the Isometric
view and we're going to turn it into a solid object. To do that is very simple: select your closed
polyline (it doesn't matter if it's an imported one or one that you drew in in 3d studio) and you
give it a modifier, the modifier is called Extrude.
After you have given it an Extrude modifier it will already look a little bit more solid than before.
All you need to do now is change the amount of extrusion, in this case, it's half a meter, which is
0.5 and that will turn the former line into a solid object. The word "extrude" means it is giving it
a height in its local coordinate so if it's a positive height then the object has a positive height and
when you go back down it can also have a negative height and it can also go down to zero but
when it has zero this is something that you want to avoid because then it's a flat object and it can
give you problems when you render it so make sure that the "Extrude" at least has a certain
height and not zero.
There's one more thing to talk about here. If you select your object and choose the Extrude
modifier, you will see that when you do it again it remembers the height from the last extrusion,
which in this case is 0.5, and automatically makes it 0.5. If you don't want this you can change it
at any time. The next thing we are going to look at which you are going to do here with your
self-intersecting polyline is to show you how a result looks with a self-intersecting polyline. If
you have this selected and you choose the same Extrude modifier, you can see that instead of
creating a solid object what it does, it creates a wall only, so it's not able to cap it into a solid
object.
Also, from our illustration above, you can see the outside here is green and here also green but
you can also see that the inside is black; this has nothing to do with lighting because here it's also
not black. Keep in mind that for it to be black means you see the back side of the face and when
you render it the back side of the face usually doesn't render since it's hard to tell in this case
Arnold also renders them but not to a solid object and if you rotate it slightly you can see through
here because it's just a little wall. That is something you want to avoid; do not create self-
intersecting polylines. Another thing here is that the Extrude modifier can also be turned on and
off, its value can be adjusted later on and if you need to change the line itself in this modifier
stack you can always go back to the line, you will see then that the Extrude will be turned
invisible for the moment and then in the line, you can choose whatever you want. For example,
let's turn this into a smooth corner here. Importantly, don't forget to go out there again; up to
Extrude and now your object has a smooth curve there. So in the modifier stack later on you will
have a lot of objects stacked up there and you can go back to the line anytime. Note that not all
modifiers allow you to go back but with the Extrude modifier, this is where you can do that quite
successfully.

Now you can proceed to close the polylines. Remember, we have already shown you how to
close them with the "Close" button or by hand, which is by deleting the last segment and making
sure they're not self-intersecting. After that, you can check if they're closed using the methods we
showed you. If you want to extrude more than one object at the same time we do not recommend
that you select both objects and both lines and then give it an Extrude modifier. Even though you
can give it an Extrude modifier they can only have the same height but you'll see it already in the
Extrude mode as it is written in italic so when you select one of them and it's a line that is
extruded when you change the modifier it also changes the other one. This is just like an
instanced copy of the modifier. The better solution is to select and remove the modifier. If those
objects belong together in a way and they will be extruded together then it's better to select the
lines and attach them to one object. So select and attach the first line, then attach the second one
and now it's one object, one color, and it also can be extruded in one go. Let's go back to our
floor plan and all the objects that we've read in this case would be wall objects. You can see that
importing them per entity means every shape from AutoCAD became a shape in 3d studio
even though they were all separate shapes. If you want to extrude them together you would need
to start with one, choose "Attach" and then click on the ones that you want to attach.

From our example as shown in the image above, all the red ones are together, we turned the
"Attach" function off by right mouse click and now we can take all the closed polylines for
example, give an Extrude modifier and extrude it into the floor plan. Let's say we are working
with a really small apartment about two and a half meters, so here are the walls all extruded to
two and a half meters as you can see in the image below.
We are going to show you the same thing one more time. We can either go to "File" and "Reset"
or we could also delete everything. Now we are going to import it one more time, so we go to
"Import" and locate the floor plan but this time we are not going to import it as an entity but as a
layer. That means everything that is on the same layer will be imported as one object and in this
case, it will derive the AutoCAD primitives by layer. We will hit "Ok" and as you can see we
have organized the floor plan.
If we select the walls now, it's all attached and we can detach it anytime as well.

From the image above, you can see that the green ones which are the windows are detached and
the doors are also detached there. Let's quickly turn this into a floor plan. We are going to do it in
the Perspective view and turn it into a simple floor plan. This may not be the best way to create a
floor plan since it's better that you do that in Revit or ArchiCAD but it's a workaround and it's a
nice geometry once you have it in Max. To start, you'll select the walls, go to "Modify" and then
give them an Extrude modifier. We will extrude it to 2.5m (but you can type in whatever height
you want) so that is our solid walls. The next thing is our doors and for the doors, we are just
going to create holes as doors, so what we are going to do is to select our door object which we
called "layer door" and we're going to move it to 2.5m in height. Now the doors are up there, let's
make our doors 2.2m in height so we have the remaining 30cm. We are going to extrude them to
-0.3 and that would be the remaining holes in the doors. Now we have our walls, we also have
our windows here and for the windows, we are going to extrude to 1m in height so that is below
the window and then we are going to clone them by using the Object Snap. So we will just move
it up there and from the top down again we make it -0.3 instead of 1 and what we have here is
our walls with windows.
From our illustration, it looks strange because we've got a mixture of red, green, and yellow
colors there but if you select all three of them and give them a color together you won't know the
parts where they came from, and when you render it, it is also not going to show you the gaps
there so as when the geometry is nicely done.

This is perfect to create a simple floor plan; just use another object for the floor and we're ready
to put in some furniture and probably some doors that you have already. Of course, the doors
come in other programs like Revit, but that is a really fast way to get the geometry good. That is
so much for the Extrude modifier.
If you would like to adjust parts of your floor plan you're going to look from the drop-down.
Let's say you've got the bathroom and you need a thick wall there, which is not a 10cm wall, but
a little bit more. You can see it's already extruded but you can still edit it because it is an editable
spline that has been extruded.
From the drop-down you're going to hit the "go back in the stack" to the "edit with spline" and in
the Segment level, for example, you can select it and just move it down.
You can also select in the Vertex level. Let's say you select this Vertex, something we haven't
shown you here is a button called "Filet" that allows you to round this corner without using a
point because rounding creates two points and the two lines perfectly stay the same.

Let's go out of the Vertex level and back into the extrusion and here's our change: the lines stay
editable. By simply going back in the stack or let's say you need a thicker wall here at this
piece, select "go back to spline," select the wall, make it thicker and here we are with a larger
column there.

So now you can perfectly edit it but of course, you could go back into your CAD file anytime
and do the same thing, which is to either edit it or add a fillet there, and then you can work to
scale. Keep in mind that the CAD program cannot substitute what we did here in Max so editing
is always possible when it is already extruded. Let's look at another modifier that works pretty
much the same as Extrude but with a little difference and this modifier is called "Bevel." For this
illustration, we are going to be working with the rectangle. First, you'll select the rectangle, go to
"Modify" then find the modifier "Bevel." Note that what you are selecting is not "Bevel profile"
but "Bevel."

The Bevel function does the same thing (it extrudes) but in different levels or different segments
and here it says bevel values. You're not going to start with the outline here; you're going to start
with the first height. The first height is half a meter with no outline then in level two again, it's
half a meter but this time you're going to make it smaller and in level three we will be going out
again. So we only have three levels but if you need more than that you're probably more in the
area of poly modeling and this is where we are going to show you how to have more levels like
this but for now we can just create a simple level.
At this point, you may be asking yourself what kind of geometry you can create here, two things
that are quite handy with this modifier. The first thing is that when you are creating a large-scale
model, let's say this is the size of your building, and here is the outline of two or three
neighboring buildings, you can use the Bevel modifier at those outlines of the neighboring
buildings.
Just give them a Bevel modifier and this is just the same thing as before. You can define the first
height which is the height of the ground floor; let's make it 3m so it's about the same size, then
the first level and the second level will be another 3m and you're going to use the outline to
minus and pull it down there.
Here what it does is that it creates a roof for you so you can create a single low-resolution, low-
level detail house just by simply using the Bevel modifier. The good thing is when you adjust the
modifier once to the height of the roof and the building, you can now at any time select your next
rectangle, find the Bevel modifier and it remembers the settings from before.
If you don't know your program, when you click on the modifier list it first makes the modifier
pop up to the top and when you click a second time it pops up to the bottom and then you can
pick from the alphabetic list.
This may seem quite annoying because you need one extra click for everything so when you
need a lot of them, such as the Bevel modifier or the Extrude function which falls under the set
of modifiers that you'll need all the time, there is something that's called "configure modifier
sets."
When you click on that do not select some pre-configured ones which makes no sense because
you want to make sure that Bevel and extrude are part of it as well as the Renderable Spline and
every other thing we've done so far.
So you're going to use "show buttons" and that shows two by four buttons here at the top.

Now once they are shown you can again click on this thing here and you can choose
"configure modifier sets." You'll see a pop-up window first, after which you can choose how
many buttons you want. Let's say four.

Now you can just select a modifier from the left side, for example, the Extrude, Bevel, and below
that you have the Renderable Spline and then the Sweep function. Let's say these are the four
modifiers you want and when you hit "ok" you now have your four modifiers ready.
Whenever you have a spline here, let's go for a circle, select the spline in "Modify" and now you
have your modifiers ready. This means at any time, you can extrude your circle or other objects.
That is much simpler to use when you need them and as long as you have four to about six
modifiers, it doesn't use a lot of space and if you need another modifier you just go down into the
list, remember you have to click two times. Moving back to the Bevel modifier that is good for
the neighboring house, of course, if you need some special geometry that has a shape like this
you can use the Bevel modifier.

Creating text
The next thing that is quite handy is when you create text on your object, for example, a house
and you want the text to be three-dimensional.
To create text there are different tools to use. There's a Text tool in shapes and then there is
another tool called Textplus in geometry. There is also an extra tool that already creates three-
dimensional text elements but we want to use the Bevel modifier. So under the Bevel modifier,
we will go use the Shape text and with the Shape text, you can type in whatever text you want.
For this illustration, there's a bar and we want to put a sign bar on top here. If the size of the
letters is too big, you can make it smaller and vice versa. You can also see our element and this
element of course will be rotated 90 degrees. We can have it created right on the wall there and
later on we are going to move it.

There are two ways to get the bar letters right there on the wall. From our example, if you look
from the top the wall that we want to place is right next to the entrance and you could look from
the front. So the first way to get the bar letter is to go into the front view and now create a piece
of text. We are going to do it up there where it still says bar with one meter and it will
automatically create the bar text this way and when you extrude it later on, it will also extrude in
the correct way, which is perpendicular from the wall.
Another way to do it is by creating the text with a button here called Autogrid. However, there's
a little danger in using Autogrid. When you have Autogrid turned on and you have a bar and the
text, and then you just click once, you'll notice that when you hold your mouse it automatically
finds the shape and it will find which way it goes. So when you hold it on that wall it creates the
letter there. This means it automatically finds a grid there.

Don't forget to turn off the Autogrid. Whatever object you create when the auto grid is still on,
let's say you are creating a pyramid, for example, and then the pyramid is being created on this
wall so it remembers the Autogrid and automatically finds the surface. This is quite helpful for
quick drawings but not for precise things so don't forget to turn it off.
Now also note that if we keep the bar sign, when we render it, it will not render because the bar
is just text (it's a 2D shape) so we need to turn it into a 3d object. To do this, you can either
extrude it but when you extrude the bar sign to an amount of about 0.1 you will get very sharp
edges and that is more like a computer graphic in the rendering. If you want this that's fine but
it's much better to use a Bevel modifier and give the letters a slightly beveled edge; that helps to
make it even more three-dimensional.
Keep in mind that an object that has already been extruded cannot be beveled, and even though
Beveling is a part of Extruding, you can only extrude shapes and once a shape is extruded it's not
a shape anymore, reason why you can no longer extrude it or sweep it. With this, you can deduce
that all those four modifiers which we have looked at are for shapes only, which is why you have
to extrude. To ensure that you can do whatever we have done so far, we will look at some
examples. We are going to place a Bevel modifier on it. For the extrusion height, we are going to
make that to be 0.1, there is no outline, and then for level two, we are going to do 0.01 and make
the outline -0.01. The image below shows how that looks.

You can see that 0.1 is the first extrusion and the second one is only 0.01 which is 1cm, so that
gives you a 1cm cut away and it looks a little too soft. In this case, we will go for 0.005, and for
the outline, we are doing the same thing here which is -0.05 which is just to give you about half
the edge here. Now we have our bar sign at the pyramid bar and when we render it, it just gives
us a little bit of reflection around the edge and this makes it look much more three-dimensional.
Let us now check out the text element that is under the Geometry. The Geometry here is
TextPlus and when you use the TextPlus tool, the same thing happens; you can type whatever
you want, you can type the bar again, and you can choose the font style as well as the size.
There is something about this tool. Not only can you define the text by the TextPlus tool, it
automatically creates an extrusion or a beveling.
This means both the extrude version and the beveling version can be done with the text and if
after using the Extrude version you want the same thing but with the Bevel, you just have to
apply Bevel and then you're going to place the text on the position where you want it to be, in
this case, the ground.
This means if you are looking down, for instance, you also want to make sure that you see the
bar.

To get the edge, the first thing to look at is the height of the extrusion and the second one is the
height of the bevel and how far it is either pushed in or out. As you can see from our example,
the positive value is pushed in and if we want to push it out we can. We can as well go to
"Modify" and change the font style.

Practice
Let us finish this chapter by showing you another example. This time we are going to choose
another logo, different from the last logo we used in a previous section and we are going to do
the 20th-Century Fox logo. Basically, we are doing just a couple of texts that we extrude and if
you look closely at the image above, you can see the edge here; we're going to bevel them as
well and we're going to check out how we can edit the text because this font style has been
altered so we're going to do the same thing and then put some plates in between so you'll see how
you can quickly recreate the 20th-century fox logo.
To begin, we are going to do a quick reset so that all the changes in your version are the same.
We will now start creating the text for it but we are not going to do it in the Top view because it's
better to do it in the Front view. We will go into the Front view, then use the traditional text
element here which is only 2D text and we're going to start with the number 20. We will try to
access "Helvetica" which is the closest to the font style but we found out it's not installed here
but that doesn't matter anyway. We will go for a Sans serif text and then we are going to type 20
and 10 meters. It's a large logo so let's make it about 10 meters in size, but it doesn't matter how
tall it is, it just needs to work together with the different text elements.

The only thing we do not need is the "th" therefore we are going to hold our Shift key and move
a copy over; we'll choose "copy," after which we select it, go to "Modify" and just change the
text to "th." Note that we will not scale the letters with the Scale tool; if you need a smaller "th"
which we need you'll just do it in "Modify" and bring it there. We are going to adjust that a little
bit later, but from the illustration so far what we have now is the "20th." At this point, we are
going to make a copy down here and make the copy text "Century" also smaller. You could
check out if you want to use Arial black which may seem the best. If you feel it would also work
for the "20" you can select the "20" and choose a different font style here. In this case, we will
just do the regular Arial. That way the "th" also stays small.
Using the "Century" we are going to make a copy down there and then change that to "Fox."
This, of course, needs to be larger so we choose another font and make the size larger. We can
see that the 20s are too small so let's also face that and change it to something better.

We are now ready to give it a certain bevel to make it a three-dimensional object. We are going
to start with one and once we have the correct settings for one we will just apply it to all the
others. You may have seen the show opener of 20th-century fox with the music and there's a
chance that we see the logo from the back so we need this beveled edge not only from the front
but also on the other side. We will maximize it from the front then we're going to give it a
"Modifier" and use the bevel. The first one needs to be 0.1 with an outline of 0 then we are going
to extrude it to a certain height, which should be 20 in this case. That is the size of the whole
thing. The second bevel will be done in that same manner and that is again 0.1 and -0.1.
You can now see there are an edge in the back and an edge in the front which looks good and
now as we have correctly adjusted our bevel we will select the "th" hit the Bevel and do a little
adjustment. We are going to select the Bevel and instead of 0.1, we'll use 0.05 and also for the
second Level instead of 1 you use 0.5 and -0.5. This is now smaller and more preferable.
Again, we are going to make some adjustments to the "th" so it doesn't look too different from
what we aim to achieve. Remember, it is still text and it has text elements, and if we want to
adjust it just as if it's a normal spline what we need to do is to put a modifier between the text and
the bevel or we can just right-click and convert to editable spline. In this case, we are going to
choose the version with the modifier between it. First, we're going to give it the modifier that's
called "Edit spline." This allows us to go into the segment level and pull this up. In the Segment
level, we are going to select that segment for example, and move it taller. Ensuring we are in the
Perspective view, we will move it in or even better go in here and select all those points and
delete them because then it's straight down. If we turn the "Edit spline" modifier invisible we can
have the original version here. Now with the modifier on we will give it a bevel after which we
have the beveled version of it.

This means we will go to "Century" and bevel, and then proceed to the "Fox" and bevel. With
that we are ready; all we need to do is to look from the top. We are going to use a simple box
there to serve as a box in-between them. So from the front view, with our simple box, we will put
it in between 20. Next, we are going to modify the “Fox” and then adjust the settings. We will
move another copy down and simply scale it a bit.

Now we are going to select everything, give it a color, make it a wide angle closer and we are
now ready to animate it, of course, with the camera. Right here it is 20th Century Fox but when
we render it you will see those nice beveled edges. With our little example, you just learned how
to use the extruded or beveled text and some simple boxes to recreate the 20th Century Fox logo.
To gain mastery of this, endeavor to practice as much as you can with different logos.

Review Questions
1. What are parameters and why are they important?
2. Mention 2 important tools used in the conversion of 2D objects to 3D objects.
3. Convert the 2D line you created in the previous chapter to a solid object using Smart
Extrude.
 CHAPTER 20
CLONING AND ARRAYS
In this chapter, we will be going over cloning and we will cover something called Arrays. You
may be trying to get in some advanced modeling because you want to start doing some UFOs
and people, but before you do that you have to understand what cloning is.

Cloning
Before you clone an object you first need an object so you're going to go ahead and make a little
box. To clone it simply means to copy and paste it but you can't just copy and paste that. You'll
not see it anywhere but what you do see is that you can select the object, and go to "Edit" and
"Clone." What cloning does is simply create a copy of it so go ahead and "Create copy" and click
"OK."

Now you will notice that nothing changes and that's because what 3d Studio Max does is they
put the copy on top of the other copy and if you move one around you can see that it's there.
Another way that you can copy this is to select it, hold down the Shift key, do any transformation
like Move, and then just let go of the Shift key and your mouse button and you will see your
clone options button pop up. This brings us to another thing. What we have here is "Copy,"
"Instance" and "Reference." What "Copy" means is it makes an entirely different copy that you
can do anything to and it doesn't affect the thing that you copied it from.
If you select this as an Instance what happens is it becomes an instance of that object so if you go
ahead and change this object by modifying one of the properties you can see that they both
change because even though they're two different copies now they're each instance of the other
so whenever you change one they both change.
That's different from the "Copy" because that one was a regular copy so that's separate. When
you put a regular copy you can modify this in the original one which doesn't reflect in the copy
but whenever you have an Instance and you modify it they both; remember, an instance is pretty
much the same thing in different locations and a copy is two different things.

Array
We will now create another box and we are going to show you how to create an array. An Array
is more like a bunch of duplications of an object. So instead of having to copy that multiple
times, if we just pick a button, and have a copy like 10 times that would be awesome.
For example, let's say we're making a wall with spaces in it and we wanted to copy this bunch of
times. Copying it could get a little repetitive so let's go up to a new tool but first; we will select
the objects and go to "Tools," then select "Array."
This brings up your Array panel and what an Array does is that it allows you multiple copies of
this. The first thing you need to do is click "Reset all parameters" so that way if you have some
numbers in there just go ahead and click "Reset" and you'll change it all to default again.
Another thing that we will show you later is the preview but for now, what we want to do is to
copy a bunch of these along the x-axis (the x-axis is the long way right here).

You will now go ahead and indicate what spacing you want in between your objects. For
illustration, we will put it to be ten spaces apart. Array dimensions account is how many
objects you want; for our example, we'll say seven. So now we have seven objects, spaced ten
units apart. What the "Totals" mean is how far apart they're spread multiplied by how many they
are. There are some other parameters here but the only two parameters you need are how far
apart you want and how many elements you want. Another cool thing is that you can preview
this without having to set it firmly and press "Ok." As we preview this you can see we've got our
seven elements but we need them spaced out a little more so we are going to raise this object a
little and that's the effect we're on. Now that we've previewed that you can go ahead and click
"OK" and set it so that's where preview comes in handy a whole lot.

Now you can see that instead of just one element we got seven elements or objects; that are the
basics of cloning an object and again, an array is pretty much a bunch of clones but you do it all
at once. Remember, to get to that, you go to "Tools" and then “Array."

Review Questions
1. What is the relationship between cloning and array?
2. What is the importance of using the feature of Array in your work?
3. Create a circle and 7 copies of it at once.
 CHAPTER 21
DUPLICATING OBJECTS WITH CLONE
When we duplicated objects in an array they got created as something called an Instance. In this
chapter, we will look at cloning objects using another method different from that of the previous
chapter. An instance is an object that is identical to another object and we can illustrate that by
selecting any one of these and going to the "Modify" panel and playing around with the
parameters.

If you change the length, for example, we'll get wider stairs. Each one of those is a separate
object but they're all instanced which means they're all sharing the same parameters.

Cloning
Let's also look at cloning objects outside of the Array tool because we can duplicate any object
and choose to either make it a unique copy or a shared Instance. Let's say in our example, we
want to make some sides to our staircase there. We'll go to the "Create” panel and in "Geometry
standard primitives" just draw out a box using the box tool, then in the Top view, we'll click and
drag to set the footprint, then drag up to set the height, and then click.
Now we want to change these parameters here. As long as the object is still selected we can
change the parameters directly here in the "Create" panel but you can go over to the "Modify"
panel just to save yourself some confusion. Let's set the length there and that's going to be 4
inches type in 4 and then press the tab key. We'll go to the width field and for the width let's
make it 18 inches and press the tab. Then for the height, we're going to make it pretty tall
because it has to be the same height as all the stairs, so we are going to make it 23 feet and 6
inches. We will also add a quote sign which would be a double quote of 23.5 feet. Now it's tall
enough, let's orient it. We'll grab the rotate tool and do this in the Front viewport. What we want
to do is just turn that so that it's lined up. First, we will make the Viewport larger with Alt+W.

We will then switch over to the Move tool which is the W key just to position it so that the
bottom here is going to be below the floor. We're going to later chop this off and make it pretty
but for now, we just want to position it there so that it is completely below the floor. We will
then rotate it a bit and highball that. If you want more precise control over any one of the
transforms then you can go into the transform type-in area down here and either enter it in or
play with the spinner values. We are giving it a value of about -53 points. So now we've got that
positioned in at least two axes let's go to the Top view with Alt+W and we want to move it
towards the stair steps. We want this to line up with our stairs so for the Y position we will give
it a value of 2 feet and 2 inches.
What we have created is our original box that's aside for the stairs but we want to make a
duplicate of that and to make a clone you can do it in two ways: either use the menu or use
Interactive Transformation. The menu is under "Edit" and then "Clone." When you do this you
get the Clone options dialog in which you can choose Copy, Instance, or Reference and give it a
name, but you can also interactively clone. Let's look at that.

Interactive cloning
To interactively clone, choose a transform tool such as the Move tool, hold down the Shift key
on your keyboard, and then change the position of the object. Keep in mind that Shift + Drag is
clone.
Now we can choose to make a Copy, Instance, or reference. A copy has no connection to the
other object; if we edit one it will not affect the other. An Instance is two identical objects and a
Reference is a sort of copy in which some of the properties are shared. If you make a reference
then the new object can have other effects stacked on top of it but it will also change if you
adjust the original option. The instance is the simple one so we'll go ahead and click "OK" and
now we've got another instance or another clone.

We want to position that by aligning it properly and to do that we'll have the Move tool selected
and set the y-position to +2 feet and 2 inches and now it's lined up perfectly.
If we need to make changes to these properties here we can select either one of them and then go
in and change things like the length and width and so on. That's how you make clones. Keep in
mind that clones and instances are super useful especially if you have many identical objects
because you wouldn't have to make a lot of copies instead, you'll use instancing since you can
change all the copies simultaneously with it

Review Questions
1. Mention 3 ways in which you can clone an object.
2. What differentiates cloning from interactive cloning?
3. Create a staircase with 12 steps using the clone method.
 CHAPTER 22
DUPLICATING OBJECTS WITH ARRAY
Now that we've got the preliminaries out of the way we can go ahead and start modeling
something. In this chapter, we are going to make an apartment loft that needs a staircase and
that'll be a good example to illustrate a tool called Array; this allows us to build multiple objects
in a spatial pattern.
Let's set up the scene first. We are going to model a staircase using feet and inches. We will go
into "Customize" and then "Units." We will set this to "US standard," we want feet in decimal
inches and for the default units we'll choose inches, which means if we type in a 12 then 3ds Max
will interpret that 12 as 12 inches. We'll click OK.

We need to also set up the grid. For that, we'll right-click on any one of the magnet icons, go to
the "Home," then "Grid" tab, set the grid spacing to one inch ( just type in a 1) and then press
the tab key. We want a major grid line every 12 inches so we'll type in 12 and then for the
Perspective View Grid Extent which is the size of the grid here in the Perspective view, we'll set
that to be 36 inches and now we have a grid setup.
We'll close that now and as we dolly forward and back with the mouse wheel we will see that
those inch lines may disappear, and the way that we know that we are at our smallest possible
grid is actually to zoom in as close as we can. So we know that each one of those squares is an
inch currently, now we are going to make a single stair step and we are going to use something
called a Chamfer box to do that.
The chamfer box is useful because it'll give us some angled edges instead of having a box where
each side meets at exactly 90 degrees. We'll have a little bit of bevel or chamfer on each edge
and that'll catch the light better. Chamfer objects are found in the "Create" panel under
"Geometry extended primitives."
After selecting the chamfer box, we will draw this out. In the Top viewport, we'll click on the
"Chamfer box." We don't care about the size, right now we just want to get the box existing in
the scene. We will Click and drag to create the footprint, release the mouse and then drag upward
to set some height. We will click again and then drag left to right or up and down to set the
Chamfer amount.
Then we will click again to finish that object. Now we have our chamfer box. As it's still
selected, we can go over to the Modify panel and enter some of these values here. We are going
to give it a length of 4 feet and then a width of 18 inches (just type in 18) and then for the height
we will give it 2 inches (type in a 2) and then for the Filet (which is the size of that chamfer) we
going to set that to only a quarter inch (type in 0.25) and then we'll press Enter.
If we get in really close in the Perspective view, what we're seeing here which is the Selection
Bracket can be a bit distracting especially since we also have the selection highlighting. We can
turn the Selection Bracket off and that's simply with the J key on your keyboard. We are turning
that off because we don't need that and to see that chamfer better. We also want to turn on
"Edged faces" simply by using F4 on your keyboard. Now we can see exactly what we're
dealing with.
We have Segments here which are the details of our chamfer. We want to have just one segment
there. We can also see that "Smoothing" is on and that will make us get a mushy effect here, so
we have to turn Smoothing off. Now we can see the angle very clearly on each one of these sides
and there's our single stair step.
Now we want to Center it. In the "world" choose the Move tool and then type in zeros for X, Y,
and Z, so down here in the "Transform type-in" area, well type 0, tab 0, tab 0, and we have our
chamfer box. To rename it, go up to the name field there so in each one of these panels at the top
you'll see a name field and that's the name of the object. We are going to type in 'Stair step 0:01'
and press ENTER. Now we're all set to do our array. We can make a whole bunch of stairs that
climb up and go up to the second floor of our building. We'll go over to the Array tool which is
going to be under "Tools," then "Array."

Within here, we can cumulatively move, rotate and scale multiple duplicate objects and to see
what we're doing we want to have the Preview button on so we'll enable that. Now we want to
move each copy of the chamfer box up by nine inches. That would be a Z position of nine, so
under Move in Z, we'll type in 9 and press the tab key. This would bring up a whole bunch of
these chamfer boxes, in fact, we now have ten of them as you can see in the image below where
it says "Total" in Array.

If we want more of these we can enter in a value as we did earlier. Let's make it 17 steps (type in
17) and then press the tab key. Now we've got 17 of them. If we also want to shift them over so
they're not all directly on top of one another, we're going to move them in the X-axis.
We want to move them in the negative x-direction so they'll stretch in this direction. For X we
will put in -1 foot or we could put in -12 inches, either way, we can put in a foot symbol here
which is just the apostrophe then press the tab key and that will take effect. Now we can see what
our stairs are going to look like, and if we are happy with that we can go ahead and click "OK"
to commit to this.
Review Questions
1. Mention the tools found under Extended Primitives.
2. What is the function of the Chamfer Box?
3. Draw out a flat square and apply a chamfer box to it.
 CHAPTER 23
GROUPING AND LINKING
In this chapter, we are going to look at grouping and linking. We will explore the function of
groups and also what the "Link" and "Unlink" buttons are used for.

Grouping objects
We start with creating things. The first thing that we are going to create is a group of just basic
objects, so go ahead and create a group of boxes; you'll make one big one and a couple of small
ones. What a group does is that it allows you to group objects so you can select them and
transform them all in the same way. To select all the objects go ahead and click "Select objects"
and highlight them all.
Now you can go up to "Group" and press "Group." You can now proceed to give it a name, even
though the name doesn't really matter and now you can see that instead of individual white
spaces around them you get this huge white bracket around the whole group.

This way if you go to your transformation tools you can move the entire objects as a group in
any direction or perform any other transformation.

Ungrouping objects
Another thing that you would want to do is to go ahead and ungroup this. With the entire group
selected, click the "Group" option first before you then proceed to select "Ungroup."
Modifying individual items in a group
Sometimes you may be in a situation where the entire group is good but you wish a particular
box there was turned or modified a little bit without tampering with the other items in the group.
If you want to edit one of the items in the group, you can't just click one of the items and edit it
or else it will affect the whole group. What you need to do is click "Group," "Open," and this
gives you access.

You will notice the pink brackets that change from white to pink and this gives you access to the
individual elements. Now you can go ahead and do whatever you want to it as an individual item
in the group.
After you are done modifying an individual item in that group, what you need to do is go to
"Group" and close it. So it pretty much opens it for adjusting and closes the group for
transformations. With that, when you click "Group," then "Close," you can go ahead and edit
your entire group again with your new transformations, so anytime you want to edit one element,
remember "Group," "Open," then when you're done editing it go to "Group," "Close," and then
you still got your group again.
Let's go ahead and ungroup our group. With your group selected, go ahead and click on "Group"
then "Ungroup" and now each of them is an individual element again.
Adding items to a group
Sometimes you have a group like this, let's go ahead and group those our items using "Group,"
then "Group" and we'll just name it group one. By default, these items are grouped. Let's say you
have another item like another box that you want to add to the group, what you would do is click
the item you want to add, select "group attached," then click the group you want to add it to and
now those three items are in a group just like that.
So again, any time you want to add an item to the group click the Item group “Attach." We will
go ahead and ungroup all of these groups in our illustration and now we have four individual
elements.
Linking and unlinking
In this section, we are going to discuss linking and unlinking. What linking does is it makes what
we refer to as child and parents. If you worked with editing before you probably know what this
is but "child" objects are pretty much linked to the "parent" objects. If you move a parent, the
parent and child both move but if you move only a child then the child moves independently. We
will show you an example so you'll understand how it works.

To make the child and parents what you need to do is link objects together. You will click the
"Link" button right up there then go ahead and click the object you want to be the child; you'll
have the parent as the big one and the child will be the smaller one, in the case of our example
below, the three small ones.
Now you can go ahead to click an object and while your button is held down drag it to the
parent, and then once you're at your parent, let go. You will notice how it will flash once, then it
will stop and that's how you know that it's a parent.
Working with Parent Object
What can you do with the parent object? Whenever you do something like move and rotate your
parent the child will move with it but the nice thing about this is whenever you move the child
it'll move independently on its own so you can move the child object over there and then when
you move the parent again the parent will move with the child.
Again, you can move the child independently of its parent and it can do whatever once it's a child
just like a teenager or adolescent but this parent object is strict, it makes the child follow its rules.

Unlinking
Anytime you want to get rid of this just go ahead and double-click any of the parents and you
can go ahead and click the "Unlink selection" and that will unlink the selection.
You'll see that once you click "Unlink" it unlinks the hierarchy so again; to create a parent with a
child click the "child" and then link it to the parent by dragging, and then it has a parent. You can
do this for all your objects if you want and then link them.

Now if you want a view of your hierarchy you'll click away from your hierarchy and press H to
get the "Select by name" button. If you expand this, you can see the parent and in our example
below, you can see that box 1 is the parent of all those other boxes.
Again, if you want to get to that press H, and then you can see the hierarchy. However, if you
can't see it, press the "Display" button and then "Display children" and that'll get you to it. So
it's probably this by default and if you want to view the hierarchy click the display option and
that way, you can see the parent and all of its children.

Review Questions
1. Explain the term "parent object."
2. Why is grouping important in 3ds Max?
3. Create one big sphere and 2 smaller ones. Group the smaller spheres and link them
to the big sphere.

CHAPTER 24
SNAP WORKING PIVOT TOOLS
In this chapter, we will talk about a new feature that 3d Max 2023 offers us, and that is a Snap
working keyword. You can access that by going to Tools. You can click on the top edge of the
Tools menu and snap here. You also have it in your right-click menu (you have all the actions
here).
Also, if you right-click in the space of your toolbar, you can select it from there. You also have
the option here. Let's do some modifications to make it more interesting. You can simply select
"Place working pivot," or you use the shortcut which helps to place your pivot point on the
surface aligned to this white surface.
So if you click and release, it will automatically align your pivot point but if you click and hold
you can rotate your pivot point. If you move your object, your object moves but the pivot point
it's still in the same spot. Now if you hit Selection pivot it will go back to that object, if you hit
Line pivot you can rotate the previous point or align it to that one edge that you are working on,
if you hit "Reset working pivot" it will again be independent. You can move or rotate another
object of your scene from that point, then align the pivot to the working pivot. It will adjust the
pivot to the current position and orientation of the working pivot. Notice that all of this is
happening in the working pivot system, and like placing a selection of locations, if we come over
here and select "View" it will go to the default system of 3ds Max pivot in which the z-axis is
always on the top.

We also have other coordination systems which we will talk about later. If we go to "Place pivot
point binding box," what it does is for example, if you are in placing mode, it will give you
additional points (24 or 25 more points) to place or snap your pivot point. So it is very handy if
you want additional points to work with. Here, the next thing we are going to look at is creating a
grid from the working pivot. Now that we have activated it, we can start working on it. For
example, if we want to make a circle on our object we can do it, as seen in the image below.
This is very cool and handy. Also, this will make something referred to as a helper point; you
can use it to snap or if you change the pivot point now it will stay here, for example, if we want
to place our object at a particular point.
At some point you'll notice that if you move an object it will move in a particular direction but if
you click on one axis it will then move on that axis, and if you click on these two and start
moving it will move on that axis; if you click on three objects and you don't want them to
accidentally change, you can turn off the Gizmo temporarily and start working. Now you'll
notice that we can move it in three directions without the keys interfering because if we
accidentally select one object we will be just moving in this one direction. Also, if you want to
just move one object and you don't want to mess it up you can turn it off but with this shortcut
Shift+X, that's sorted.
In a few versions earlier it was the shortcut X but now it is for global search so if you want to
make a shortcut for this you can go to Customize hotkey Editor and transfer this more cargo.
We specified shift shift shift x for this one so it is very handy.
Review Questions
1. Mention 3 areas where we can locate the Snap pivot tool menu.
2. Mention 2 tools found under this menu.
3. Create a big box, change the color to red and apply the "Line pivot" to it.
 CHAPTER 25
UNDERSTANDING HIERARCHIES
In this Chapter we'll look at hierarchies, in other words, connecting objects especially when
doing animations because you will need to have objects connected. For our illustration, we've got
our little artist mannequin (shown in the image below) and we can pose that mannequin by
rotating the various parts.

If we select its shoulder for example, we can rotate that but before we do we just want to make it
a little bit easier to see by disabling those selection brackets with the J key on the keyboard. We
are also going to turn on the selection highlighting with edged faces.

A selected object can be displayed in an "Edged faces" mode and that's done from the viewport
menu. So from the rightmost entry on that menu we will click on that option, go down to
"Display selected" and enable "Display selected with edged faces," that way, it's a little easier to
see what we've selected because we have the wireframe superimposed with that shoulder
selected. Now we can go to the Rotate tool, do some rotating and we could see that the other
parts of the character are following it.

This is how hierarchies work; the shoulder here is the parent of the elbow and the elbow is again
in turn the parent of this wrist object here. The rule with hierarchies is that the transforms of the
child are inherited from the parent, that is, the position or the result of where this elbow is going
to be inherited from the position rotation and scale of the shoulder. The Children inherit the
transforms of their parents. The same thing happens with position; if we use the Move tool and
move the shoulder we'll see that its children are going to follow, likewise Scale, as scaling is also
inherited.
The other rule to keep in mind is that a child can only have one parent but a parent can have
many children. In this model in our illustration, we have a pelvis which is the center of the
hierarchy and everything else is a child of that pelvis. We've got the thigh and joints here, we
have the left hip and right hip, and those are children of the pelvis. We also have the chest here
which is additionally a child of the pelvis, which means if we select the pelvis and transform it in
terms of position, rotation, or scale, then those objects will all inherit those transformations. We
can see the hierarchical structure in Scene Explorer; that's one way to do it. We'll open up that
Scene Explorer and what we've got is one object, the pelvis, and a little right-facing arrow there.
If we open that up it's going to show us all the "Children" objects and there is a nested
hierarchy here so the children can have other children, in this example, all the links or the
parent-child relationships are already created. Later in the book we'll look at how to make and
break links between the objects.

Review Questions
1. What is the rule of applying hierarchies?
2. In what cases can heirchies be applied?
3. Create 4 objects. Group 3 of these objects. Make the remaining object the parent
object and the other 3 object the children.

MATERIALS AND MODELING

 CHAPTER 26
MATERIALS AND MAPPING
In this chapter, we will look at materials and maps, which help determine the appearance of
objects in your 3D scene. In real life, an object's appearance, such as color and shininess,
depends on how it reflects light, and/or how light shines through it. In 3ds Max, you use
materials to simulate effects including color, reflectivity, transparency, detail, and so on. You can
create materials in the Slate Material Editor, which you open by clicking its icon in the toolbar,
or by pressing M on the keyboard. If necessary, you can resize the Slate Material Editor to see all
three columns. You can also minimize it while you work to see changes in the viewport, and then
restore it when you need it again. You'll choose material and map types, or ready-made
materials, from the Material/Map Browser panel.

The View panel is where materials and maps appear as nodes that you can connect or wire
together, and you can edit the material and map controls in the Parameter Editor.
The interface and available options can change depending on which rendering engine is selected.
To navigate in the View, scroll the mouse wheel to zoom out and hold it down to pan. There are
many materials, but this chapter will focus solely on the Physical Material.

Physical Materials were designed to simulate real-world materials, and can achieve greater
realism with less effort than other materials. Physical Materials come with a collection of preset
templates that can assist you in creating your final looks. The list includes simple materials like
glossy plastic and more complex materials like red sports car paint. Let's start by creating
materials for the train station seats in the platform area. Open the "Named Selection Sets" drop-
down list, and choose the "Seat Selection Set." Right-click in the viewport to display the quad
menu, and choose "Isolate Selection."

Now only the seats display in the viewport and you're ready to begin creating materials for these
objects without the clutter in the scene. In the Slate Material and Map browser, go to "Expand
Materials" from "General."
Drag the Physical material from the browser and drop it into the active view. Double-click the
Physical material node to display its parameters in the Parameter Editor.
In the Material Name field, enter "Seat top orange" as the material name. It's a good habit to
name materials as soon as you create them, to make them easier to find in a complex scene.
Now select "Assign Material to Selection" to apply the material to the seats. Double-click the
node's preview to get a closer look. You can see it has chamfered corners on the sample sphere
thumbnail icon, which means that the material is used in the scene, and any changes you make
now show in the scene.
For the seat's material, we are going to take advantage of the preset templates. In the material
parameter, go to the "Presets" drop-down menu and choose "glossy plastic." The default color is
a warm white color. This color is determined by the Base color in the Basic Parameters.

As you can see in the sample sphere, there is a nice shine on the surface. This is from the
Reflections parameter of the material, which is set by default to 1.0. This means it is fully
reflective, but the Roughness parameter adds a bit of softness to the reflections. For the seat, we
need to change the color, so select the Color swatch next to Base Color.
Choose an orange color with the values Red: 0.9, Green: 0.4, and Blue: 0.02, then OK the dialog.
Now adjust the reflections from 1.0 to 0.6, but leave the roughness at the default.
By default, the Physical material has the Base Color and Reflections together in the Standard
Material mode, however, this template has them separated in advanced material mode. Exit the
"Isolate" mode by right-clicking, and from the display section of the quad menu choose "End
Isolate." Select one of the single seats and use the “Zoom Extend” shortcut Z to fit the seat into
the viewport. To see the material, you need to render. This means we are converting 3D
wireframe models into 2D images. In the Main toolbar, choose the "Render Production" button.
This brings up the "Render Frame" window and shows the seat. The big difference between the
render and the viewport display is that you can see the reflections in the render.
This texture is done now. The seats have a heel plate that we want to have a different color, so
enter Polygon mode by using the keyboard shortcut 4. Select one polygon on the heel plate,
holds Shift, and selects the next polygon, and we have the heel plate selected. Now go to the
Slate Material Editor, drag and drop the Physical material into the active view. Double-click the
node title to display the parameters. Rename the material to "Seat Bottom Gray," then choose
"glossy plastic' from the template list, and change the base color to a dark gray. Change the
Reflections amount to 0.6, and leave the Roughness at 0.256. Click the "Assign Material to
Selection" icon and because we have a sub-object selection, the material is assigned only to what
is selected. To do the other seats, you only have to select the seat and apply the "Seat Top
Orange" material to the entire object at first, and then select the "heel kick" portion of the seat at
the polygon sub-object level, and apply the Seat Bottom Gray material. You've just created a
basic shiny material.

Review Questions
1. What are physical materials?
2. Why do you need to select materials before applying them?
3. Create any physical material of your choice. Choose an orange color with the values
Red: 0.9, Green: 0.4, and Blue: 0.02. Now adjust the reflections to 1.0.

CHAPTER 27
MATERIALS AND UV MAPPING
In this chapter, we'll go deeper into Materials in 3ds Max. We're going to create materials, apply
them to objects then check out what kind of different textures go on to those materials. We're
also going to show you how to correctly place textures on the geometry because there are
different ways to influence how the texture is placed on the geometry, and we're also going to
show you how to place different textures on one piece of geometry. So let's get started.
The first thing that we're going to do is change the Render engine and for this illustration, we're
going to use the simple Scanline render engine by using stand-up material. It is much easier to
get started and get used to the way 3ds Max works with materials. We will go into Render Setup
and choose the render engine. So where it says "Renderer" we'll switch from the default Arnold
to Scanline Renderer. That means that now all the materials are available in Scanline render.

The next thing we're going to do is create some simple objects. All we need is a plane in Top
view so we're going to create a plane, then we're also going to take a sphere. When you create the
sphere, it is helpful to click the button down here that says "Base to pivot" because then the base
of the sphere is standing right here on your plane and the box there in the foreground so that is
our simple standard scene. Since the sphere has the same color as our plane we're quickly going
to change that to a blue sphere and that is the object color only. Also, on our viewports, we're
turning the background grid off by using the letter G on the keyboard.
When we talk about materials we need the Material Editor and as you already know the Material
Editor is hidden in the shortcut M. So when you press M on your keyboard you can see the Slate
material editor. Now we'll close everything here on the left side so we have enough space to
work with. We can see the first option which is Materials, so materials will be applied to our
objects. The other option Maps are usually parts of materials and they can also be used as
environments. Then we have some other options such as Material libraries and Sample slots. For
this chapter, we are going to focus only on Materials and Maps.
Moving from that we have the Standard Windows column in the Windows commands up here
then we have the view. This is where the materials are getting created so we'll put them together
out of maps, out of different influences and then apply them to something. On the right side, we
can see the parameters of a certain material or map so this is how we start.
The first thing we're going to do is create the standard material for our object so we'll go to
materials and here we're going to pick the Scanline rendering typical material. We will open
Scanline and there is the standard material. The standard material now already says "Legacy"
which means it will soon be removed. This is more like an old material but we're going to use
other types of material later on as well, for now, we're going to start with the standard material.
So we'll pull it out and drop it into our viewport. We can roll our mouse and zoom in and zoom
out, and you can see we have all kinds of in-going nodes in which we can connect something to
this material, and on the outgoing side, we have the outgoing node which also can be connected
to something else.
When we double-click the material (right now it's only one material), you can see on the right
side the parameters of the material. The first and most important is the name; the name has to be
unique so you can either name it after what material it represents, for example, concrete wood
stone or you can name it after the object that you place it on, for example, sidewalk handrail or
floor. However, just make sure you have unique names.
We will take the first material that we have created and apply it to an object. There are different
methods to do this but the best way to do it is to go to the Material Editor, select your material
(in our case, there's only one in the viewport for now), in any viewport choose one or more
objects in which you want to apply the material to and then in the Material Editor click the
button up here that says "Assign material to selection." Now the material will be assigned to your
plane. So let's check out the parameters. The most important one for this material is the color
because right now it only has a color which is the diffuse color right next to "Diffuse" and when
we click on this little color icon we can choose any color. In this case, we'll go for a colorful
orange and hit "OK."
In the Simple shader you can see the ambient color and diffuse color, all the same, the
specular color are the colors for the highlights but as we mentioned this is a very simple
material that has no reflection and also does not have very nice refraction or transparencies but
it's a very simple one so it's applied to our ground plane here. We will create another one and
apply it to our sphere. So we'll pull out another standard Material, give it a name then double-
click it.

To make sure we have the right one here, open here on the right side, change the color to let's say
a dark green, then select our sphere and hit "Assign to selection" because when we apply it to our
sphere it is one parameter in the material that can be seen a little bit better. Now when we change
the specular level, you can see that it suddenly creates a highlight and the highlight usually is a
bright spot oriented towards the light. Right now we don't have a light so it's oriented towards us,
and it's just as if we would have a light on our forehead or a flash on our camera so the light
comes from the direction that we look at it. If we look at the glossiness here we can see there is a
graph that shows us what this highlight looks like and when we increase the value for the
glossiness, then it looks a little bit more like a glossy object because the highlights are getting
smaller; so the more glossy an object is, the smaller the highlights are.
On the Diffuse pearl object it's a larger highlight and it's smaller. You can increase the specular
level as well. So that only works well on round objects like the sphere and a third one for our
box. We will pull out another object and place it next to each other and we usually do it on top of
each other or put them into groups. If you have lots of materials in your scene you can also use a
second view here, so you can create another view to work on your materials. We will double-
click the material and change the color. For this one, we're going for a blueish-purple one which
we will apply to our box. After that, we'll select the material and assign this to our selection. This
is the way you assign materials to your object.
Now you will observe that all the materials have been used in the scene. If we accidentally delete
one of the materials in our Material Editor, it's gone but that doesn't mean it's gone out of the
scene because we can see the object here in our viewport it is still there which means it is still
used in the scene.
This tells us that not all materials from the scene are in the Material Editor and also, not all
materials that you have in your material editor are assigned to an object, so you can keep
different versions. For example, if you have a floor and you have three different versions of your
floor, you can keep all those versions and only assign one to your actual floor in your 3d model.
How do we get our object back? We do this using a button, the eye drop tool which is called
"Pick material from objects." When you click on this Eyedrop tool and then on an object in
your scene, it brings in your material. Sometimes the material may be on top of another but that
doesn't matter; so in our illustration, all three materials are back. This is one way of applying
Materials.
There is also a button material that enables you to get all scene materials and that can give you
back all the materials in the scene. To ensure that the materials don't get lost you have to at least
apply it to something because if it's not applied and you delete it, then it's gone for good. We
have created our standard material and played a little bit with it, let's now have a few more looks
at the parameters. Going back to our example we are going to check the green one so we'll
double-click it and then check out the specular highlight and the glossiness.
One thing that we can also do here is on the top side, there's a Wire parameter. The Wire
parameter will give us a wire object, of course, all that also works when we render it but it's
enough to see it here in the Viewport Wire.
When we render it we can see that it only renders the front side but it's not rendering the inside of
the sphere so we can only see what looks towards us. If we want to see the inside too then we
have to click two-sided" and it will render both the inside and the outside. We can remove that if
it's a smooth geometry like the sphere here is a button then we can turn it into an object that is
not smooth but only upon render times. We can see that every polygon of the sphere now has its
own brightness and that's why it looks like a crystal thing.
Going back to our wires, we will quickly copy or clone our object. So we'll bring our sphere into
the Perspective view and now as we have used wire on our material it would mean that the wire
in the foreground is a little bit wider than this in the background because with the distance it
gets smaller. If we render it you will notice that the wire is the same thickness because right now
it's all one pixel wide and if it has the same thickness and is further in the back, it looks as if the
wire is getting thicker. What we want to do to the wire so it would lose its width over distance is
to choose "Wire" and then go under "Extended Parameters" Here we will find some parameters
for the wire.
Now when we change the units for the wires which are the same thickness from pixels to units
then the wire will render in actual units. We will try 0.1 and since that is not so thick we will go
for 0.5. When we render it, you can see it is the same thickness for both sides, and in the
Perspective view it is further away and getting thinner. This is one thing you should consider if
you use the wire model; make sure you always go in here and change the wire to units and not
pixels.

Using pictures as material

Moving forward, let's show you how to use a picture as material. We're going to use it first on
the plane (so our plane is the top material) and then proceed to name it, now we know which one
it is.
Now let's get started by showing you how to use the material on your plane. The first thing we
need is the picture that you want to use. We've got our plane but we need the picture here inside
our Material Editor and the picture that we're going to use is a map. We'll go over to open Maps
and we're going to use one from the general maps, one of which is the general bitmap. The
bitmap stands for every picture that you want to place onto it so it doesn't matter if it's a jpeg, a
gif, a png, or whatever kind of image. You can also place a film as a material.
We will pull out a bitmap and place it next to the plane and it'll ask us what kind of picture we
want to use. For this example, we have taken a couple of them from the 3ds Max library and the
image below is the bitmap we will be working with.
Now we have our picture and what we're going to do is take the outgoing node and drag it (we'll
get a rubber band), and then drop it onto "Diffuse color." Diffuse color is the general texture but
in this case, we'll use the picture instead of the color.
Remember earlier, we worked with a material that was the diffuse color up here but now instead
of using the diffuse color we're using the picture, however, we have to link it first.
This link can be selected after which we can link it but if we don't want to link it anymore you
can see how its color has changed to orange again. If we take it and link it again with "Diffuse
color" the material shows up in our viewport.
If we zoom out a bit you can see the picture we are working with (bookshelf) has been placed on
our whole geometry so it was a rectangular plane and it will be placed once on the whole plane if
we change the size of our geometry. We will select the plane and go to Modify. If we change the
size of our plane we can see that the texture sticks to the geometry but we don't want to do this.
The texture always follows the size of the object. If we double-click the picture here you can see
it's a picture used as a texture not as an environment like where we used the Hdri image in a
previous chapter.
When you're in texture you can also use the offset which means you are moving the picture. If
we try it here you can see that if you use offset it will be moved to one side and the new picture
follows on the other side of course, u stands for x direction and v stands for y direction so if we
change the offset here it will be moved in this direction.
That is one way to adjust the position of the image. For example, if we want more than one
bookshelf we can also use the tiling. If we do one into two then there are two pictures used, and
these are not offset so we have to then offset it or also use two in the other direction.
This is how we can create a larger bookshelf with more books on it but then you will see that the
red books, for example, show up multiple times; that is the offset and together with the tiling.
The default value here is 1 because we want to use the picture one time and if you need to
change the picture by itself, you will click on this and change it for another picture.
Here, we can also view the image. This tells us how the picture looks and if we want to crop
something off, we can crop it here, not forgetting to "apply" that and now it crops the image. We
can uncrop it by bringing it back and then it uses the whole image. That is how you place a
texture on an object.
Why does it know how to place it on a rectangle? This is because it's an object that has been
created in 3ds Max so it knows right away how to place it on the geometry; that is the same way
for the sphere and the same for the box as well, so let's try to put it on the box but this time with
another picture.
From the previous image you can see the material for our box which is a purple one. We will pull
out another bitmap, then we'll choose Windows here and link the Windows to the Diffuse Color
and it will be applied right away.
Here on the box, it will be applied, though in a different form; it will be applied in the form of a
box so it knows that every side now gets the picture exactly one time. That means when we take
the box and change its size, that is, we select the box, go to Modify, and change its size, it will
also stretch the texture because it always uses it one time on every side.
If this is not what you want, if you want to adjust it by yourself by how many times the picture is
placed then you have to do something else and that is to apply a UVW Map modifier but before
we do that let's do another texture also for our sphere.
So for the sphere, we're not going to use a picture just like any other picture from the library.
We're going to use a procedural map. This means it's a map that has been created in 3ds Max.
Examples include tiles, checkerboards, or some kind of noise. Let's open up the Material Editor
with M and bring the material of the sphere and now instead of using a general bitmap to pick
any picture that we want to place, we're going to try some of the others and the one that we're
going to use it's called Checkerboard.
Checkerboard is a very simple black-and-white checkerboard. When we pull it out it says
checker out of two colors and then we'll link it to our Diffuse Color.
Now looking at the sphere, you can see it has a black-and-white pattern on it. If we double-click
the checkerboard we can adjust its settings. For example, where we have two colors, let's go for
blue and a complementary color would be then yellow, so we now have a blue and yellow color.
If we don't want only blue and yellow, let's say we want to add two we can use tiling. For
example, if we use a 4 by 4, that means two 2 by 4 which indicates we now have a pattern of 8
by 8 checkerboard on a sphere like this.

Also, it's better to use the x and x direction a little bit more so let's do 8 and 4 and now it looks
like a sphere with the parameters, including the longitude and latitude. Now that is a procedural
map. Let's get another one, this time not a checker. Meanwhile, to remove the Checker, you can
just select it and hit delete, and that cuts the connection between the two. Now we'll bring in
something else and that would be the tiles. If we go further down we'll find "Tiles" and link it to
our Diffuse Color.
This now creates simple tiles and when we double-click it we have the pattern of our tiles. We
know the tiles of the sphere might look a little weird so we'll go to "Advanced control" and here
we can choose the tiles and the grout color.
We can choose how many we want but first, we'll make the grout smaller like 0.1 and for the
horizontal count we'll do 10 by 10 or even 10 by 20. There is also a little color variance which
means not all the tiles have the same color so we'll do 20 here and that creates some random tiles
in our sphere.

So that's that for a procedural map. You can unlink it anytime or go back to the old one if you
prefer and that is how to place the material. In the next phase, we're going to adjust how the
picture is placed on the object. We're going to apply this UVW Map modifier and check out its
settings and we'll be doing it to the plane. First, we're going to select the plane and right now it
already has a material applied to it because it knows how to apply materials and that's called
UV/UV coordinates. Since it already has UV coordinates or Mapping coordinates we're going to
give it a modifier. For that we'll first select it, go to "Modify" and from the list we'll pick the
UVW; it's down and it's called UVW Map.
There is a modifier that allows us to give it a different form projection method of mapping and
also adjust it in various ways. The way the picture is applied to the object right now is planar
because it's a plane and it knows planes usually get it from the material. Now let's look at a few
things that we can adjust. The first thing is the size of the image. From our illustration, we can
see the size of the image and we can see it now allows us to change the size to which the picture
is applied.
What you see here, the orange frame with the line here that says this is the top of the image is
called the Gizmo and this tells us where the picture is even though we don't see it outside of our
picture. Also, up here where it says uvw map we can open that and here it says Gizmo. When we
click on the Gizmo then it turns yellow from orange and when it's yellow, we cannot only scale it
but we can also move it.
With this we can define what part of the picture will be placed on the rectangle, of course, when
we reach the end of the picture it repeats and there's a second picture coming in so that is how we
move it; you cannot only move and scale it, but we can also rotate it so if we don't want the
picture to be parallel to the edges we can also move it the other direction but that will distort the
image a lot so we're only rotating it in the z-axis. If you need the tiling you can also tile it here.
We'll do 2 by 2. There is U V and W because when we place the box we want to adjust all three
directions of our texture so that's why we have a 3 right now. We only have a plane so only two
of them are there; the next one is not doing anything and it's not changing anything so let's leave
it at 1 and that is when we have a plane.
We can simply adjust it. If we adjust the mapping by doing things like rotating and tiling it's
even more recognizable, don't forget to go out of the Gizmo when you are done. Now we'll show
you something else; we're going to create another plane and this plane we're also rotating the
plane a little bit so nobody says yes because it's parallel. We can also rotate this plane because
the texture will stick to the plane but here is our other one and we would like to have the same
material on it which is simple. The same material means we will go to the Material Editor, select
our plane, select the material, and hit "Apply."

Now it has the same material but we want the same mapping directions and this is important, for
example, if we have a hardwood floor in one room and want the same tiles or the same size of
wooden panels also in the other room, we have to adjust it for one room and then just take our
next room and apply the same uvw map modifier and now we would have to find the same
angle (same size of texture or tiling), or just copy it from the other one. Here, there is a button
that's called "Acquire" and with that, we can acquire and then click on this one.
So the question is do you want to apply it relatively or absolutely? Applying relatively means the
same size and the same rotation angle but it will not match the other mapping, it will only have
the same look. If it is Absolute then it continues to the other object. Let's try "Absolute" because
it's the most common one. So when we choose "Absolute" we can see that all the boards will
continue over here and we will see it a little bit better when we bring it closer.
Let's bring it over here and "Acquire" it again then make it "Absolute" and here, you can see it
just continues here. That is perfect if you have some tiles on the floor or something like this and
it continues even when going into the other room. So that is how you apply a planar uvw map
Modifier. Let's go back to the box. When we want to change the texture of the box we need to
also apply a uvw map only this time and you can see that when we use planar it protects the
texture from the top down. At this point, this is not what we want because these streaks that we
can see here on the side of the box are the last row of pixels of our picture and the last row of the
pixels will be pulled down which is why it has that weird form. So what we want is a box
projection and when we click open this and go to the Gizmo, of course, the box usually will fit
the picture.
If for any reason we have messed up our texture, there's always a Reset button that we can use to
reset it to how it was in the beginning which means it fits the box perfectly on all sides. If we
accidentally change the size of it only then we can either reset it or we can use "Fit."
In this case, it's the same as it will fit again into your box but we'll show you when it's not the
same. So when you resize your texture and then you click on Gizmo and rotate your texture and
now you click "Fit," it fits in the rotated version, and if you want to go back to the original
settings you just have to reset it. That is for the box but you can do the same thing with the tiles.
You can tie it 2 by 4 by 2 for example, in this case, it's also x and y only. There's no change for
the box here and so that is the tiling. There are also some other things that you can check out in
the uvw map if you want to know more as there are different ways but for now, we would say
that the Fit, Reset, and the Acquire from another object are probably the most important things
that you need.
If you go into the Help file and press F1 you can get information on all the other functions of the
uvw map modifier as well. Let's try something else but first, we'll go back to the Material Editor
because there are still a few things that we want to do on our material so let's go to the plane.
You saw that we not only have Diffuse Color maps, but we also have other things that we can
apply and link to our material and we would like to show you two of them.

The Bump Map

The first one is the Bump map. The Bump map creates a bumpy or rough surface by creating the
illusion of some height or depth; it's only working on the illusion so it's not changing the actual
geometry as a bump map.
We usually use grayscale images so you use a bitmap, place it in here and we can see there are a
couple of grayscale images, so for this illustration we'll go for the tire thread.
From the image above you can see the tire thread and you can see the black and the white so the
gaps have white and the rubber things are black. We will take it and link it onto the Bump map
but you'll notice that the Bump map is not shown on the viewport, it is only shown when you hit
"Render," only then can you see the Bump effect. Going through our object, it looks as if the
black parts get pressed in. We cannot create a landscape or mountains out of it but we can create
the illusion of a rough surface for example, with a brick wall or we have also here some
cobblestones so we can do that with the bump map.
When we double-click our material and go down to the Maps section, we can see that all those
maps usually have 100 percent but only the Bump map has only 30ml so we can also increase the
effect that the Bump map has on the geometry. If we increase it and render it again, it looks as if
it's deeper pressed in but be aware and don't go too far because, at a certain point, it will just look
ugly. This is not accidentally at 30 ml and not in percent. It is per ml because you could go up
high but when you do this it will soon look ugly and artificial and not very nice so let's keep this
to 50.
If we want to change the picture to another one we'll double-click our bitmap and then we can
load a different image. In this case, we're going to show you the dots that we have here. These
dots create little bumps on the material but in actual sense, it's the black pushed in so the picture
looks like what we can see in the image below.
What it does is it pushes in the black parts and leaves the white parts as they are. What we can do
in the material is double-click the material and then we can also give it a negative bump. We will
try -100 and we can see that it pushes in the white and leaves the black out or let's say the black
is not pushed in instead it's pulled out, anyway, it's the same result. We can see it looks a little
different now; it looks like a golf ball. We can not only inverse the bumping but bring this to a
positive value which is the default. We can also select the bitmap itself and on the Output here
we can invert the image and then it becomes an inverted image. Now it's the same effect as if you
would go to a -100 or +100 so that is something that you should keep in mind.
You can do all kinds of things to the picture here and the Output and under the bitmap
parameters but that is what the Bump map does as well. Let's quickly cut the connection between
the Bump map and the picture itself and we're going to show you the next step and the next map
here and that is the Opacity map.

The Opacity Map

To show you how this works, we'll use the same black image with the white dots, but we'll take
the image and use it as an Opacity map. What it does is it turns the parts that are black invisible
and we probably don't see anything here.
However, if we take our box here and move it underneath our plane, as it has a Transparency
map, the parts which are black in the Opacity map will turn the material transparent, and all we
have are those yellow dots so wherever it was black it's now fully transparent and of course,
smoothly changing to fully opaque.

If we take the picture in the Opacity map and double-click, the material is 100. In this case, we
cannot go into the negative and also from 0 to 100 so if we want this picture to be inverted we
have to double-click the picture, and down there in the Output section we can invert the picture
and now the dots are black and are creating holes. In summary, the Transparency map, or in
this case the Opacity map creates transparent materials wherever it's black.
Note that you can use the Opacity map for all kinds of things. If you have a metal with holes in it
or if you have a fence that is only made out of wires then you can use the holes in between, make
them black, and then you get a nice view of which you can see through as well. That is enough
for the Bump map, the Opacity map, and the Diffuse Color map. The next thing that we would
like to show you is in the materials. For this illustration, we are going to use the original box as it
was and what we would like to show you now is a case of what if we want the material to be
larger on one side and the other side to have a smaller image?
Mesh
Whenever there is a Uvw Map modifier it will always be that the two sides that are facing each
other will be the same size but how can we adjust the Uvw coordinates for every single plane?
We will go to our box (a clean box without any alterations), right-click, and convert to "Editable
Mesh."

You will notice it still is applied correctly because the mapping coordinates are usually in the
geometry so if there is no Uvw map modifier on it, it already has some mapping information and
some texture coordinates. Now we're going into the polygon level and we would like to adjust
the mapping coordinates for every single side therefore we need a combination of two modifiers.
In addition to the uvw map modifier, we will also use another modifier and we have to check it
out from the modifier list unfortunately, you have to always click twice on the list (that's new in
Max), go down search for a modifier that is called Mesh Select.
Mesh Select is a modifier that by itself does nothing but only selects an object and now it allows
us to go into the Polygon level, for example. It looks like an "Edit Mesh" modifier but it's Mesh
Select and we'll select one side. By the way, if you don't like that the side will get red when you
select it you can use your F2 on the keyboard and F2 switches between red selection and red-
only outline. In this case, we would like to leave it like this because this way, it's clear which side
is selected.
Now with one side selected (here it says "Mesh Select") and we're inside the polygon mode, this
is the only time when we're not going out of the level and now we'll add our Uvw map modifier
and now we can see it by the connection.
In this case, it is only applied to one face, unfortunately, it is projected from the top but we want
to project it from its front side and that is called "Normal Align" because this face here has "face
normals" which is that point perpendicular to the plane so we'll click at "Normal Align," go with
our mouse on it and move around a little bit.
It's not changing a lot because it is still zero in one direction then we'll go out of normal
alignment and hit "Fit" and now it fits this side. When we change the size we can see it only
changes on one side (on the one side that is selected) so we'll adjust it so it looks like what we
wanted and when we are done we'll click anywhere else.
Let's do the same thing with the other plane. First, we'll select it then we'll go back to the Mesh
select because we need a new Mesh Select on top so we'll find another mesh select (Lms Select)
then we'll go to the polygon level and pick a new polygon and a new Uvw map and now it's only
on this side. After that we'll click on "Normal Align" and go to "Fit," and now we can adjust it
to this side only so now we have different sizes.
If your Modifier stack is getting too annoying or confusing because you've got several different
modifiers, you can always select your object, right-click and convert to Editable Mesh. That
makes the Modifier stack collapse but it still looks the same so it means we change the texture
coordinates and now they are looking fine because they are in the geometry and are no longer
handled by the modifier.
If we want to adjust it again to its default, for example, we can place another Uvw on top of the
UW map and choose the box, so this modifier only brings it back to the default but if we turn it
off it is the way we adjusted it before with the Mesh Select and the UW map for one side.
If this is a little confusing make sure that you remember Mesh Select was the modifier we used
to pick a side and Uvw map to only adjust the coordinates for that one side.

Applying more than one material to one object

We will now delete the modifier here and do something else to the box. We would like to show
you something else and for this purpose, we're going to quickly create three different standard
materials; the image below shows the three different stand-up materials.

We're going to double-click and change their colors so that they look different, so using lime
green, light blue, and the third one would be light orange, and now we have three different colors
on our object.
We are only able to apply one material to one object, for example, we have one material and one
object selected then we hit "Assign to selection" and now it turns green because this is the green
object. If we now select the second one and apply it then the green one is gone and the blue one
is in all the objects. Now what we want to show you is a method of how to apply more than one
material to one object, therefore we have one very specific material but it's not here under
Scanline, it is under "General" and it's called a "multi-sub-object Material."
This is a material that allows you to gather ten materials and place them all on one object. We
will double-click the "Multi-sub-object Material," in this case, we don't need ten, we just need
three different materials and to do that we will set the number by clicking on "Set number" and
then using "3 only," so now the material is only three materials. What we will do next is take the
Outgoing node of the material and link it to the in-going of multi-sub-object material. We will
do that for material number one, material number two, and lastly for material number three. To
make it better visible we're pulling those out a little bit so we can adjust it. Now it's clear which
one is which so those three materials go in here and then this one will be applied. Now we
select our object and our multi-sub-object material and then apply these three parts here onto one
object. The question is which part gets applied to which face and that looks a little bit random
but it's not random. It has something to do with the box itself but if we look closely, the Multi-
sub-object material has three materials and they all have different ids which mean every one of
those materials has a material id.
Now all we need to do is select our object (it's an Editable Mesh again) and we can go into the
polygon level and select the face. Whenever we select one face we can see here it says material
id and this face has material id1; the material ids on the box are randomly distributed from 1 to
6. Now if we want to apply very specific materials all we need to do is select all sides, give them
material id1 for example, and now they all get material id1, only this one will be material id2
or this one will be material at id3 so we just apply which material goes on to which side and
this way we can apply more than one material to more than one side. Of course, the texture
coordinates have nothing to do with it so when we take one of the materials, such as material
number three, for example, and give it a texture which in this case is the bookshelf then link it to
this side, then the bookshelf will be visible on one side because that is material number three
which is placed here.
If we now select our object again, also the other side here and give it material id3, then we will
also get some bookshelves on it.

Don't forget to go out of the polygon level; this is not a Mesh Select so you're not allowed to stay
in there because that will result in some errors later on. That's it for the Multi-sub-object
material. Again, if you're not sure, ensure to check out the help file and see all things that can be
done with multi-sub-object material. Now we want to do something different and for this, we
will be using a brand new scene, and to make it a bit more complicated we're going for the worst
case and that is by importing some geometry that has no texture coordinates. This can simply be
done by importing some geometry for example, from SketchUp.
What we're going to do next is create a little circle (it doesn't matter how big it is) and then create
a piece of log or a tree trunk which is just a little cylinder and the file will be saved and placed on
our desktop. So we have our file imported from the desktop which is untitled but there are no
textures on it and it's a C pointing up that's good input. So why is there a cylinder? We could go
in here and create a cylinder like this a much better one but what we want to do is show you a
piece of geometry that has no texture coordinates. It's just a name and has these square brackets.
Now we have our object and we are going to place material on it. From our Material Editor,
we're going to create a Scanline standard material and in this case, we're going to use two
materials, a standard material which is the bark of the tree, and a second one which is the
wooden part where you see the rings on it. So from the image below you can see the two
materials. We need two maps as well so we'll use one bitmap which is a picture of some t-rings
and for the other one, we'll use part of the tree bark. We'll call the first one "bark" and the
second one "ring"
We will now link the pictures to the picture here and the picture there and now we need a
Multi-sub-object material to connect the two of them. We will double-click it, and set the number
to two since it makes no sense to use ten when we only need two, so here is our material number
one which is the bark, and material number two which is the rings. This material now goes on to
our cylinder, to do that we'll have the cylinder and the material selected and then apply that.
From our result so far you can see in the image below there are no texture coordinates on it. This
is because it has only a couple of pixels and there is some noise on it so let's fix that.

The texture coordinates here is our object and when we go to modify it's an Editable Mesh so we
go for the version where we use the Mesh Select. So first, we'll use a Mesh Select to select a
piece here and now give it a Uvw Map modifier. In this case, we're not using a planer but we're
using cylindrical because that wraps the bark around it. So we don't have to do anything, but
only give it a new Mesh Select. Now in the Polygon mode, we will select the top and the bottom
and use a Uvw map. While we are still in the Uvw map, we'll be using planar this time and you
can see the plug from the top down which looks just perfect.

To fix it all, we just make an Editable Mesh out of it. However, you'll notice it shows some bark
here but doesn't show the rings up there, this is because the material id1 is the bark so when we
go into the polygon level all those are material id1. At the top, there is also material id1 but we
have to make that two and also do that to the bottom and now it shows the rings that we have
created.
All we need to do is fix the bark a little bit. We'll go to the picture (the bark) and double-click.
We can see it's only using the picture once so we're going to change that to tile, so we'll use the
picture three times and in the other direction, do it two times.
There is no bump map on it but we can also fake the bump a little bit because the wood has
darker spots here and those darker spots would usually be pressed in so what we can do is use the
same picture; we know we told you bump maps are supposed to be black and white or grayscale
images, but you can also use this one if you don't have a grayscale image.
The difference between using with and without the Bump map is that with the Bump map, the
log looks more three-dimensional. Let's make the bark a little bit stronger by going for 60. So
with the Bump map, you can see it's much more three-dimensional. Now let's quickly clone the
image and then with the cloned version remove the Bump map and render it one more time.

The image above shows the bark with the Bump map on the right side and the one without the
Bump map on the left. From the results, you can see the one on the right looks more three-
dimensional. We could do the same thing also with the rings; use both of them as Bump maps
and as Diffuse color maps and then it looks more three-dimensional in the rendering.
That was a simple example of how to deal with materials. There are a lot of things that can be
done with materials in 3ds Max but in this chapter, we focused on materials for the Scanline
renderer. Besides that, there are a whole bunch of different materials with much more
sophisticated ways to deal with them.

Review Questions
1. Explain how the Bump map works.
2. What is a bitmap?
3. Create a cone. Import a picture as material. After that, select the cone, and then
select the picture you imported and assign this to your selection.
 CHAPTER 28
MATERIALS AND RENDER SETTINGS
In this chapter, we are going to be covering materials and some basic render settings that you can
use when setting up your scenes for render. We will also look at some tips and tricks that you can
use all the time when you're making personal digital art, basic materials and lighting,
professional work, and when doing things with architectural visualization and 3d motion
graphics.

Customizing your setup

With your Max open, the first thing you're going to do is quickly customize your unit setup. You
are going to leave it as generic units and if you're following along with system units, one unit
equals one inch.

Since you're now pretty much familiar with the general interface of Max, chances are you
probably have popped up in the material editor and tried to render some things out and if you run
into any trouble this will be a good place to start with as far as materials and lighting goes.
We'll go into Max to show you how to model a couple of things then set up a little scene and
start playing around with some materials. The first thing you're going to do is to create some
spheres and turn on your edge faces. You'll now change your segments to something slightly
smooth then you're going to copy this and make four copies of it.
The next thing you'll do is to move the whole thing up; these are going to be some test spheres
that we're going to toss some materials on.

What you'll do is create a little backdrop plane, center this object out and get rid of all the length
and width segments. You'll toss on an "Edit poly modifier." You're going to drive this
backplane up, grab that back edge and toss a chamfer modifier there. Set it to "standard
transfer chamfer" and increase the amount to something high up and you'll set your segments to
40.
Quickly, you'll go to your Top view and create a camera which can be a standard camera or any
kind of camera you want. You're eventually going to convert the scene to Fstorm which is a
different rendering engine. Keep in mind that we will explain some of that later. We are also
going to be covering some basic render settings as we progress in this chapter, but for now, you'll
go ahead and create a basic Fstorm camera.

You'll plop it in your scene there, then grab the pivot and the camera itself and just zero out the
x, and then you're just going to raise the object a little bit more after which you're going to set
your camera here from your viewport port to see through your camera and change this to default
shading. Now you are good to go.
Getting familiar with the Material editor
Let's look at a couple of things to do with the material editor. You can bring it up with the M
key, so simply typing M brings up the material editor and again, you can find that Material
Editor here. Click on the little toolbar icon at the top and it'll pop up.

There are different types of material letters and we will cover what each one does. The first one
we have is the Standard Material Editor. If you just install Max, chances are this is what's
going to show up if you type M or if you click on the toolbar.
Now if you hold down on the toolbar icon you can hover down with the little icon here. Next is
the Slate Material Editor. The Standard and Slate Material editors are both fundamentally the
same thing and they both do the same things. However, the Slate material editor is more of a
node graphs visual-like Graphic User Interface (GUI). For the material editor, this is helpful if
you're creating complex materials that are blending different texture maps that you'd like to see
visually represented in a graph.
It's great for that sort of thing, let's say, for instance, if you wanted to choose a material like a
bitmap you could plug that right into any one of these channels and it's great for visually
representing what the material is doing in terms of what's being fed to the other material. The
other material editor if you hold this down and go back to the regular standard one is
fundamentally the same thing, this just has a series of shader swatches that you can see or
preview what your material looks like, and you can click on any one of these particular material
swatches to see what the parameters are that's being fed that material.
Now if you double-click on one of these swatches it opens it up and you can get a larger view of
what this is doing. Also, if you want to see more or less of the shader swatches here you could
type the X key and the X key will cycle through. By having different amounts of rows, you can
see if your scene has fewer materials.
If you want to see fewer swatches you should just keep it at the standard 4x6 grid that it has here,
especially if you use a lot of materials in your scene and sometimes it's just easier to see them
directly like that. Further down, you can see all your material parameters. This is where you can
rename your material, for instance, you could just do a standard matte and rename that material.
You can choose the basic shader parameters as there are all kinds of different options here (we
will cover what each one of them does in a little bit) and then select all kinds of different
classifications of the general material types.
General render settings
The next thing we want to look at is just some General Render settings. If you type the F9 key
the Render setup dialog box is going to pop up.
Of course, you can always open it from the toolbar up there as well, so if you pop that option
open you're going to get your basic Render settings, and if you're brand new to 3d Studio Max,
these settings are universal to any kind of rendering engine.
We will now talk about the different types of Rendering engines and why some are better than
others. These are fundamental. For all the different types of rendering edges you get, you're
going to get four Max and it has all the same settings. We will briefly cover what this means.
This is for if you're rendering a single frame just one image or if you're rendering a time segment
of the timeline. Let's say for an animation for instance, you can specify the number of frames that
you want to render out or if you want to, you can set an area to view through the particular
camera that you're looking through or the viewport that you're looking through. You can specify
your output size which you could do something like HDTV or the standard size for 1080p, or
you can do a custom size such as that of Instagram which is typically around 1080 x 1080 for the
standard portrait mode which is a 1:1 aspect ratio.
Let's say for instance, you want to do portrait mode for Instagram, which would be around 1080
x 1350 that would give you that elongated portrait view for Instagram, if you want to do
something like that otherwise you can stick with the 1080 x 1080 square pixel ratio but in this
case, we'll just use HTTP. So we'll just use 1920 x 1080.
You have a bunch of different options here for rendering specific things in your scene and your
render output is where you're going to be saving your final rendered image. We will be going
into further depth about all the different render settings in a separate chapter but for this
particular section, we are just going to be briefly covering some render settings and focusing
more specifically on the materials.
Under the renderer we have some rendering engines that come out of the box by default with the
scanline renderer and we have a bunch of different rendering engines, these include Corona,
Fstorm, V-ray, and Arnold. Arnold has now come standard with the Max installation which is a
great rendering engine but all of them do slightly different things, for instance, in Corona,
Fstorm, and V-ray.

Considering Different rendering engines

There's a difference between GPU-based rendering engines which run on your graphics card and
CPU-based rendering engines which run on your processor. The real difference between them is
that GPU engines offer close to real-time rendering capabilities, but they are limited to the
amount of v-ram on your particular graphics card. If you have an intense awesome graphics card,
top of the line, typically, it comes with about 10, 11, or 12 gigabytes of v-ram which might limit
the amount of geometry and materials that you can process in a particular image, rendering, or a
particular scene. So if you're using huge amounts of instance objects like trees or something
similar to render a giant forest or huge bitmaps for materials, you might tap out that v-ram which
is a little bit limiting sometimes. The CPU-based rendering tends to be slower. It is not a real-
time rendering but it can handle huge amounts of scene geometry which is more of a brute force
method again, like a lot of this, such as in your professional work or architectural visualization,
all that can be rendered with Fstorm; it has a ton of scene geometry, a lot of high poly count
objects, a lot of super high res textures and displacement which will cover all that and this is just
rendered on your single graphics card way back then.

Fstorm
Now we have four graphics cards that help distribute the load of heavier scenes but for this
section, we're going to be using Fstorm because it's just generally a simpler rendering engine
which is pretty great. If you just converted your scene to Fstorm you can see all the material
swatches go black. What you're going to have to do is that under the Fstorm settings in the
"Tools" section, you're going to convert the scene to Fstorm.
Most of the other rendering engines like Corona and V-ray have the same tool to allow you to
convert your scene but it just might be in a different spot so depending on the particular
rendering engine you are using, you just have to find that convert button. After you have
converted your scene, you can see all of these are now Standard Fstorm materials which are
awesome. Now quickly, what we will do is go under Kernel settings so we will explore some
basic Rendering setup settings.
For Light samples you're going to set it to 12 max depths. We're going to set this to something
like 24 which is a little bit higher and we will show you why later on. We are going to keep our
Noise threshold to 001 and for the Array threshold we might increase this a little bit later on
when we do some volumetric materials because we're going to need that else we're going to get
some artifacts to decrease this value as too little as possible when you do volumetric stuff but of
course that comes at the cost of rendering time, so that's pretty much all we're going to use.
Under "Environment" we are going to toss in a texture map. Here, we're going to use an HDRI
map under Fstorm runner if you're using Fstorm otherwise you can just use the general bitmap.
In this case, we're going to use the storm bitmap and we're going to drag that and drop it into one
of the swatches, using our Material editor as an instance. We will then click "OK" and scroll
down.
Quickly, we're just going to set this up. It is just like a background texture that we have here for
an HDRI map so that you get that HDR image here, and it gives you a little preview of what it's
going to look like. Now we will click "OK" and keep everything in default. Under gamma, we
are going to change this to 2.2, and under mapping, we are going to change this to "spherical
environment." With that, we're pretty much done with our basic scene setup and we're ready to
start digging into some of these materials.

Working with different materials and maps

We will now set up another little background material and the way that you apply materials to an
object is to scroll around here and you can either drag the swatch onto the object and drop it or
you can choose the little "Assign material to selection" button and that'll apply that material that
you made to the object.
For the background, you could choose a different color and you can tell that the color is changing
especially if you changed the Diffuse channel color to something a little bit darker, and from
here we're going to set up a couple of quick lights. Again, lighting is something we are going to
cover more in-depth in subsequent chapters because there is a lot to cover on lighting but for
now, you are going to set up one light and this is going to be your primary light. You're going to
set up another one as your secondary light and this is going to offer a little bit more light bounce.
You're just arbitrarily placing this in here and you can of course be much more precise, go back
and tweak all these to how you want them but for now, you're going to set your power to the
secondary light to 4 and your primary light to something like 10. That's going to be it for our
render setup. If we go to our Render settings, under "Interactive Render," again, depending on
what your rendering engine is you should have an interactive render or you click on the big
"Render" button and this thing will fire up and you'll get your scene.
For now, we don't have any materials applied yet for the background but that'll be our next step.
We are going to fill each one of these spheres with a different type of material. The first thing
we're going to do is on that first swatch there, we're just going to create a basic glossy material
and we'll see how that starts to look. So now you'll go ahead and assign material to selection
now that you have it selected and we'll go ahead and make this something like a red color.
Now if you have the material as red, it's just going to show up quite boring; it seems like there's
not much surface information and it's flat, however, there are a couple of things you can do at
this point. There are all those different parameters and settings in this particular material that you
can adjust.
These settings and their names are fundamentally universal to most rendering engines. The
Standard Scanline, Arnold, engines like V-ray, corona, and even GPU engines like Fstorm and
Octane all fundamentally have these similar named parameters so IOR can control the overall
reflectivity of an object and it's like refraction as well. It's more like a funny parameter that we
will get to explore when we make some metal materials.

We also have the reflection which of course black is no reflection and white is the most
reflection the material can have, so you just set this to white and you can see it's reflective but
not much like the glossiness. You can control the glossiness level with this parameter here so
right now it's set to 0.1 which is quite low, however, If you set it to 1 it's going to be reflective.
You can already see our Hdri map in the reflection of the sphere, in our illustration below and
along with the two lights that we've set up.

Now if you don't want to see the reflections of those lights, one quick tip is that you can lock
your Viewport, so you can jump out to different viewports. One quick tip here: most lights for
most rendering engines have a visibility checkbox so you can click uncheck that and you can see
right away that the light is now invisible in your scene. You also can click on the secondary light,
uncheck visibility and it's done. So now all you see in your reflection is just the Hdri background
which is cool.
Now let's play with this a little bit more. If you want to set this to Hdri, this is almost like a
glossy plastic or painted metal or something like that but if you wanted to be more metallic-like
or more like a mirror you could set your IOR to something like 2 or 5 and you can see that that
now it's becoming more like chrome. We're going to leave that at 1.5 for now and we'll jump
back to IOR a little bit later, including all the different types of settings that Fstorm has, again,
this is pretty much fundamental to most rendering engines and then down there you have all of
your maps and we're going to go over what most of these mean. We'll create our next material
here and what we're going to do is a basic glass material. Our diffuse channel is going to be black
because there's no color so you're going to set your diffuse to be black. We are going to reset our
reflection to be white and our glossiness to something around 0.8; you can see it's like a
reflective black material but that doesn't look like glass at all so now we'll play with our
refraction settings. Under the color, black is no refraction and as you guessed white would be
total refraction, so now we have a glass sphere.
If we jump out of this Viewport and jump back into our Perspective viewport we can scroll up on
this and unlock our Viewport. We will get the pan around it a little bit and you can see it's
behaving like a glass material in terms of the way things are flat, refracting through it. Now what
we have is a solid glass ball.

If we modeled something inside of it like a cube, we are not going to get too fancy with it. We'll
just do like 8x8x8 and then we're going to toss in some other materials like white and we'll go
ahead and align it to the center of that.
Under our Pivot effect, we'll only set it to object. Using a line, we'll align the cube to the center
of that sphere, not forgetting to preview to see what that looks like when we render it out. We'll
go ahead and refresh it and now you can see a cube in there but it's acting strangely and that's
because it's within a solid cube of glass. We can play with the refraction a little bit but ultimately
if you want to have the glass is like a shell so you have a thickness to it, it's going to look
different. What we'll do is take a glass material and toss this on this sphere then we'll go ahead
and do a shell modifier then we'll grab our cue, copy it over and align it to the sphere.
To see what that looks like we'll have to refresh it. Now you can see that the glass is almost like a
film or bubble and if you scroll up into that you can tell that there's a thickness to the glass which
is pretty cool and of course, you can play around with these settings as much as you want and get
the glass to be super reflective or super transparent if you want it since it depends on what you
want and it's up to you to decide what you want.
You can set the IOR to 2 so you'll see how the reflection around the glass is warping around it
which is interesting. Usually, glass has a standard IOR rating of about 1.65 to ground in the real
world. So yes, there you go. That's how you would do architectural glass like a window. You
would have to give it a thickness or if you want to render soap bubbles you'd have to give them a
slight thickness or else objects inside of them or objects which are refracting through them will
look a little strange if they're completely solid glass.

The next quick material that we're going to look at doing is going to be chrome. We'll go ahead
and create our chrome material and when we say chrome we are referring to a metallic material.
It could be gold, bronze, or brass but in this case, let's go ahead and create a chrome material and
we'll apply that to our object. We have it selected here and Chrome will do.
We could do black for the diffuse color, the reflection is going to be close to white, and for
glossiness, we can do something around 0.85. Again, you can adjust all those parameters
depending on what you want the thing to look like. For the IOR we will start with 10.
Now if you double-click on your Chrome sphere it's going to look like what you can see in the
image below.

Now if you go ahead and update that you can tell it's starting to reflect all the spheres around; it's
starting to get your HDRI map and it's starting to get reflective. You can set your glossiness to 1
and that'll give you a perfectly reflective sphere, as shown in the image below.
If that's something that you want, that's awesome. Typically, materials aren't perfectly reflective,
even mirrors are non-reflective to an extent so if you're going to do a perfect mirror what we
would suggest is putting on a reflection texture map or even a texture map in the glossy
channel to add a little bit of dirt or some fingerprints. You can get these items the same way you
get materials. That means you can either search for them or purchase them. If you look at
websites such as textures.com, there you'll find all kinds of different materials including
materials for overlays, water droplets, and things like dirt that normally would be on a reflective
object such as fingerprints and similar items. Keep that in mind as that is something that will
enhance the realism of a particular scene that you are working on, helping out with all the things
that you can do to your materials to bring out more realism.
If we drag and drop this material to a different slot it's going to copy it but it's going to copy it as
a pure copy. So you can name this one gold and you can bring down your glossiness a little bit
to around 0.85.
We will go ahead and copy it again just to show you what it's going to look like and we will
apply the gold material there, after which we are going to refresh that. Similarly, if you want to
create gold you can just basically find a color in your reflection color slot and play around with
this so you can get the saturated gold look to it.
In our illustration, it almost looks more like brass or bronze at this point but you can play around
with that, and even if you want to change the color and have chrome or a reflective colored
sphere, you can try that out with your colored objects. For the next material we will look at, we
will go further down, so we're going to do something with emissive materials. We'll name our
object a light bulb and we're going to play around with some emissive materials.
We are going to select a sphere and then we will apply this material to that sphere. We will leave
all the settings default for now. We will head over to “Emission" and we are going to turn that
function on. We will then proceed to change our color to a blue or something aquamarine so we
can get a little bit sci-fi here and we're going to crank up our power just to 1 for now then
preview to see what that looks like.
From the image above you could tell what's happening there. It's starting to emit light now. If we
crank that up to a 10 now it's going to start emitting light and you can tell what's happening; it's
emitting light on your scene.
You can even choose direct illumination which is going to pump even lighter as it's going to treat
that object as more of a light than an object, which means it's going to be calculating light
bounces from that object which is pretty cool.

If we take that way up let's say to 500 you can see what that does. You can tell that the bloom
starts happening on your camera lens so we'll drop this down to something like 20. Again, all
these parameters are of course highly editable and you can tweak them to your heart's desire to
make all kinds of different complex materials.

The next material that we're going to make is a volumetric material. What we mean by that is
that it's a kind of material that you would apply to things like fog, smoke, or things that allow
light to pass through them, which gives a particular look to them.
We'll name this illustration "Smoke." We'll start by grabbing a sphere there and you'll go ahead
and add this material there. We'll now go ahead and look at this in the camera so we get a broad
view of everything we've done so far. In our smoke material what you're going to do is set the
diffuse channel to black because we don't want any diffuse color and then set the IOR to 1
because that's the lowest possible IOR you can have. Now we have a pure black material.
If you want to make a black hole, set the IOR to 1, you're diffused to black and you're good to
go. For the roof reflection, you're going to keep that at black, and for refraction, you're going
to set that to white. That gives you a completely transparent material. Now you're going to
control the material with the volume parameters down there. Remember, the absorption is
completely white that's why we can't see it but if you set it to gray it starts to pop up. You can set
that to be a little bit darker like black and for “Scattering” we can set that to be a little bit lighter
and that affects the surface of it. The surface is like the depth, as the light bounces through the
depth of the material it gives a soft cotton ball-look effect which you can tweak to make it look
even more like fog and the way we do that is with the distance parameter. If you set that to
something like 50 it's going to become even less dense and you can tweak these parameters to
get it to the deeper part where the camera is looking through the object.
The thicker the object, the dense part of the object is going to be darker. In this case, the sphere,
which is the densest part of the object, is, of course, the center of the sphere so it's looking
blacker in the center and it fades out or has this falloff effect which looks nice.

If we now look around this thing in the Perspective viewport to see what it's looking like, we can
tell that it allows us to see through the object. So you can see the other sphere through the object
which is a nice effect.
Note: if you're using particle systems, for instance, if you're using Phoenix fd or Real flow, a lot
of those don't have many of those types of plugins and they are difficult to render on a GPU-
based rendering engine. The reason for that is they account for huge amounts of particles so you
have to render each one of those particles and it's a giant amount of information to process on a
single GPU.
However, the way to tweak it is by setting those particular particle systems to have a mesh so
you're able to set the render settings of Phoenix fd. When you're rendering smoke for instance,
you can set it to render mesh and then you can apply a material like this to that mesh and it'll
look just like smoke, which is a handy little tip for you.

That's how you do simple volumetric materials so you can render things like clouds, smoke, and
fog. For the last two materials we're going to be looking at using texture maps and we're going to
explore using the uvw map modifier and a couple of other modifiers to allow you to get some
pretty cool effects using texture maps. For this next material, we're going to call it "Wood." We
will just do a simple wood material for illustration. If you scroll down under the diffuse channel
you're going to click on those little check boxes so we want to be able to use the map and you're
going to click on where it says node map. You can either decide to use storm bitmap or
standard bitmap, it doesn't matter. Under where it says File, go ahead and open this up and
you got a wood material set up already. So you click on "Wood" and what you're going to do is
to grab the sphere there and slap your wood material on the sphere.

Now if you go into the Perspective viewport to see how that's looking, you can visualize what the
wood material looks like in the scene by clicking the little "show shaded material" and
Viewport buttons.
After you do that, you can see what it's looking like in the scene. You can even turn off your
edge faces if you don't need that.

Now if you notice your wood is boring, you may want to spice up that wood a little bit. Typical
wood has reflection but its polished wood if it has a glossy coat on the wood. If you want a brand
new chair or something that might have glossiness to it, you can add a little bit of reflectivity to it
and just play around with that.

Applying the Bump map

Also, you can add a little bit of glossiness in 0.6 and if you preview it once more, you can now
see that it is a highly polished perfect wood surface. Typically, in the real world wood would
have a grain to it so we need to use a bump map to give it a little bit of a bump texture or a little
bit of surface information about the wood material. The way we do that is to create a Bump map
and stick it in the Bump map slot there.
An easy way to go about it is that you will open Photoshop, take your wood material that we just
referenced, stick that in Photoshop, and open it up. This is assuming that you have Photoshop;
it's important as a 3d artist to always have Photoshop and be able to use it for texture maps
whenever you need to. If you're using things like a substance painter or quicksilver mixer, those
sorts of programs are robust and you can do all kinds of different material painting and things
like that but for this section, this is basic. We will show you how to create a quick bump map
right away. For the bump map parameters, the channel reads black and white and the gradient
is between black, white, and gray. So black is the depth, which is like the lower part of the
bump, so you can imagine the surface variation of wood in the grain.

The deep parts of the grain are going to be black, and the high parts, the peaks of the grain are
going to be white, and then all in between is going to be gray and gradients of gray. So we have
our material set up here, our texture map is loaded into Photoshop, and we'll go ahead and
quickly toss on a black-and-white filter. After that, we'll toss in a level filter.
We are going to set our blacks and our whites in the sense that we don't want completely black
nor white but instead, we want to get a little bit of variation in there just to get some more of
those grays flowing in between, and depending on the resolution of our texture map that's going
to pop out. We will now go ahead and do Ctrl+Shift+S, save this as a jpeg, and then rename this
to "Bump."
Bump maps are different from displacement maps which are what we're going to be looking at
next but for now, we'll continue with our wood example here. So in our bump channel here we
will toss in another bitmap. Under File, we're going to choose the bump map we just made.
From what we already have, if we continue rendering this it's going to look terrible which is
because it's too high so we'll set this to something like 0.2 which is something really low. Now
we'll start to see that surface information which is awesome, but you'll notice it looks like it's
fake because of the appearance of rustic wood. What we can do at this point will be to drop our
glossiness down so it becomes more rustic but if we want to keep our glossiness there we are just
going to turn this down a little bit more with about 0.05. Now we're starting to get into the realm
of photorealism. We can even drop it down to 0.1 or 0.05 so now we're starting to get that
surface information that is important for even close-up shots.
So again, depending on the texture and the resolution of your texture map, the higher resolution
the more information you're going to get and the closer you can get to that particular object.
However, for distances that are far away when working with something like a wood floor, for
example, this texture map is perfect for that. You can also use this texture map in commercials
for high-resolution renderings or just use it for a fixture like a chair leg or even a floor plank. So
you get that surface information and it just looks so much better when you have a little bit more
detail to it. The last and final material we're going to be looking at is grass material and we are
going to be creating a displacement map.
We will name this one "grass" and leave all the standards for now. Under our diffuse channel,
we are going to click on Bitmap, then grab our grass material and make that visible. We will
now place it on our sphere.
Obviously, from the image above, you can see it's looking pretty awful but a couple of things we
can do is to go back to our full parameter list here and then adjust the color of that under the
color section. We could parent a color correction modifier onto this bitmap so we'll do some
color correction and keep the old map as a submap. What you can do here is adjust the
saturation. You can offset it so it's lighter or make it even more saturated. If you want to make it
a darker grass, increase the saturation or adjust the hue of it if you want to make a slightly
different color to look a little bit cartoony. All of that are simply parameters. You can tweak that
and you don't necessarily have to Photoshop.
We could do a couple of different things. This includes creating a bump map for the grass and
this would be for distant grass objects that are in your scene. It is not something you would want
to do for close-up grass. For close-up grass, you would scatter the actual geometry of grass onto
the grass surface but then for further distance, you can use a texture map and a displacement
map, and just like a little bit of wave that allows the rendering to be cheaper and take less time to
produce. Back to our wood example, if you increase the bump map to something like 20 to make
it super bumpy, you can't tell but if we zoom way into it to around 5, you can still see the
faceting of the edges of the material. The bump only affects the surface of the shader and it
doesn't represent geometry but that's the difference, rather, that’s what displacement does.
Displacement map
We'll cover displacement now. First, we will set that back to 0.05 then we'll zoom back out and
what we'll do now is create a displacement map that is different from a bump map. For this
example, we're not going to be using Photoshop even though we can. The newer photoshop cc
can create normal and displacement maps but you can use software called Crazybump. It is just
for creating normal and displacement maps. It's also super robust and easy to use. There's a free
version of it but a regular license costs about a hundred dollars.
After we open Crazybump software we will click "Open," then "Open photograph from file"
and then go ahead and open our grass. If you're purchasing material from textures.com, let's say
for instance, you type "grass,” some of these textures have height maps which is effectively
displacement map and they have normal maps too but in the case that you just Google an image
and you don't have that information such as a displacement or normal map, you have to make
one since you would want that surface information. We'll go ahead and select our shape and what
it does is it gives you a preview of what the normal map is going to look like in this case, what
the displacement is going to look like on the actual object. You can increase or decrease the
intensity, in this case, we will decrease the intensity a little bit, and you can increase the fine
detail, in this case, we'll boost that up a little bit or lower the large detail. This is because, for this
example, we don't want too much intense surface variation.

With the displacement channel selected, we’re going to save displacement to file and just do
grass displacement. This just names it for us as a jpeg. We will save now and close down
Crazybump because we don't need any more and that's how fast it is.
Now on our sphere, we are going to toss on an Fstorm displacement modifier. If you want to
use displacement you should consider using the Fstorm displacement modifier. The v-ray has a
similar modifier and you can use normal maps in v-ray and corona but you can't necessarily use
normal maps in the material itself. This is something that has to do with the GPU engine.
We'll just toss on a storm bitmap then go ahead and drag that and drop it onto one of our
swatches as an instance. Note that if we change any of these parameters here it's going to
automatically change anywhere else you have it applied. Now under File, we're going to select
the grass displacement that we just created, click "Open" and then that will apply it to the object.
That's all we need to do and under the "Power" is where we can adjust that.
We'll go ahead and refresh this after which you can see the difference. This show the edges of
the material are going to have that geometric displacement. It's going to have that surface
deviation or variation. We can crank this up a little bit if we want to and make it 5 and when we
refresh it, it's going to now have a seriously intense grass ball, as you can see in the image
below.
You can see it almost looks like moss but it is super-fast to render this because there's no actual
geometry, it's just reading that surface information from the texture map. So this is awesome for
rendering moss or grass at a distance and if you're going to do something closer up you would
always tend to use actual geometry and scatter it for super close-up shots but regardless now you
know how to use displacement maps.
UVW map modifier
The last thing that we're going to look at is using the UVW map modifier. For this, we will use
our wood example because it's a little bit simpler. We'll just go ahead and create a cube with
dimensions of 25x25x25 and we're going to toss on our wood material.

What if you want to control the grain of the wood and how do you adjust the material? You can
adjust it globally. You can adjust the tiling if you want to and also adjust the rotation but that's a
stressful way of doing it because it's going to change it globally on every single material that you
have this applied to considering we just want to change the cube and not the sphere. What we
will do is go to "Modifier stack" for this particular object, and in the drop-down, we'll scroll
down and choose "UVW map."
We can already tell what it did. It created a Planar map; the plane is facing in the XY direction
so if we refresh our scene, we can see our cube here.

You can see its wrapping that texture map on the sides of the cube and we don't want that so we
can set this to be a box. Now that we have set that as a box we will go ahead and refresh this so
what we can do is play around with all these different settings. There's "Spherical," "Shrink
wrap," and "Face."
If you want the same size map on every single face it's going to apply that map to the bounds of
each face of the geometry. Let's say your texture is boring and you want to adjust the texture, you
can enter this little drop-down here and click on the gizmo.
If you click on it and it's highlighted blue, click on it again and it'll just have a blue box around it
that way you can adjust the texture map. So now we are not moving the object, instead, we're
moving the uvw map modifier, gizmo, so you can adjust the scale of this. If you want the faces
facing the same orientation, turn on your angle snaps here. For our example, let's say we want
the green to face downward; we can adjust the map to do whatever we want. You can adjust
this to get it almost seamless so what we have is a pretty little cube there. Remember, you can
always increase the scale of it.
There's so much more to materials. You can do so much with all the different parameters of these
different materials and we have looked at a few since these are the ones you may use all the time.

Summary
We created a simple glossy plastic sort of material, we created a solid glass which is a glass that
has a thickness to it, and showed you the different looks that you get from having a glass that has
a shelled thickness to it versus a solid mass. We created chrome and you saw different variations
of metallic materials such as an emissive material, a volumetric material, a wood material that
has a bump map for surface variation, for the grain, and a grass material that has a displacement
map for the surface variation and the surface information.

These are the fundamental set of materials that you'll use all the time and just by tweaking
materials and the parameters you can make any kind of material you can think of just with these
fundamental set of parameters that we looked at in this chapter and of course, you can practice
further and create things like car paint which is reflective and with the information in the paint
you can get infinitely more complex from there.
We also covered things like the UVW wrap modifier and that's for things like creating and
wrapping things for use in games. So you can explode a particular sphere into individually
wrapped objects then you can paint in Photoshop or bring in substance paint. That being said,
you'll agree that there are a million cool things you can do with materials.

Review Questions
1. What is the difference between GPU-based rendering engines and CPU-based
rendering engines?
2. Mention one material modifier you learned in this chapter and explain its function.
3. Create a sphere. Apply a bump map to it and render using fstom Renderer, ensuring
that your render settings are accurate.

CHAPTER 29
ORGANIZING MATERIALS LIBRARY
In this chapter, we will show you how to organize your workflow with the use of the Project
Manager.

Project Manager
Project Manager helps you with managing files in your scene. With a few clicks, you can access
different files, and quickly drag and drop assets to the scene.
First, we will open the Project Manager. Here, we have two main options: Explorer and Assets
Files.
Let’s start with Explorer.

Managing Files with Explorer

On the right-hand side, we have different categories. You may not get to use them all but you can
easily adjust them to your needs.

The Models section is the one that you might use the most often. The structure you can see here
is the exact structure of the library you have on the drive. So you have main categories and then
subcategories for all of them. Now, let's show you the Interior. Here, you can see all
subcategories listed. You can choose tables and Dining for instance. You can see all the models
that you have in your folder as an image. There are different displays but depending on what you
want or the one you like most, you can choose from 3 types: Details, Thumbnails & Details, or
only Thumbnails.

You can also order by name, file size, file type, and date. This would be useful from time to time.
You can also search by name, and if you like to put the name of the company the model is from,
you'll simply type in the first letters so you can easily access all of the models that meet these
criteria. After you have chosen one of them, you'll simply drag and drop it to the scene. By
clicking you can set the model in the correct position. You can also see it comes with a texture.
You may also like to have the maps folder to all of the subcategories models in one folder so
they are all linked to one place.
Let's show you another category, HDRI for instance. So, similarly, you can select a category you
want. You need to turn off the filter name though. So you can see that we have previous and we
can easily search and decide what we want.
Let’s go to the IES now. We don’t have anything here because we want to show you how to see
the structure of folders. It’s super easy. It reflects your folder structure on the hard drive. You
just need to find the folder you want to have in this section, then drag and drop this folder here.
And here it is. The whole structure is visible.

We can see the subcategories and look for IES that we need. Again we can simply drag and
drop it to the scene and we’ll get the ready light.
Another cool thing is that you can make changes on the hard drive in the Project Manager too.
Let's see what we mean. If you right-click on the image, you can, for instance, delete it from the
drive. But be careful with this and don’t delete it by mistake.

You can also open the file with Associated Application; in this case, it will be a 3ds Max scene.
You can view the image in better resolution if you wish.
There are some other options you can do from the level of Project Manager. There are also some
cool options in this panel. So if you select a folder and right-click, we can, for instance, create a
new folder and it will be created on the hard drive. You can then rename and so on. You can
delete it from HardDrive as well or open the folder by using Reveal in Windows Explorer.

Asset files
Now let’s talk about another use of project manager - Asset Files, which is used to link the
assets. Here you can see the list of different assets. You can see the name of it and the folder
location and the size. If you click on the File-type button, you can include or exclude the types
of files you want to have in the list. On the list, you can have textures, proxies, xrefs, or different
sorts of things that are linked in the scene. You can collect files, which means that you will copy
all selected files to a specific folder, and you can also search for the missing assets.
From the image above, you will notice that you only have the correctly linked files visible on the
list now, but you also have 59 missing assets. That’s the whole beauty of Project Manager; so
with a few clicks, we can look for the missing assets on our computer or in the selected folder.
Here, we will choose the folder where the manager should look for the assets, we simply click
"Start" and we need to wait for the results. You'll see how it’s searching through all folders on
your T-drive. If you choose a whole drive, for instance, it can take a while as there are lots of
files to go through. So if you know where to find it exactly, use a more specific folder as it will
be much faster this way.

When you see that all files are now linked, as in this case, you'll simply click on Ok. Well, you
can see how handy this manager is. It can save you tons of time. If you don’t use anything
similar, we highly recommend checking out different options.

Review Questions
1. Explain the role of project manager in 3ds Max.
2. How can you recover missing links from files?
3. Go to your Project Manager, check for missing assets and relink them so there are
no longer missing links.
 CHAPTER 30
WORKING WITH SCENE EXPLORER
Once you've got a few objects in your scene, it's useful to employ the scene Explorer or Outliner
view. If you previously hid the scene Explorer you can bring it back.

To do that goes up to the main toolbar here and click on "Toggle Scene Explorer." If you want
to you can dock it to the interface. You can see a list of all the objects in the scene and we can do
fun things here, for example, hide objects (that's what the little eye icon is here). You can go
through and hide items or you can select an object then hold down Shift and select all those
continuous objects and then, for example, hide them all at once or unhide them all at once.

You can rename objects here. For example, in our illustration, we have those two that are just
labeled 'box 0:01.' We can select that and then click on it a second time (doesn’t double-click but
leave a long pause between selecting and then selecting a second time) and we can call this one
'staircase side 0:01.'
You can also additionally select that text then copy it into the clipboard (with Ctrl+C or with the
right-click menu) and press ENTER to change the name. Then go to the second object, click
once to select it, click it a second time to rename it, then paste the other name in (right-click and
choose 'Paste'), change it to 'staircase side 0:02', and then press ENTER.

Other things you can do here include creating hierarchies. We'll look at that later in the book but
know that you can select things by group. You can select different types of objects here or most
importantly at this stage is the ability to Freeze objects. A frozen object cannot be selected in the
viewports. Looking at our example, currently, none of these objects are frozen but if we select
everything (hold down the Shift key to select all that items), then go over there where it says
"Frozen" (where we have that little snowflake icon) and click on any one of those, now all of
those objects are frozen and they're unselectable. If we now go over here to the viewport and
click, we cannot select those objects. You'll notice that they're also displayed in gray as that
happens by default (frozen objects are displayed in gray) unless you choose otherwise. We'll
look at how to change that behavior later.
We can unfreeze things one at a time or of course, we can select all those objects and unfreeze
them at once.
There is a lot more to the Scene Explorer; this is just a very basic introduction to how it works.
We'll be coming back into the Scene Explorer in various forms later in the book.
Review Questions
1. What is the function of the Outliner view?
2. How do you prevent objects from being selected from the Viewport?
3. Create 5 different objects, go to your Scene Explorer panel and freeze 3 objects.
 CHAPTER 31
SCENE MANAGEMENT USING CONTAINERS
Containers are helper objects that let you organize scene contents into logical groups or "blocks".
Objects within a container are then manipulated as a single object. If you are coming from a
CAD background, think of containers as AutoCAD blocks. 3ds Max containers can save content
to disk for collaborative purposes. You can even set rules to prevent others from editing
container content.
Containers can be managed from the Helper command panel, the Tools menu, or the Container
Scene Explorer.

A Container Scene Explorer is a regular scene explorer with a Container Toolbar that gives you
direct access to container commands. You create a container like you do a dummy helper, with a
simple click and drag.
In this scene shown in the image below, we have a kitchen cabinet made of three parts: the
cabinet body, a door, and a handle.

These three objects are hierarchically linked to perform logical transform operations like Move
& Rotate. To group the three objects into one container, place the container where you would
need to have it serve as an "anchor", or an insertion point to the geometry. In this case, place the
container in the back center of the cabinet, at coordinates [0, 0, 0]. At this time, it is called a
"local" container, meaning you created it locally on your system. Local containers display as
"open".
The container is now ready to be filled with components. Use the Add tool to add container
nodes, in this case, all three parts of the kitchen cabinet. At this time, it would be a good idea to
give the container a name that reflects its components. This is a 12" low-cabinet, so name the
container: Cont_locab_12i. Do not use symbols like double quotes (") when naming containers.
You can display the label on the container helper object, to make it easier to identify in the
viewport. You can also change the size of the helper object without affecting the geometry. At
this time, you need to consider if you want to provide editing rights to others. If you do, turn on
the "Allow Edit" in Place option. If you do not want anyone to edit the contents of your
container, leave this option unchecked, as is the case in our example.
You are now ready to save the container to disk. You can use the "Save As" command to that
effect. If you forget to use the "Save As" command and proceed directly to closing the container,
you will be prompted to enter a filename.
A Container Definition File is saved under a ".maxc" extension. After you save and close a
container, you can no longer access its parts. You cannot select its geometry at all. You can still
transform the container to move or rotate the cabinet for scene placement. However, as the
original "author" of this container, you can still open it to make changes to its components. For
example, we can mirror the door so that it opens from the other side. At this point, we can create
a new Container Definition File using "Save As," or simply update the existing one using the
"Save" option. Close the container before moving on.

Review Questions
1. What are containers?
2. What is the extension used for containers?
3. Create a compound object such as a proboolean. Add a container and save as a
container.
 CHAPTER 32
COMBINING SCENES WITH XREF
Another more powerful method for combining scenes is to use external references in 3ds Max;
this is known as an Xref. This will be our main focus in this chapter. An Xref is a scene file that
is loaded into another scene file.
We have a hierarchy of scene files, including a master or parent scene, and some Xref or child
scenes and this makes it easy for you to version your work in 3d.
You need to save a lot of versions of a project since you can't overwrite your scene every time
because it's common that you'll need to go back to an earlier state, so you'll save a lot of versions
as you go.
If your scene file is large and heavy, let's say it's a hundred megabytes, every time you save out a
new version you're going to take up another 100 megabytes of space and after you save out 10
versions, suddenly you've eaten a gigabyte of disk storage but if you are smart about it you
would use xrefs; you'd have a master scene that was let's say 10mb and you would store all of the
model data in xrefs external reference scenes that total up 100 mb then every time you save a
version of your master scene you're only using 10 mb of space instead of a hundred.
Another reason to use xrefs is to give you the flexibility of rippling changes across a bunch of
different scene files. If you make a change to an Xref then all of the master scenes that reference
that Xref will be updated so Xrefs are good and we recommend that you use them in 3ds Max
whenever you've got a complex scene that has a lot of parts to it.
Well, for illustration, we'll go ahead and load an Xref into our master scene. So go to the File
menu and choose "Reference."
Within here you'll see two entries: "Xref objects" and "Xref scenes." You should choose X ref
objects since that's the one that gives you more power and flexibility. In the "Xref objects" dialog
you need to load a scene file and that's done from the toolbar at the top there on the far left. Click
on that "Create xref record from file," and you should be taken to your scenes folder. We do
recommend that you keep the Xrefs separate from the master scene.

Now let's load in something here. Let's just bring in the walls, click "Open" and now we'll see
we've got some walls in our Master scene. In the "Extra objects" dialog it looks like walls Max is
selected but it's not. If you click off of it and then click on it again then it's selected and
highlighted here in blue and in the image below you can see all of the entities that are being
loaded in from that scene file including all of the objects.
If we scroll down a bit we'll see that materials and controllers are also Xrefs tin. Let's load in
another one. We'll click on "Create Xref record from file" once again and this time we'll load in
the doors and windows. So we'll select that and choose" Open" and now we've got some doors
and windows.

We can navigate in our scene, go to the Perspective view and maximize it with Alt+W and then
navigate with the middle mouse button and Alt on the middle Mouse, tumble around and get
some doors and windows present. Now let's load in another one. Again, we'll go back to the Xref
objects dialog and click on "Create xref record from file" and this time let's load in the living
room furniture. We'll select that, click "Open" and because this file name matches one that
already exists, this time we get a dialog that says duplicate material name. This is where things
get a little bit difficult.
In 3ds Max if you load in an Xref that has a material that matches a material that already exists in
the scene either as an xref or natively in the scene, then you've got what's known as a name
clash and you get this dialog "a material name assigned to a merging object is a duplicate of a
material in the scene." How do you solve this? Well, if you don't do this right you could have a
lot of problems later on. For example, the links to materials in your documents can get broken.
What you need to do to avoid problems is to enable "apply to all duplicates" and then click on
"use merged material."
By doing that you're saying you want all of the Xrefs to carry their own materials with them and
that way if you make changes to an Xref material, that will be linked in your Master scene and it
will update in the master scene as well. So in this case, click on "use merged material" and once
you've loaded in all of the Xrefs then you need to save the scene out and reload it but this is often
an issue in 3ds Max. If you went into the Material Editor now, you would see the duplicate
material names assigned to multiple objects but that is not accurate, there is no master material
that's assigned to all the different Xrefs in the scene. In reality, each Xref has a completely
separate material even if those materials have the same names so before you do anything at this
point you want to save the scene file.
Now that we have our living room set in there, we need to save the scene at this point, then reset
the program and reload the scene. That way, we won't have any problems later with links to
materials getting broken.

Review Questions
1. What is a Name clash?
2. Why are external references important?
3. Load a scene file from the Xref Objects dialog. Create an Xref record from that file
and save the Xrefs separate from the master scene.
 CHAPTER 33
GRAPHITE MODELLING TOOLS
In this chapter, we're going to cover the Graphite Modeling tools in 3ds Max. We will start by
just making a plane and then we'll add an "Edit poly modifier" to that. The Graphite Modeling
tools were originally a plug-in by a third party for Autodesk 3ds Max but they were so successful
that they integrated them into the program and they show up now as a toolbar just below your
main toolbar.
Over there on the right, you'll see a little down arrow, and if you want to see the full ribbon you
can click that and that'll show the visual of the icons of each of the different tools.

This makes it a little easier especially when you're learning to see what these different things do.
Now a lot of these only work on "Edit poly" so you're not going to be able to access these if
you're using a Standard primitive or different geometry type, so you have to make sure you add
an "Edit poly modifier" to use these different tools, and a lot of them are the same that we've
been covering.
These "Edit vertices" for example come with different selections like loop and ring but there are
some new features that are added here and are going to cover a few of those. You can change
between vertices, edges, borders, polygons, or elements. You can do things like loops, so for
example, if we select one edge and hit "loop" it'll loop all those. We can then "Ring" which will
then ring all those edges.

You can also do things like "Dot loops" and one thing that's helpful is if you hover over these
you can see what it does. For example, if you select an object and then go to "Dot loop," it'll
select every other ring in a loop. So it's nice if you're trying to create a pattern and then you can
extrude those edges to make some kind of pattern into forms that can be useful. You can grow
and shrink these different loops and rings which are pretty helpful.
There are different ways of creating Dot loops like the number of gaps between each selection. If
you select that down arrow you can Dot loop on a cylinder, for example, so there are a lot of
different things over here.

The other things we want to show you are under the polygon sub-object. If you go to the
"polygon sub-object" level there are different things you can do to the polygons, for example,
Extrude bevel, but you can also do these geopolis and you can see that it untangles the polygon
section and then creates geometric shapes out of them.
So that's interesting but what we want to show are those other tools, so if we click there at the top
you have the Selection button and this is quite powerful. You can start to select based on patterns
so for example, we can select some random polygons or percentages of random sub-objects. We
will go over to polygons, select 25, and then hit this arrow.
From the image above you can see it'll randomly select 25 of this polygon, which is a good way
to then make a pattern that feels random. You could do that and then extrude these for example,
and get some interesting geometry that starts to show up from there. You can also do percentage
and then hit that arrow; you can of course change those numbers. Other things you can do
include selecting all concave or convex polygons. In our example it's just a flat surface, let's go
ahead and add some three-dimensionality to this. We'll bend this plane along the x-axis, and then
add a wave modifier. We will also do symmetry just to gain a little complexity in this geometry
and show off some of these selection features. You can even rotate it a little bit if you want,
which we would do here as well so we have this form.
Let's go back to our "Edit poly" and then go back to our polygon, and now we can use this
"Concave" option. If we select "Concave" and increase this number, you'll see it'll select all our
concave polygons and then we can increase the tolerance.
You can also do "Convex" which is going to be the opposite of concave. We can then apply a
different material to these polygons and it would have some kind of pattern that relates to the
geometry. You can also do it by angle, which includes an angle from the x or z direction, and
then it selects down from there. That's another neat way to get a pattern from this.
You can also do an outline; there are a lot of different things you can do here and it's just
something that you should try using different options. You can also select "Tops" in case you
have tops of geometry like a box or anything open, so that selects all the edges which can be
interesting. You may also try taking all those polygons and then Beveling them or working on
those edges to form. Even though this is not a great program for sculpting, you can try sculpting
these things. If you do something like a Mudbox where you use pen tablets to control how
you're sculpting the geometry with a brush, there is some potential there. If you do want to get
into sculpting you can try that but the other thing we want to show is under Modeling.
If you already have a polygon selected, you can select where it says "Polygon Modeling" and
select "Generate topology." This is an interesting tool that allows you to reconfigure the
polygon subdivisions of the geometry to match one of these templates here. For example, if we
hover over the brick topology, it says that it "requires one edge to be selected." We will select
one of our edges, hit that and it will change the form into a running bond kind of pattern which is
quite interesting. So if we go back to that "select edge," then select one of our edges and hit the
Brick pattern, it creates that brick pattern on the surface. After that, we could select all these;
insert them by polygon for example, and then get some cool little window frames.
We can even delete those and that gives us a really interesting kind of running bond lattice
structure. From there, we'll then add other Modifiers like "Shell" to give it some thickness and
that's if we want to have something that we can 3D print. Again, it's all parametric so you can
always go back to your original plane, adjust some features here and see how it works. One thing
to remember is whenever you edit an "Edit poly" if you go back and change the dimension of
the plane or the number of segments, it's going to have an effect on the form so that's why you
may be seeing some kind of weird effect. We wouldn't recommend going too far back if you're
going to do some "Edit poly" like deleting polygons, for example.
We will delete a few more of those polygons now and we're going to add another "Edit poly"
Modifier. For this one, we will do a different of these topologies. We have some interesting ones
here like a hexagon and this also requires one edge to be selected. If we hit that, it turns
everything into hexagons. Of course, there may be some issues over here because of the
symmetry but if that's just a plane or a regular primitive it'll have a nice effect. So you can play it
around with different ones and change some of the operations or parameters here to get different
results.

Review Questions
1. Where are the Graphite Modeling tools located?
2. What are Dot Loops?
3. Create a material and apply the "Concave" effect to it.
 CHAPTER 34
GETTING CREATIVE
In this chapter, we are going to show you simple projects you can start creating to help you fully
understand the capabilities of 3ds Max.

How to Paint on Grass

In this section, what we're going to do is paint onto some planes or objects. The first thing we'll
do is use the grass. So with the grass selected, we're going to choose "Paint with objects" from
the list and then select that grass.

Next, we're going to select this plane to "paint on selected objects."

Now we're going to hit the brush and with that, we can paint on the grass.
You can add some variation here with the scale or rotation and also the offset. You can also go in
and paint this grass here on the Reference. Simply open it up and take a look at where you want
to place the grass. You can go through and delete individual pieces where you don't want them
which is quite handy. But for this illustration, we're going to use Paint objects.

We've selected that again, though this time we will use some cloves. Keep in mind that you can
pick more than one object. We had selected paint on the plane before but now with the brush
selected, we can start painting these objects, and rather than in order we will paint randomly.
We're painting random bushes and rust which is a nice quick way to get foliage in and remember,
we're going to hit or tick "turn-off pane" and we can always go in and delete individual objects
that we don't want. We can move them around individually as well which is great. So we're just
 going to unhide everything and as you can see from the image below, we now have quite a

dense forest.

How to use Terrain

In this chapter, we're going to create a landscape based on a picture. This is more of a height
map and we're going to use it to our advantage.
The first thing you need to do whenever you work with these kinds of images is check for the
dimensions of the image so we're going to right-click and make sure to see the properties more
precisely. We need to see the dimensions that are in the details of our object so in the case of our
illustration it is 1200x1200 which is cool because sometimes it's rare to see a nice image that has
this kind of proportions so it's going to be way easier for us to work with.
Now we're going to type in the length as 1200 and the width as 1200 as well. We don't need any
width and length segments so we're just going to type in 1 at this moment. We are not going to
be using any kind of additional modifiers at least for now so we can just simply turn off the grid.
We will go to the Top view by pressing T and then we're going to open the folder in which we
have our landscape picture and simply grabbing it and dropping it onto our viewport is going to
be enough to add it as a bitmap to our object itself.
There's a chance that the method that we have just shown you is not going to be working on your
computer and this comes down to your 3ds Max settings. For some reason, some people may
have this problem where dragging and dropping an image onto a 3ds Max viewport is not going
to work but we've got the solution. What you are going to do first is to click on the directory
where your file is stored, so in this case, we're just going to copy this directory because this is
going to come in handy later. Now we can simply minimize this folder and go to 3ds Max
again, press M, or click on this icon to open Material Editor. There is a chance that you might
open the Compact Material Editor, nevertheless, both are okay but in this case, we prefer to
use Slate Material Editor. The next step is to add some kind of material to our scene. In older
versions of 3ds Max, you're going to see "Standard" but since 2021 this was scrapped and now
we're using physical materials so that's exactly what we're going to do; it doesn't matter which
slot we're going to be adding at this bitmap, we're just going to add it right away to the first one.
Now we will left-click, drag it and select the map, go to general or if you've got Corona go for
Corona bitmap, but we're going for the safer route so we'll just simply select bitmap in this case.
You can see that some kind of folder opens because now the bitmap is requesting a file so we're
going to paste our previously copied link. Since we've got this directory we can just simply click
on this icon. What is going to be important at this moment is to select our Plane. We'll then
double-click on our material and assign it to our object. If you're following this step, you will see
that at this point nothing happens; there's a chance that you're going to have real-world map size
turned on but in this case, we just need to click on our bitmap and then click on the icon that says
"show shaded material in viewport" and you should be able to see your object. If this still
doesn't work and then you notice that the bitmap is there but it's awfully small and well there are
a thousand copies of it, this means that your 3ds Max settings are incorrect. Just go to
"Customize" and set it to Max but in this case, we're just going to click on "real map size" and
that should get things sorted. Our next step is going to be simply creating some shapes or splines
that are going to show us the outlines as this map is not going to be useful as it is. We are going
to make sure to create lines based on just simple drawing so the first thing is to left-click on the
area that we know we want our spline to be connected to and we're just going to be holding our
left mouse button to further manipulate its shape.
We will go ahead and just continue building this shape with the left mouse button being held. It
is going to be extremely easy for you to draw lines just as we have shown you in earlier chapters.
Sometimes you may not be all that precise because 3ds Max is not CAD software (it's more of an
artistic tool) so we don't need to be necessarily that precise with it.

This is going to take us a while because we've got quite a lot of lines for this illustration to get to
this point and what is going to be very helpful is to know that you can always go back and
manipulate your vertices a little bit further if needed by simply using the most common tools in
3ds Max. First, it's going to be your Move tool, then your Rotation and scaling. By scaling the
beziers that we've created we're going to create a little bit sharper lines. By moving them we can
ease the tension or by simply rotating them, it's going to make sure that our shapes are going to
be placed in the right way.
We can go back to this point and try to move the beziers to better trace the image and if needed
we can just go ahead and walk from one to another, scale it down a little bit, or just move it a
little bit and by going step by step we will be able to get a little bit more precise outline. But in
this case, we're just going to make sure to start using the right tools that we need. The final part is
going to be our zero point because if we just start using terrain now it's not going to look nice so
for that we're going to scale this object and we're going to use this as an additional base. Now
we can go for our selection presets and we're just going to go for shapes alone by typing 100 in
the Z value for our first outline. We're going to be able to place it exactly where we need it, then
we'll continue with that and select each element. Typically, when you will be loading CAD files
or any kind of outlines that were created in different software, unfortunately, most of the time
you will be forced to use this kind of method where you have to manually tell 3ds Max where
those objects are supposed to be placed and in this case, this last part was on 500 centimeters. As
you can see this is going to create a rather big slope so because we're working on a rather
imaginary object we're just going to scale this further to make sure that our landscape is not
going to be too pointy. We no longer need this image so we'll go back to "Selection," select this
part and delete it. Now this looks quite fun and then we're going to now go to our Creation
panel, select "Compound objects" and in this case, since this is just a simple shape we need to
go back to our Creation panel from our Geometry and again we'll go to Compound objects.

Here we need to pick "Terrain." The terrain is very simplistic as you can see. It creates a very
primitive type of mesh so we can just simply click on "Operand" and start selecting each line to
just allow 3ds Max to follow up with the connections.
You can see the connections are already creating a quite nice tearing, unfortunately, it's not going
to be very precise, it's going to be rather primitive as most of the tools in 3ds Max are from our
regular Creation panel. To make sure that we do not have any problems with this mesh we can
also add a turbo smooth on top of that so by increasing the iterations to a bigger number we can
just simply create this kind of land and we will be able to use it as a base to our 3d visual. To put
our tearing into work we will need some simple materials on our object to avoid the default
color poking through. Next, we will drag and drop the material and we now have pre-made a
simple scatter object for this illustration.

We will simply add the terrain as a distribution on the object to allow scattering to take place;
this simple technique will allow you to quickly prototype landscapes and pre-made mock-ups for
our presentations or for many more uses that you can come up with but you have to know how to
use on your own.

Paint Deformation
In this section, we want to talk about Paint Deformation in 3d Studio Max. To begin, we will
maximize our Perspective view. From "Create and "Geometry" we will create a plane. We'll
press F4 to see edge faces, convert to editable poly, and press Ctrl+M a couple of times to
increase subdivision. If you're using previous versions of 3ds Max there are two options to use
paint deformation: you can use ribbon in the freeform section or simply find Paint
deformation rollout in the Command panel. As you can see (shown in the image below) there
are three buttons on top of Paint Deformation: Push/pull, Relax, and Revert.

We will enable the "Push and pull" button and start painting by default. The "Push" operator
enabled means when you start painting, your geometry surface will increase height based on
normal directions. If we hold Alt or option key (on a Mac) and start dragging, you enable the
Pull operator which means you decrease the height of the geometry surface.
If you like your deformations you could press the "Commit" button, otherwise press "Cancel" to
reset the deformations. There are three value parameters here which contain Push-pull Value,
Brush size, and Brush strength. When we enable the "Push and Pull" button, the "Push and
Pull Value" by default is set to 10 because our 3ds Max unit measurement was set to centimeters
so we have the Push and Pull value set to 10 centimeters. For example, if we set our Push and
Pull value to 20 centimeters and start painting on the surface, our geometry surface where we
paint it will increase in height by 20 centimeters. Based on our normal direction we can create a
box here, change the color, and set the height to 20 centimeters and you can see our geometry
height increased exactly 20 centimeters.

We will delete that box and go into the Modify panel again. The brush size is self-explanatory.
By increasing brush size you can push or pull a larger area or decrease the size. For example, if
we put it around 6 our brush size will reduce. The last parameter here is Brush strength which is
the multiple of brush and the Push and Pull value. For example, our Push and Pull value is
already set at 20 centimeters, if we decrease the value of pressure strain to 0.5 this time when
we start dragging on the geometry surface instead of increasing the height immediately to 20
centimeters, it will slowly increase the height. We can say Brush strength works like brush flow
in some applications like Adobe and Photoshop so if we decrease the value for example by 0.1,
now if we start painting our geometry the Push or Pull value will increase slowly. We will now
increase our brush strength to 0.3 and cancel the formations.
Note that if you push or pull your geometry surface while holding down the left mouse button,
the maximum height you will achieve is 20 centimeters. If you want to increase the height you
should release your left mouse button and again start dragging to another 20 centimeters step. So
if you set your Brush strength to 1 and start dragging by Push and Pull value, while you're
dragging to your painting, your maximum height will be equal to the Push and Pull value. If you
need more height you should release your left mouse button and start dragging again. The
"Relax" button is also self-explanatory. If we click on the Relax button, it starts painting our
jagged hard edges and then smoothens them. The third button here is Revert. If you press
"Cancel," all deformations will undo but if you select the "Revert" button you could just take
back some part of the formations you applied and you'll see it going back to its original shape.
From our illustration, we see very harsh edges so what we'll do is use the Relax feature.

Some important shortcuts

There are a few useful shortcuts here that we will mention to you when working with the Push
and Pull feature. If you hold down the Shift+Ctrl or Shift+Cmnd (on a Mac) and drag it up you
can increase your brush size but if you bring it down you could decrease your brush size so keep
in mind that Shift+Ctrl or Shift+Cmnd and drag will change your brush size. If you hold down
the Alt+Shift or Option+Shift on a Mac and start to drag you can set your brush strength
value.
We mentioned before that if you start painting with the Push and Pull button, by default your
operator is Push; if you hold down the Alt or Option key, your operator sees to pull. Lastly, if
you hold down the Ctrl key temporarily, the Revert operator will activate so you could bring
back all your deformations anywhere on your surface geometry. We will press "Cancel" to undo
all our deformations on our geometry and will mention one more tip. If you select the Push and
Pull button and click, you can see our brush has a falloff or we can say it is a soft brush. If we
click on Brush options in the Painter options window, you can see there is a "Linear Curve" in
which the left side represents the center of our brush and the right side represents the border of
our brush.

We have a curve here from 1 to 0, which tells us that the middle of our brush or the strength
value is one, and that will slowly decrease to reach zero and because of that, we have a soft
brush.

If we select the right side of this brush and set the value to 1 we now have a straight line and if
we click on our surface geometry, you will see we now have a very hard edge.
Of course, like any other Curve editor, you can increase your points at the middle of this line.
For example, we can add two more here and move these two points to reach close to zero.
Now if we analyze before we start painting, we have the brush strength 1 which is slowly
decreased to reach 0 at the middle of this curve (or better to say brush), which means here we
don't have any strength value and by reaching to the end of this brush outline again we increase
the value to reach 1. Also, if we start to click on our geometry, we can now change our brush
values. We could delete all of these and increase only the middle of the brush to 0.5, and then
select both sides of the brush and set them to zero.

What happens here is that the center of the brush which has a 0 value starts to go in the
maximum strength value to 1 and again 0. If we click to see the result, of course, we could make
the corner smooth. We can right-click on that corner and select bezier which will smooth it up
then click once.

Ground Deformation
This section is about another type of deformation known as ground deformation. Before we
begin we need to make a ground first so we will create a plane, set the length and width and also
ensure to keep the segment's number high for ground deformation to look realistic. Now we will
make a cylinder and this will represent the tire of a vehicle. We will set its parameters such as
position and rotation.

Next, we'll create a box and position it here. This box will define the contact region of the tire
with the ground which means the ground will deform underneath based on the size of this box
and not based on the size of the tire.
After that, we need to create a small animation of the tire moving across the ground so we'll
position the tire along with the box just above the ground.

Obviously, from the illustration so far (as seen in the image above), in the animation the box
says to move with the tire so we need to link the box with the tire. For that, we'll choose the
"Select and length" tool and link the two by holding the left mouse button down on the box and
releasing it on the tire. Now with the auto key checked and with the animation slider at 100, we
will move the tire to wherever we want and then uncheck the auto key; so now we have a small
animation. The next step is to set up the deformation system. For that purpose, we will use
"Particles." We will open the graph editors list and select the "Particles" view.
A window will open, and from there we will drag the Standard Flow System onto the empty
area. This will create a bunch of events. We are now going to first click on the Render operator
and its parameters will appear on the right. In the "type" drop-down list we'll select "None."

Next, we will click on the Birth operator. We will set the "Emit stop" option to 0 then set the
particle amount to 50. We suggest you always start with a low number for the amount. Now we'll
delete all of the operators and with that done, we are going to add the "Position object"
operator under the Birth operator. We will set the "lock on emitter option" in its parameters.
In the emitter objects lists, we'll add the box which is the contact region; this means that
wherever this box moves the particles will be emitted from there. Next, we'll add a Spawn
operator underneath the Position object set by travel distance and its parameters.

Now we need to create a force of gravity so that the particles emitted move downward, and for
that, we'll go to the Space Warp section, and in the "Forces" section we'll choose gravity
created anywhere in the world and reduce its strength to half. Similarly, the particles have to
collide with the ground, and for that, we will use deflectors. So we'll choose "Deflectors" in the
Space Warp section and create a standard deflector; the deflector should be in the same size and
position as the ground. We will now maximize the Particle view window, create a "Force"
operator separately and add the gravity force that we have just created in its parameters. Now
we'll add a "Collision" operator below the Force operator, and add the Deflector and its
parameters. We will also check the "Collide multiple times" option and set the number of times
to zero and the speed to stop. Now we'll connect this event with the previous event and if you
drag the animation slider now you will see particles being painted on the ground.
With the ground selected, we will open the Modifier list, add a volume, select "Modifier,"
choose "Vertex" as the Stack selection level then check "Select by mesh object" and select the
particles as the object. Lastly, we'll turn on the "Soft Selection" and decrease the falloff amount.
Now with the vertex being selected, based on the particles we will add a Push modifier.
Normally, we will add it here from the Modifier list; however, there is a glitch. If you open the
Modifier list now the program might stop working as this has been tested with two different
versions of 3ds Max on two different computers and both times the program crashed. If this
happens to you as well, then open the Modifier drop-down list from here, and in the Parametric
Deformers list add the Push modifier and decrease the push amount based on how much you
want the tire to dig into the ground. If we move the animation slider now the ground will deform
as the tire moves forward.

You can set the size of the box that is emitting the particles based on your requirement. Also as
you can see from the image above, the tire is floating above the ground you can simply move the
tire down by using the Transform tool and since the box is connected with it, it will move down
as well but that is not a problem because once you are done positioning the tire, simply move it
upwards and now you can scale and position the tire in the contact region according to your
needs. If you have followed up to this point and you play the animation you can see that you
have rendered out the animation.
Tire modeling
In this chapter we are going to create basic tile modeling with the help of irritable poly in 3d
Studio Max so let's get started. First of all, we will go to "Tube" and draw a tube from our Front
viewport. We're going to give the radius 2 and then put some depth in it so now we have created
the basic object of our entire model.

Before we proceed we need to increase some detailing. To do that we're going to open our
topology so we can see some wireframes and also look at our wireframing options. We will go
to the Modify panel for that purpose and then we will decrease those segments of height because
we don't want them at this point.
The most important thing is called sides. It is 18 sizes. That's why it looks like some kind of a
tag or not a proper circle so we can easily find the edges of these objects we're going to increase
some segments or some heights or some sides of this so we're going to make a 40 percent. Our
next step is to right-click on it and just find our Editable Poly options so when we will convert it
into the editable poly you can find there are different options. There are no segments, heights, or
radii but only one size. These options are called vertices, edges, borders, polygons, and elements.
What we're going to do now is go to the polygon first. We're going to go outside of this viewport,
select half of it and delete the other half and then take the vertex, give it some more depth to it.
Our next step is to maximize this view once again, then go to the H and just select one edge and
make it a ring. The ring will help us to select all the same directional edges. After that we'll go to
the option which is called "Connect" and take two connections just to find a depth in it so here if
we select them we will take out a part of it so now it is becoming a little bit spherical or rounded.
We're going to double-click on it and press Ctrl then double-click on the one from the east side
and then select the Chamfer.

The chamfer will help us to break them smoothly. After that, we will increase some sides and
you can see there are some depth in it and some rounded surfaces. Once again we will take H and
then make a ring once again for that purpose. This time, we'll go to the connection option and
select this one and do some rotations after that just select one to three H, make them into rings,
and after that press Ctrl and select polygons so it will select all the polygons.
Now we are going to the Insert menu and this has some options which can decrease the selection
of polygons, so what we're going to do is "select by polygon." This means each polygon has a
separate Insert option. Next, we will select the Extrude command and it will extrude a texture of
this style which is perfect.

Now we have already modeled our tag. The last step is to go to the Modify panel and find out the
Symmetry option which is called this one. So the symmetry (x y and z) will help minus our
symmetry. We're going to take a mirror and make it close to the symmetrical options like this.
With this simple illustration, you have learned how to do basic tire modeling. You can go to the
Material Editor and apply a black color to make it look better.

Model a Perfect Couch Cushion

In this section, we're going to show you how to use the Cloth modifier very quickly and easily to
create a couch cushion, which is very natural and realistic looking. We already have a box in our
scene but we're going to create a new box, convert it to Edit poly, and then give it some
geometry just by using the Connect tool. That looks good and it's connected in this direction as
well and then we will apply a Cloth modifier. To do that we will go into Object properties,
choose the box to which the cloth has been applied then we'll set that object to a cloth and we'll
use a preset. Any of these fabric presets will work but think about what you want it to look like;
we're going to use silk since it's more of a light fabric.

Now this pressure setting is the important one that simulates gas inside of an enclosed object so
we'll inflate that box to look like a balloon. We're going to set it to somewhere around 2.5 (it can
go from 0 to 100). We want the gravity to be 0 because we want this to just float right now and
just so that all it's going to be affecting is the pressure setting so if we hit "Simulate," that thing
will inflate like a balloon and you'll get these nice wrinkles in it. What we can do next is collapse
that down to an Edit poly and from there we can start adding our manual cuts. We'll take this
polygon here and just start using the Cut tool to add detail. We're going to add a chop on this
pillow because interior designers love to see the chop on your rendered pillows. Sometimes they
get weird about it but we're going to put that in because that is fairly realistic.

We're snapping there so that our vertices are all connected. We will add in some extra geometry
and of course, you can go in and add as much or as little kind of wrinkles as you want or
variation to your model. You can even do this with an FFD modifier or whatever you want to
add this extra variation in but it's nice when we're doing it on top of these natural-looking kinds
of folds that we already got from the Cloth modifier so let's raise that all up to get a little crease
in there.

Let's make it a little deeper. If we do a turbo smooth on that now we can see the natural wrinkles
in the chair but we can make it even better. We are going to take the turbo smooth off and then
what we can do is add the turbo smooth now.
There are a lot of different things we can do with this. We can put an Edit poly modifier on it,
select the edge here, and loop it. We can do our regular extrusion or in/out depending on how we
want that to look. After that, we will move it again so it gives us a little seam there. It’s not bad
what we can do to those before we put that turbosmooth on.
Now let's do another Cloth modifier and this time we'll add objects to it. We will add that box to
box two which will become inactive and will be just a collision object. Box 3 which is our
cushion will become the cloth silk again.
We will put the pressure at 3 or 4 (that's something you'll have to tweak and experiment with)
then we'll turn our gravity up to -100. The default is -98 but we don't want it to follow that
quickly so if we simulate this now it's inflating again but it's also going to come and crash down
into this which would be setting out a couch.
Imagine this is a couch. You can set that as a collision object and just sit this cushion right down
on it. We will let it simulate for a minute and if it doesn't get a great simulation there we will
work on the settings a little bit.
We will set box 3 to generic heavy and set the pressure to 2. We would turbo smooth at first and
then let it collide because the more tessellation we have the more accurate it's going to get but
this looks like it's working pretty well so we can cancel it once we have something that we like
and then we can just use our animation slider to go back and forth with it.

From what we've done so far as shown in the image above, you can see the nice folds we are
getting. Now we can put the turbo smooth on and we have a pretty nice pillow there.
We've got our crease still and we have these natural-looking folds. We have a fairly efficient
model going on and it's not too high poly. We can as well add as many custom wrinkles as we
want and then still turn that Cloth modifier and that would make it look more natural but either
way, that Cloth modifier is handy for making these nice natural folds in your fabric and getting a
nice pillow in a really short amount of time. You can make more pillows and crash them into
these and make them react with that couch. You can make it lean back on the couch or do
whatever you want by using the Cloth modifier and just working with simple settings and presets
so it's a cool tool for making things look natural.

Modeling Wood Planks

For this illustration we're in Layer Explorer here and we're not using all the other things that are
in Scene Explorer over here we're just using the layers. We're just making sure that we're on a
layer let's see we go on the floor set that is our current so when we start drawing the house and
stuff it's going to be on the floor layer then we can just turn it off
Let's start modeling this house from the Top view. Again, we can just drag and this is going to be
the patio area of the house, which is the platform that it's sitting on.
We've got the rectangle of it from the top view. From the side view, we will hit Q to move it in,
and then ensure we're in the y-axis, and then just lock it in. We want it to sit off the concrete or
the dirt a little bit and then we can extrude it so now we've got our little platform.

Now if we want to go into detail because photorealism is about detail, then we would have to
recognize that just modeling that thing as a box isn't sufficient, it's not representing reality very
well and therefore our rendering won't look super real. We can take this box and model it like
that and just put a material on it that is a tileable wood texture. We could make this nicer though,
it depends on how close we're going to see it to the camera too but if we want to get creative
about this we can go into some more tools here. For example, we can take the rectangle and
instead of converting it to an Edit poly, we can add an Editable spline modifier there before the
extrude.
That will give us the same tools that an editable spline has so we can then select the outer spline
here, then go down to our handy Outline tool we'll outline it just a little bit then extrude it.
With modifiers we can stack things up so if we turned off this Edit Spline it would ignore what
we just did in that Edit Spline and extrude the original rectangle but with the Edit Spline on, it
also turns off the Extrude. We could take this, make a copy of it, then go back to the Edit Spline,
delete the outer one again, and extrude this one by one and a half inches. We'll just leave it as a
flat plane, convert it to Edit Poly, and then move it up into place. Now we have a platform with a
rim around it building it more accurately for what we want here. As an example of how we could
add a little detail here, we could model each of the planks so we have our wood on the outside
that is holding this whole thing together but then we can take this and model planks of wood
going across the top. So in Edit poly mode, we will go into "Edges." We have a whole new set of
tools in there so say we wanted to connect these edges across with lines we can just use the
Connect tool. If we hit on this window here it brings up a dialog box for us and we can adjust
things like that so it's connecting it as many times as we tell it to.
If we just hit this it would use our last settings but so we don't want to do that. In this case, we
want to use this window and then set it like this. Those lines represent individual planks of wood
and to get this to look like individual planks of wood we need gaps between each board so for
that we will use a chamfer again, using the dialog box and you can see its chamfering.

You can see that it is turning one edge into multiple edges. What we'd want here is to delete the
faces in between so that's a setting here that can do that and that's the "Open chamfer" option.
With that, we are quickly able to just turn this into a bunch of planks without having to model
each one.

From the above image, you can see they're flat which isn't right either so we would need to add
thickness to them. There's a modifier for that, it's called the Shell modifier. If we go out of Sub-
object mode and go to the Shell modifier here we can add thickness. You can see it added
thickness on top one and a half inches and then we can drop it into place a little bit so instantly,
we have a bunch of planks for our little wood platform there. That is more accurate than just
modeling it as a block.

There's a lot more you can do. You can do something like a Bevel modifier or a Chamfer
modifier. We showed you there's chamfer built into the Edit poly tool but there's also a Chamfer
modifier and you will see it chamfering all the edges of our planks. We can make it a hard edge
so that it looks crisper or default.
We're using the "Legacy" so if you're in an older version it's going to look like what we have
above. We just want a crisp edge on that to give it a chamfered edge so that it's not a perfectly
crisp edge. There are other options here too like that which is more rounded and then there's
some smoothing going on to make these look more smooth but because we're dealing with hard
objects, not soft ones then we would just want it to look hard just like a hard edge.
So there are a lot of different things you can do but you can see that Spline modeling and Poly
modeling are a little bit different mindsets either way you can go into Edit spline and have full
control over every vertex and line there or you can go to Edit poly and have control over every
face. Those are two different things and it's going above and beyond what we do with standard
primitives or just drawing lines and extruding them; this is where you get into the full control of
making things as organic or inorganic, as real or fake as you want.
We have shown you some examples of how you can start thinking about modeling principles but
as much time as you're willing to go in here and work in detail using Edit poly modeling tools
you can get more realistic as you go.

Review Questions
1. Mention 7 modifiers you learned in this chapter.
2. Differentiate between Modifiers and Tools.
3. From what you have learnt in this chapter, model cushion pillow. Import a picture of
yourself and apply this picture as material to your cushion.
 CHAPTER 35
FFD MODIFIER
In this chapter, we're going to cover the FFD modifier. We'll start by making a box and then
working with the FFD modifier. FFD which stands for FreeForm Deformation is a cage that
goes around your geometry and allows you to edit it using different handles. We'll go to our
Modifier tab and select FFD.

You'll see there are a few options here: there's FFD 2 X 2 X 2 which puts two control points
around each length, width, and height of the box, 3 X 3 X 3, and 4 X 4 X 4. We tend to prefer
using the FFD box so you can choose the number of points in each direction.
Here you can set the number point so it starts as 4 X 4 X 4 and you can see there are four points
in the X, Y, and Z dimension. You can change that if you want. Let's say you want only three in
a length and six in the width it'll then update that.

Now we have these points, if you open up your FFD modifier you have these control points and
if you select them they deform the geometry as you move them around.
So if we move this you can see it adjusts the geometry and you can select multiple points if you
want so it's a nice way to deform a geometry without moving each of the vertices on the actual
face; it just puts a cage around it and lets you deform it based on that cage.

Review Questions
1. Explain the FFD modifier.
2. How can you apply this modifier to your project?
3. Create 2 boxes. Apply FFD 4x44 to one box and FFD 3x6x4 to the other box.
 CHAPTER 36
SLATE MATERIAL EDITOR
In this chapter, we will look at the Slate Material Editor. This section is useful because many
people have trouble with shifting from Compact Material Editor to Slate Material Editor. First of
all, we need to open the Material Editor, and to do this we are going to use the M key on the
keyboard. Now if we go to the Mode tab we can choose between two types: Compact and Slate
material editor.
We don't recommend using the Compact editor so if you use it you can change it here to the
Slate Material Editor then follow along so you can test it by yourself. We will start with an
overview of the main panels of the editor. On the left-hand side, we have the Material Map
browser. Here, we have all types of possible materials and maps listed. Then we have a View
panel where we will create materials.
The next is Navigator, and as the name implies with this we can navigate where our materials
are. Lastly, we have a Material Parameter Editor. Here, we make changes in materials and maps.
We can add extra views which may be helpful if we work on complex projects and want to have
different materials grouped.
If you don't need a specific view you can delete it; you just need to remember that if there is a
material created but not applied to any object and you delete it, the view will not have this
material in the scene anymore so if you are sure and you still want to delete the view you can
then click "OK." You can also rename a view if you wish.
Now let's go over to the Material Map browser. Here we have everything that we need to create
materials. We have the material tab, we have maps with different categories as well as
controllers, and Scene Materials panel which we will show later, and at the end Sample slots.
So you can drag and drop the material to the View panel and you can use it or add it to your
needs. If you want to delete the material from the View panel just select it and use the "Delete"
key on the keyboard. We will now show you how to use this panel. We will start with materials
and we will choose Corona material, then drag and drop it into the View panel.
To edit the material double-click on it and you will get different parameters in the Material
Parameters Editor. Here you can change the settings exactly as it is in the Compact version and it
will automatically be changed under preview as well.
We can change the basic options and even more advanced ones as well as make changes in the
Maps panel; everything that we can change in the material will be here. Now if you want to
make the materials more compact you can click on the minus sign here so it will leave only the
maps that are used in our case, none, or click the plus sign if you want to go back.
If you double-click on the preview it will become larger. if you right-click on the material you
will see different options, for instance, you can rename the material, open a preview window,
update the preview manually, or use the auto-update option which is on by default. You can
change previews for the cylinder for instance or the box, for now, we will use a sphere preview.
You can show a background which is handy when you want to see how reflection works.

Let's now show you how to move around the View panel. By holding the mouse scroll wheel,
you can pan the viewer while by moving the screen wheel forward and backward you can zoom
in and out of the view. Now if you want to make more complex materials and use some maps
you can click on the dot hold until you see the line and release the mouse button. This will bring
up different options and from here, we can choose Corona bitmap for instance, and select the
map from the drive. We will click "Cancel" here, for now, to go back. In this case, we will click
on the dot, move the mouse away and then release the button to delete the diffuse map from the
material and we will choose something different, let's say the checker map this time. To delete
the map, select it and use the delete key. If the map has the option to use another map we can add
it the same way as before. If you want to edit them up double-click and in the Material Parameter
Editor you will see the Maps options which work the same with all Maps and Materials. There is
another way of adding maps or materials to the View panel. You can simply drag and drop a map
or material into the View panel then we can connect the Checker map to the Color Correction
map by connecting the dots. Remember to hold the left mouse button all the time and release it
when it's on the dot. We want to connect it the same way here so you see what we are doing step
by step.
If you want to move one element, select it and move it. By holding the left mouse button you can
also select a few and move them the same way or the whole material. If you want to copy
elements you need to select them and move them while holding the shift. So you select what you
want to copy and move it by holding shift and you can copy the material as well. We will create
slightly different variations to show you other options. We'll connect it to the diffuse slot so
quickly; we will create a box and maximize the Material Editor one more time. Now if you have
the object selected, by using this option you will assign the material to this object.
If you select the material and click pick material from the object, you will get the material in the
View panel. We can also drag and drop the material from this panel so that in these panels, you
can find the material from our scene, we'll double-click on the material and then change the color
in the Checker map to see the changes more clearly. Now we will show you another method of
applying Materials. You just need to click on the dot then hold your left mouse button and
release on the object you want to apply the material on. From our illustration, we cannot see this
material on the object so we can click on this icon to see the texture in the Preview. Instead of
using the Delete key, we can also click here to delete selected maps or materials.
By using the Ctrl+Z shortcut we can undo this action. This option is pretty handy when it is on
so it means that we don't have to select all maps related to the material; whatever we select, it
will move the whole material structure. If we turn this off we will move only selected elements.
If you use this option, the material will leave only the slots that are currently used in the material
and it can be useful over time. Let's go to the next option here and this will show you the
background of the material. The Preview option will do the same as we have done before.
With this option here, we will choose the material ID we want. If we click here all materials will
be laid out vertically. Now if you click on the scene explorer, all the children which are the maps
related to the material will be organized.

The last two ones are pretty straightforward. With them, you can turn on or off specific panels.
Let us quickly show you how to use the navigator. The red rectangle shows you your actual
View panel so you can easily navigate if you have lots of materials. You may not use it too often
so you can make this panel smaller.
The true beauty of the Slate material editor is how easy it is to understand the material structures
and also a more user-friendly interface makes the workflow much faster so as a 3ds Max user,
we highly recommend choosing this Slate Material Editor.

Review Questions
1. What is the shortcut for Material Editor?
2. Mention 3 materials you can find under the Slate Material Editor.
3. Create an object or select an existing object, go to the Slate Material Editor and
apply a Corona material.

CHAPTER 37
USING THE COMPACT MATERIAL EDITOR
This chapter is going to be about using materials to create shaders or surface properties on
objects. First, we will open up the Material Editor. We've seen it a couple of times already in this
book but we just glossed over it to do a couple of key operations such as looking at the
Environment Map, but now, we will go into the Material Editor and take a look at all of its major
functions.
We can launch the Material Editor from the main toolbar or by pressing the keyboard shortcut
which is M (for materials) and we get the Material Editor open. Here we will see the Slate
Material Editor. This is a node-based interface in which we can see all the various parts of a
material or a shading network.
We will look at Slate Editor in the next chapter, but in this chapter, what we want to do is to
make a short detour into the Compact Material Editor. The Compact Material Editor is an earlier
version of the material editor and as the name implies is smaller and more compact. This could
be better for you if you prefer that kind of interface or if you don't need the node-based interface.
So in that case, let's just take a look at the Compact Material Editor.
We can switch over to this editor by going to the Modes menu here and choosing "Compact
Material Editor." The main thing that we want you to see here is the fact that we have these
Sample slots and the sample slots are like a sandbox, a working area, or a staging area for
creating materials.
Now just because something is in a Sample slot does not mean that it's on an object in the scene
and vice-versa. You could have material that exists in the scene but does not exist in the
Compact Material Editor. You could have a material that's here in Material Editor in a slot but is
not in the scene and the way that you know the difference is with those little angle brackets in
the corners.
We had previously created a material which is called White Diffuse which is assigned to all the
objects in the scene and we know that it exists in the scene because it has these little angle
brackets on, as you can see from the image below.

Now let's make a new material and assign it to an object. We'll click in the Sample slot here then
we can go down and choose what type of material shading we want. There are a bunch of
different shading algorithms; Blin, which is named after Jim Blinn, the person who created it, is
the most common one that you'll use a lot because it's very versatile. So we will stick with Blin.
Now let's say we want a flat black matte material and in that case, we would go here and click
on the swatch that's labeled "Diffuse." That's the base color of the material. So we'll click on that
and then bring it down to black or nearly black.

While doing this, notice the way that our values are non-linear and that is because we have
Gamma Correction enabled. When you're using an arty you need to have Gamma enabled and
because of that we have this nonlinear curve to the brightness values and that is kind of
problematic actually because there's not a lot of numeric difference between let's say a value of 0
and the value of 1 but there's a lot of difference here in terms of the actual color. So as we
increase this up to 2 or 3 or take it even higher it's getting a lot brighter quickly and this is a type
of material called Standard. We can see it says standard here and what we're seeing here is just
a range from 0 to 255 which is what you'll get with the Standard material. We'll set the value
here to something pretty low like 9 and then once we've created that material it exists in a
Sample slot but it's not assigned to any objects.
We can assign it just by dragging and dropping or we can click on this button and that will assign
the material to the selected objects. We're just going to select these lamps in our illustration and
they're in a group so if we select any one of them we'll select all of them in all the parts and then
we can click on the button to assign that material to the selection after which we will see that
they all turn black.
We want to give this a name as well, so we'll select this and call it Matte Black.

We have just shows you the general process. However, if we want to grab a material from the
scene, then we can use the little eyedropper here, then select a different slot, click on the
eyedropper and then click on an object and it loads that material into the current slot, and now
we've got two different versions of Matte black. Once again we know and you can tell that this
version is the one that's present in the scene because it's got those little angle brackets.
Additionally, if the angle bracket is solid that indicates that we've selected an object that has that
material applied. If we deselect those objects then we get those open triangles.
If you need to change the options for the Material Editor then you has to go into the Compact
Material Editor and there is an Option button here. That option button for some reason is not
present in the Slate Material Editor.
If you click on that, you can go in and control things like the size of your sample object and the
default size of a texture here in a Sample slot. Again, you may need to go in here and adjust these
things. But if you're using the Slate Material Editor you'll have to switch modes to the compact
material editor and only then do you have access to this option box dialog. With these, we have
just shows you how you can use the Compact Material Editor to work with your objects.

Review Questions
1. What is the difference between Slate and Compact Material Editor?
2. Mention 3 materials you can find under the Compact Material Editor.
3. Import a scene into your workspace. Select one of the objects in the scene. Go to
your Compact Material Editor and apply a Black Matte material to the scene.
LIGHTING AND RENDERING
 CHAPTER 38
BASIC CAMERA SETUP AND NAVIGATION
Hopefully, you understand how cameras work in general, let's look at how this applies to virtual
cameras; a little hints for you, it works the same except that we're not limited by the physical
world. Here we can try out different aperture sizes and shutter speeds, we don't need a tripod and
we're not limited by light levels in the natural world or anything like that but all the settings are
the same.

Setting Up Your Camera

To set up a camera we just go to our "Create" panel and instead of going to Shapes or Geometry,
we'll go to Cameras. There are standard cameras. The physical camera comes with 3ds Max and
it is the most similar to a real-world camera however, most people prefer the v-ray camera which
also has all the same settings as a real-world camera.

The physical camera in 3ds Max and the V-ray camera are very similar though most people find
the V-ray one to be slightly simpler so we will focus on the V-ray camera.
From the top view, we just need to select the V-ray physical camera and we can just click and
drag to the box which is the target of where our camera is aiming and the little icon you see
down here is the actual camera so you can see which direction we're looking.

From the side view, we'll make sure that we are not on the ground. With that camera selected, if
we hit C we will then look through the camera. You can see that we're pretty low to the ground
so all our controls for the camera are down here and these are mostly cinematic controls.
You can see the field of view that zooms the camera in and out. The Dolly camera moves the
camera forward and back like it's on a dolly. Pan camera means that we're looking in different
directions so the camera stays still but we are looking in different directions. There's the Truck
camera which is what we think of with panning usually in the software but with a camera the
verbiage is a little bit different so this would be like panning in the viewport but it’s called
trucking when it comes to the camera.

So picture it on a rail and sliding that rail or rolling on that rail from side to side similar to this.
Dolly and Truck are perpendicular to each other. Trucking moves the camera side to side while
Dolly moves it forward and backward. The third one which is the pan means looking in any
direction. So if we want to dolly backward, for example, we will go to the Top view again, we
want to be right up against this wall back here so we're in the right place and usually we want to
be at eye height or eye level and then we just want to pan to see a little bit more of the pool to
make sure we've got a good composition. Now if we select the camera, we can go into the
Modifier stack and change every setting of the camera too. So you can go to the Top view, select
the camera and then you have all the Modifiers available over there or when you're in the
Camera you can right-click here and select camera. The focal length is going to be an important
thing and that's the zoom of a camera. We can zoom way out so we have a wide angle but this
distorts everything a lot and makes it look way bigger here than it is because we're at a much
exaggerated zoom basically like a fisheye lens on that thing. There is a rule of thumb for
architectural things though: we don't go much lower than 28 unless you're specifically going for
a distorted look but you can see this is changing how this feels. Looking at our illustration, it
feels like a big old backyard even though we know from modeling it that it's a kind of cozy
backyard so this seems more like our human eye. You've seen the settings of a regular camera
and those same settings are here as well. For the aperture, there's white balance, and there's Tilt-
Shift.

We're going to talk about all this as we start rendering and see what kind of effects we're having
here. One thing that we will talk about before rendering though is the Tilt/Shift.
A Tilt-Shift camera is a camera that is traditionally used in architectural photography and we'll
show you what it does. It is a special lens that straightens out those vertical lines and that is
called the Tilt. If we turn this on it's doing it automatically now but if we turn it off and do the
tilt automatically, as that lens tilts, it distorts in different ways because of how the lens is
pointing at it but you want to get it straight because in architectural photography it is very much
the norm to have these vertical lines straight up and down whereas if we turn this off completely
you can see they're slightly bowed in. If we turned down the focal length and got way up close to
the now you can see they're not even close to straight up and down (we got up here but zoomed
out) it's now all sorts of distorted and these lines are not straight up and down so we'd go to this
Tilt Shift and when we try to straighten it out then we get lots of distortion going on. That's
because we're at such a wide angle so if we wanted a dramatic composition then we could set it
up.
We're going to do a more formal look in a more natural-looking shot and that involves having the
lines straight up and down too. Now the Shift is all about shifting the lens up and down. If we
were doing a skyscraper, for example, we might need to do something like that in this case. We
don't need to do it and usually, it's sufficient to just automatically shift and tilt the vertical lines
so that they go straight up and down because that is what we're used to seeing in architectural
photography.
That's all you need to do to set up the camera and the rest of these settings will dial in as we start
rendering and seeing what our light capabilities are and where our light exposure is at.

Review Questions
1. What is the function of Tilt-Shift camera?
2. Mention 3 types of camera you can find in 3ds Max.
3. Go to your camera tab, Select the V-ray camera and modify the tilt values to 40.
Apply this to your scene file or object.
 CHAPTER 39
BASICS OF LIGHTING
In this chapter, we are going to talk about lighting, specifically how to light an architectural
scene such as an interior scene. In subsequent chapters, we are going to show you how to
properly light an exterior scene for daytime and nighttime. You will also learn about product
lighting which is lighting a specific object rather than a scene or interior space.

Why lighting is important

There are a ton of different ways to light an interior scene like an architectural scene and if you're
already doing architectural visualization using 3ds Max or any other software, lighting is key.
The right lighting is what sells the image. You can spend a ton of time on making all of the
geometry and the materials perfect but if the lighting sucks then the whole scene just falls apart
so lighting is extremely important.
Key Ways of lighting an interior scene
Right now we're going to look at three key ways of lighting an interior scene and the different
lighting hierarchies you can use. Before we begin, let's look at the scene we will be using for
illustration, as shown in the image below.

The scene is super simple; it's just some walls that we've put together. The window and floor
trims are just a polyline that has a sweep modifier on it with a little profile.
Using an HDRI image
The first method is by using an HDRI image. This method is simple but sometimes it needs some
secondary lights to help make the scene feel a little bit more alive because an HDRI map can
light the scene properly. You can give some color to the lighting inside and it might not be
exactly what you want, regardless we'll look at that method first. The second method we're going
to look at is just lighting it with V-ray lights, and then the third method is that we're going to
switch those lights to light portals and then use the sun and so the sun has completely different
characteristics than just the typical lights, it has a little harsher shadows and a different feel. We
will now go into details and then along the way we'll do some post-processing effects.
Using an HDRI map
The way that we use an HDRI map is if you type 8 on your keyboard it's going to pull up the
"Environment and Effects" panel.

If the 8 key for whatever reason doesn't work or if it's mapped to something else, you can go to
"Rendering and Environment," and pull that up.
Now click on the "Environment map" here, scroll down, and go to the V-ray tab here under
your Maps because we're going to be using V-ray as a rendering engine for this lesson. V-ray
might be quite complex for beginners but we're going to be doing everything as simply as
possible for our purposes so it should be pretty straightforward. Now what we're looking to find
is the V-ray HDRI so if you double-click on that it'll add it to your Environment map channel
here.

Next, we need to get inside this and assign the HDRI map to it. What we could do is bring up our
material editor. We already have some materials in here from the scene but what we want to do is
grab this and we'll just drag and drop it to an empty slot, then we're going to have to Instance it,
we're going to copy it into this slot as an instance and click "OK."
Note: You can download a free Hdri map from a platform called HDRI Haven. There are a ton of
good Hdri maps here and they're all free. Now we have access to the HDRI map for this channel
and in the bitmap slot what we are going to do is click here and in our folder, we'll go ahead and
open that and then you can see it shows up in our little map slot here.

For the mapping type, we will change that to "spherical" because it's a spherical image and then
we'll leave all those other settings the way they are and just see how this looks.
What we're going to do next is pull up our render settings and we'll just leave everything default
or the way we already set them up in the previous chapters so we don't have to spend too much
time with the render settings but you can feel free to go through these settings. We set up Global
elimination, there's an irradiance map, we set up some other things here and we're using cash
so it's all pretty much default.

So under the V-ray tab here under IPR options you can do "Start IPR" and that'll start your
Interactive Production Renderer. A menu will pop up and it's basically like a low-res interactive
view of what the scene is going to look like when it's rendered. You can see the Hdri map is
producing light in the scene. You will see some light splotches that are coming in through the
trees and it's not a good resolution but regardless we'll play around with this.
So in our Material Editor, we'll scroll down there and just explore the scene because we know
that the other side of the scene has some trees so we want to show some of that through the
windows. We will drag this around and 24 looks good so we'll see what this starts to look like for
the interior scenes.

Remember, it might be a little difficult to light an interior scene with an HDRI Map because of
those weird artifacts that are there sometimes but one way to get rid of that is to increase the
gamma. You can increase the gap to something like 2.2 and that'll just soften everything up but
you might lose some of the Fidelity of the image like through the windows so it might not be the
coolest look that you want. Another way is the Render multiplier. We can increase that to
around 4. So with nothing else in the scene, with no lights, you can light a scene with an HDRI
map and that's one simple way to do it. With some secondary lights we can get this to look pretty
cool but for now, what we'll do is stop this and we'll tap 8 to get our Environment settings back.
We will also leave the background white so that if we hit our IPR nothing's going to happen.
We're just going to have a white scene and it is still being lit with that because there is some
ambient lighting going on outside but again, this can be super boring.
We want to make this look like a daylight scene so that's going to lead us up to our next method
which is lighting it with just simple V-ray lights.

Using Simple V-ray lights

We'll open up our Layer Explorer and in the layers here we already set up a cabin lights layer so
that's where we are going to be putting all of our lights. We'll just close this out for now and then
hit Alt+W to get back to the scene.

We will click "Create lights," go to the drop-down, and select V-ray.

You may not have some of these other options you are seeing above but Arnold comes as default
with Max. There are other default rendering engines like the Standard, the Art renderer and
there's Arnold. Arnold's a great rendering engine but V-ray has just way more features. Fstorm is
also an excellent rendering engine but it's a GPU-based rendering engine and not everyone has
an awesome GPU or graphics card. Now after selecting V-ray from the drop-down, we'll click on
"V-ray light" and then make sure the type is set to Plane, and we'll just go ahead to drag out the
"Plane" and cover one of these windows.

Right now, we're going to copy this so we'll go ahead and pull this out and we want to set this on
the outside of the window, then we can either mirror that or we could just do like a quick rotation
on that. So that's our first window. What we'll do is go to the "Multiplier" and set that to
something like 44.
For now, we'll just leave all of those options as default and then we'll go to the Top view here,
hold Shift, and drag, to just create a duplicate of that. We'll do an Instance for that one and rotate
it to match the angle of the window here.
Again, this model isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it makes for a pretty decent
scene so let's handle that a little bit. We will pull that out just by a slight amount so it's not
intersecting the geometry. We don't want any artifacts. We will do the same thing here: Instance
that, then mirror this on the y-axis and pull that one back. So now we have those lights set up.
We want another light here. This is going to be like a background light. It's going to splash some
light into the scene. We will grab this one here, hold shift and grab this, and put that one over
here. What we are going to do is make a copy of that because we might want to adjust that one
separately to something like 40. So that one's just a copy and then we just want to make sure
that's big enough.
We'll make one more and then put that over here so this is like a big opening. We will clone that
as a copy and put that one up here so as you can see there's a big opening right here and we didn't
put any detail there. You can add detail, make an animation of this or add whatever you want to
add but for this illustration, we are not doing any of that. What we'll do is increase that and let
some light just splash in there like what you are seeing in the image below.
We also want to make sure we can't see that from the camera but we can do a little trick which is
to click on that "invisible" button in the options. If we check "Invisible" that's not going to be
visible to the camera which is good just in case there are any Reflections or anything that's going
on since we don't want anything that we're not in control of. We'll leave that at 40 and preview to
see how that looks. So with this scheme, we're just lighting everything right away with just
planes. Going through the windows it should offer a pretty soft light, more like a morning light
and we can of course adjust the color of a lot of these lights too.
We'll now pause to look at that and with that setup, we'll go ahead and do a quick save on that
because sometimes, when you start that renderer, crashes could happen so it's always a good idea
to periodically save your work.
Recall that for this game lighting everything was straightforward. Using Standard lights is a
typical common practice in architectural visualization which is lucrative. So if you're interested
in doing architectural renderings it just takes practice; you have to get good at setting up your
lights. It's like a simplified version of how to do a basic lighting scheme, where you just put
lights in all the windows. This is easy and you can play around with doing secondary lights
behind the camera.
For practice purposes, we're going to put a secondary light underneath this light here to splash
some light on the table which could look cool so we get to see how this looks. It will fire up our
renderer and already that's bright so what we'll do is bring down the intensity of some of these
lights to 40. We'll then grab some of these lights and under "Effect diffuse," set these down to
like 0.24. For the other one back there which is still bright, we will bring it down to 30 and also
adjust the “Effect diffuse" to 0.24. We will go over the other lights, bringing the values down to
36 and adjusting the "effect diffuse" to 0.24. To get the full picture of how that looks we'll start
the IPR. You can see from the image that it's looking better, however, it's quite dark back there
so we would increase that one a little bit, then go again to see how this plays out.
Now that's looking good. The intensity kit on these can increase a little bit and we would proceed
to add a secondary light in front of the windows. For that, we will increase the intensity of the
one back here so we're simply going to drag it over our other screen and grab the light back here.
We can even make it a little wider and set this to 40, then we'll leave these lights at 42 and see
how that looks.
So again, with what you've learned so far, you have to tweak it and see how it plays out for you.
In our case, this is already looking a little bit more dynamic. If we want this to be a little brighter
back there we might even take that up a little higher because we imagine there'd be a big window
on the opposite wall of this room so we want that to Splash a little bit lighter through there.

We are going to put a secondary light there in front of the windows and then increase that light to
45 or 50 so it starts making sense.
Now we will stop this, and then grab one of these lights and put it inside the room. Now it's a
little different so this is going to be a secondary light that will blast some light into the space and
to brighten things up we are going to make this a little wider a little shorter then drag this in a
little bit further, after which we're going to set one to be invisible. We'll drag that further into the
space and that should help brighten things up.
Note: we don't want to blast too much light from the windows so it doesn't get a little bit too
burnt.
From all we've done so far, you can see how dynamic it is. We have a lot of dark materials and
there are some splashes of color but these are for illustration. You can play with the camera
settings to get used to how things work. We have the Camera correction modifier on this
camera which adjusts the tilt of the camera lens so basically, all of the straight vertical lines
remain vertical and that's important for architectural renderings; you want to make sure that all of
your vertical lines are always vertical because if there's any kind of skew or anything going on
that just makes the image look weird, that wouldn't come out nice.
Now we are satisfied with our image, if we run the render at Full Resolution that is going to look
awesome.

Post-processing
Before we hop into the next method we want to quickly show you a little fun post-processing
thing that you can do. Let's say you want to make the rendering look less real and more sketchy
or sometimes clients request for the image not to look so perfect especially when the early design
is in play or if you have a particular client that you're producing these renderings for such as an
architect or an interior designer and they don't want them to look final, one thing you can do is
add a little post-processing effect. That's super easy and you can do it in the "Atmosphere
channel.“Here, it's called a V-ray tune.
If you add a V-ray tune effect and then start up your IPR, this usually starts showing up after the
light cache passes and you'll start seeing it in a second here. What this does is give you outlines
on everything neat, you can even render this as a separate channel and overlay it in the post if
you wanted to but you would see how it looks a little sketchy which is fun. This is just for a
complete side tangent. If you have the lighting scheme down or if you like it you can add this
layer on top of it and make it looks a little bit more sketchy or cartoony.

Skylight portals
Our third lighting scheme is going to involve taking all the lights that we created and turning
them into Skylight portals. We'll create a separate layer and call that "lights." We'll take effects
like "Lights ambient" and we'll just put everything in here.

Then we'll create another folder here and we'll just call this "Lights Sun" and what we'll do is
pop this open, grab all of these lights that we just created, right-click, and clone them a copy. We
will take all those copies and then just drag and drop those into the "lights Sun."
Now what we'll do is hide the "Lights ambient" as that's our previous lighting scheme. We can
always go back to it if we want to because we're going to modify all these lights and we'll just
keep using the "lights Sun."
Now just make sure that the "Light Sun" layer is active after which we can close out our layers
manager here. One thing we have to do quickly is in our render settings. If we click on the button
"Render setup" in the V-ray tab under "Global switches" make sure that "Hidden lights" is
unchecked because if that's checked then all of the lights even if they're hidden are going to
affect the rendering and we don't want that.
So we'll uncheck that and when it goes we can just move that over the side for now and what
we'll do is start going around and modifying these lights. All of these lights are going to be
"Skylight" portals now. We will click the "Skylake" portal and we'll show you what this does in
a second.
In this portal, all of these are instances which mean they should all be Skylight portals and then
this one is the only one that's not an instant cell that's going to be a Skylight portal as well.
What a Skylight portal does is if we try to render this right now you'll see that the Skylight portal
looks much similar to when we were messing around with the Hdri map.
When we took off the Hdri map it was just rendering it from the color of the Environment slot
and it was like an off-white color so there's not much going on, it's producing light in the scene
but there's no Skylight yet.
What we are now going to do is in our Top view, we will put this over here, for now, you don't
need that. Under "Create” we’ll go to "Lights" and under that, we'll do a "V-ray sun.”

So let's stick with the Fury Center. We'll just drag and drop them. This is going to be like a target
for the Sun and it's going to ask us if we would like to automatically add a Sky environment map.
Sure, because we can always bring back our Hdri map if we want so we'll click "OK" and so
we've gotten that in there.
We are just going to place this over there but since we want the sun to splash some light inside
the scene it may not be able to hit this wall back there so we can make a few adjustments to that.
For that, we'll simply drag it up a little bit right there, and then we're just going to render exactly
how the scene currently is.
After that, we'll make some adjustments to that "Sun" effect. So we will go into our "Modify" tab
there just for future use. We'll now do other drag-over Render setup settings and start the IPR.
From what you can see in the image above you can tell that the lighting scheme is completely
different than using the ambient lights and it makes for a more Dynamic image. If you or your
client dislikes harsh shadows, that's perfectly fine. In a lot of architectural renderings, especially
if you look at any architectural digest, magazines, or whatever that you subscribe to, most
interior designers will have a soft ambient light because that makes the products in the
environment and the scene look way softer and just easier on the eyes. So having harsh Shadows
like this might not be ideal but regardless we'll play around with this for illustration and see if we
can make it look good. Recall that we still have that secondary light on right here so what we can
do is grab this option and turn it off just so we can hide it for now.
The Skylight does have a warmer Hue to it which is pretty cool. If we want that kind of light
quality we can either adjust the color of the ambient lights from the previous scheme or use a sun
effect and now we have full control; it's splashing sunlight on that back wall which is good since
it makes for a dynamic image.
We will now adjust the sun angle where we'll do a little bit above the head and then we'll bring
this back, start that up, and adjust some more settings. Now you can see that it is looking
balanced, more interesting, and realistic.
If you study the image above you'll see how the Shadows are hard-lined. What we can do for this
is in our "Size multiplier" of this Sun. Here, we have the various unselected Size multipliers.
We can increase that to something around 6 and that's going to soften up the edges, even though
you might lose a little bit of the details in the shadows but that's what we want, to get it a little
softer so it's not so hard-edged. We will keep increasing that until it's a little bit softer or more
natural looking, sort of like springtime light or something that would come through your
windows and not just be completely hard like a summer light. Now if we were to render this at
full resolution or close to the full resolution we can get some pretty decent Shadows going on
here if we wanted that sort of lighting scheme which looks pretty interesting and more dynamic
than the ambient light.
Now going back to the windows, it looks boring outside the windows and there are a couple of
things that we can do. We can set up a Matte Shadow material and apply that to the window
glass and we can create an "Alpha Channel" out of that. So if you're interested in doing that,
have in mind that the end goal for that is to bring this image into Photoshop and then be able to
easily crop out the windows, after which you can add the sort of window glass and the reflections
in post.
That's one way of doing it. If you're rendering an animation you're probably not going to want to
do that because that's a huge pain so you wouldn't want to go with that method. Now another
thing you could do if you want to add a background is to add it a couple of different ways: you
can add it as a plane (a static plane) and apply a background material to it. So if you want some
trees or something outside, that's the way you can do that; just by applying it like a plane.
Another way to do it is by bringing the Hdri map back. So we'll open up our Material editor.
Remember the shortcuts. If we type 8 (which is the hotkey), sometimes it doesn't work but since
we have the IPR open which is another way to do this, we'll go into the Rendering environment
and under "V-ray," "Sky" what we'd do is just drag our Hdri map and Instance that back here.
We're going to have to adjust some settings because it's going to blow it out. So we'll start this
backup. Already, the lighting is significantly changed with the Hdri map but it looks a lot better
with the v-ray sign there. Now we can still see our Hdri map back there, we can proceed to bring
our gamma back down to 1 if we want to and get the full fidelity of that image and then we can
just tweak some parameters such as keeping it at 1 on "Render multiplier" to increase a little bit
like 10 or just get it to be a little bit more naturally lit outside because if you take a picture of
interior space, the exterior might be a little blown out and that's quite natural.
You can tweak and adjust the Hdri map that you chose but regardless, if we render this at the
full resolution we may want to add some post-processing effects and some streaks of light
coming in through the windows because right now it's not so dynamic and as far the lighting is
concerned there's no like turbidity in the air and it's just like super clean which is not how
interior space usually is.
So you can see how adding different backgrounds like Hdri Maps can make you get completely
different light qualities. This is combining the first method that we looked at (which explored
lighting the scene with just an Hdri map) with the third option (using a Sun).
We used the Skylight portals on all the lights and we used an Hdri map just to give it a little bit
of color, so the scene introduces the color from the Hdri map into the interior scene and it's
completely different looking.
For your practice, you can combine these methods to get an interesting-looking lighting scheme.
Lastly, let's show you one more thing. We are going to remove our Hdri map just to see how this
would look.

Now from the image above you can see it looks quite horrible so we might want to bring back
that V-ray Sky because with that it was looking pretty cool. We'd go to V-ray and under that,
we'll do V-ray Sky, then we'll render that out. You can now see how that looks better as
compared to what we had earlier.
Another thing you can do with this particular scene is add some secondary or tertiary lighting
behind the camera or around the scene to give it a little bit more Dynamic quality. You can also
put a pendant light right there in the lamp, you could have some light shine down on the table
which would be pretty cool, you could do a nighttime scene, or just keep exploring because there
are plenty of things that you can get with this.
There are different lighting schemes that you guys can play with. Keep practicing and have fun
with the process. Feel free to swap out all of those assets and make it your own scene. This gives
you a chance to study some of the rendering settings that are used in different scenes. These are
settings that you can use all the time in architectural works. Even if you want to start the business
of doing architectural renderings as a side gig or professionally there's a lot to learn. There are a
lot of different rendering engines out there but it can be lucrative if you do it right.

Review Questions
1. Why is lighting important?
2. Mention the important lighting parameters.
3. Select your scene, go to V-ray light and apply the following parameters under the
General option: Length 50mm, Width 50mm and Multiplier 50.
 CHAPTER 40
SIMPLE RENDER SETUP USING ARNOLD
RENDERER
In this chapter, we will be looking at setting up a decent render for a simple file. The file we're
working with is a textured perfume bottle as you can see in the image below. The texturing has
been done already so we're going to get a nice decent render out of this.

The first thing we want to do is improve the background a little bit so we're going to select the
surface object and just zoom out a little bit then we will go to "Modify," add an Edit poly
modifier and go to Edge mode.
We will double-click on the "back edges" here and then hold down Ctrl and double-click there.
So we've got two edges selected and then we're going to extrude those up.

We will go quite high so that it doesn't matter the angle of the camera, there'll always be
something there. After that, we'll go back here, select both edges and then go to Chamfer,
increase the chamfer amount and the number of segments. Next, we're going to apply an "Open
subdivision" modifier so it's nice and smooth.
What we want to do now is also put a texture on this so that we have something nice in the
background so we're going to add a UVW map so that we can control the texture. We'll press M
for the Material Editor and make a new physical material. We will move it down here, call it
"backdrop" and apply it or assign it, and then for the base color we're going to add a simple
gradient.

Now in our UVW map, we need to choose the right mapping coordinate so we're going to leave
it on planar but we're going to change to the x-axis and then we're going to open up the UVW
map modifier choose the Gizmo and just move that map down so that we get a nice gradient
going on here. We can change the colors of that gradient by pressing M for the Material map. We
are going to make this more of a dark purple okay with that we now have the material on the
backdrop. Now we need to set up some lighting. We will go to our left view here and add the
light. We're going to choose Arnold lights then click over there to make sure it's a Quad light
and then we'll set it up in the Top view. We want the light to be there and we want it to be rotated
so that it's pointing in the left direction and then we're going to press Shift and drag a copy over
there and rotate it.
We now have a light shining there. We need to get a Camera view so we can play around with
the lighting and get the right sort of look that we want in our Top view camera and we're going to
choose "Target camera." We're going to take the camera targets and make sure that is the Plum
Center on the perfume bottle so wherever the camera is it'll always be looking at the perfume
bottle. We are going to change our Perspective view to 1 and now we can select the camera with
that going up a bit.

Now to play around with the lighting we need to get an approximation of what the render is
going to look like so we're going to activate the Camera view and we're going to go to
"Rendering," "Render Setup" and we're going to choose "Active shade mode" then make sure
the render is in Arnold. The active shade allows you to make changes to lighting and materials
and see the changes happening in real-time, so it's a fairly close approximation of what you'll get
in a final render. We're going to press "Render." and there's our view.

From what we can see in the image above we would say that the camera needs to come out a
little bit better so let's play around with these lights. We'll take the first Arnold light and go to
Modify. We're going to leave it as a "Quad light" because quad lights give some sort of diffuse
light effect. We're going to change the intensity but first of all, we're going to make the color of
the lights slightly yellow-white, then we'll leave the intensity at 1.
We will now go to Arnold Light 2. We'll make the color slightly blue-white and then bring the
intensity down to 0.5. We will also bring the exposure down to 4 and then for the Arnold light 1
we'll bring the exposure down to 4 or 5 as well. Setting up lighting and renders can be a very
time-consuming process of testing and tweaking but these are just some of the things that you
can do in your actual render setup. Now that we're ready to do an actual render we're going to set
it from "Active shade" to "Production" mode making sure it's on Arnold. These settings here
are what will determine the quality of the render versus the time it takes to render so the lower
these values, the faster the render and the poorer the quality and you have to find that sweet spot
between the quality that you want and the time you can afford to dedicate to rendering. Some
renders can take horrendously long to render. It all depends on how much lighting, how much
Ray tracing you have and all of that details, but you can play around with these. We're going to
leave them at default for this particular case that's going to work fine. We will go to the
Command Tab and set the size to 1920 x 1080.
If this was an animation with a camera we would set a range of frames to render, then go down
to our Render Output and then to Files and set our render to our desktop. We're just going to call
it a "Perfume bottle product shot," put it at a JPG base quality, and now we're ready to start
rendering. We'll close the "Active shade" render and then we're going to press "Render." After
the render is finished, because we set up the output file it's already saved to jpg. This one took
about 20 minutes on our machine which is pretty slow and that's because render times can be
affected by many variables, not just your Max setup. Obviously within Max, the number of
Lights, the kind of textures, the amount of refraction, and other factors affect the rendering time.

In our case, we are running Max on one of the M2 MacBook Airs so we're running it through a
virtual machine which means it splits our resources between Mac OS and Windows. That means
you pay a price in terms of performance but for render times you are doubling your end at times.
If you've got a dedicated Windows machine with good specs you're going to half or quarter that
render time. Let's look at one other thing. When you are saving an image from here bear in mind
that rendered images from 3D applications are usually never just used as is. There's always a
post-production process, in other words, opening it in an application like Photoshop or after
effects and applying some color correction, compositing, and a whole lot of other things.
So if you are going to do some compositing, let's say into a video comp or something like that,
you might want to save out in a different format such as "open exr. image" or even an HDR
option. Those are things you can look up as to how you can use that. For our illustration, we
saved it to jpg and we can open that in Photoshop and do some post-production.

Review Questions
1. Where can you locate the Arnold render setup menu?
2. What is the function of the Active Shade feature?
3. I'm your current workspace, go to your render option and render your image
using the following parameters: Active shade mode render, Arnold light 1 with
exposure of 0.7, size 1920x1080 and JPG quality.
ANIMATION
 CHAPTER 41
ANIMATION BASICS
Have you ever done any animation? If not, this can change after this chapter. In this chapter, we
will teach you the animation basics in 3ds Max. This is targeted more towards beginners and
artists who just started their journey, but even if you are a pro you will find something here that
will help you. Let's get started.
We have a box in our scene that is not animated yet. We will show you two ways of animating.
In the first one, we will use the Set Key option. When you enable it, the timeline and the
viewport border turn red. We can add an animation key by clicking on the plus icon and we will
see it added to the timeline.

Let’s go a couple of frames forward. For this, we'll move the object and add another key. It’s
working, and pretty straightforward. Let’s go a couple of frames forward again and move the
object. If we don’t add a key and move the slider, the object will go back to the previous key
position so let's add a couple more keys. This works fine, but there is a quicker way. We will
select the keys and delete them. Now let’s use the Auto key option. Here we don’t have to add a
key each time. We only have to move the slider and object and 3ds Max will automatically add
keyframes for us. This method is way quicker and one you will use more often but if you have to
add some keys you will use the other method. Now we will delete the keys to show you another
thing. We will animate the box to move in a straight line but the speed would not be constant as
it moves faster, then slower, then faster again. However, we can control it here.
We will copy this box and animate it with constant speed. We'll delete the keys, change the
tangent for the new keys to linear, turn the Auto key, move the slider to the last frame, and align
the x-axis. Now the difference is clear.
There is another way to control it further here. To do so we have to enable the Curve editor, just
click that option to open it.

First, we will show you how to move around. You can pan by clicking a wheel on your mouse,
the same as in the viewport. You can zoom in using this option. If you click and hold the
control, additionally, you can zoom only vertically or horizontally. The quicker way to zoom is
to click these 2 buttons as it will zoom all the keys to cover the whole area. You can also zoom
into a specific region if you need. Let’s zoom it back to see the whole curve. Now we'll show
you another box. On the left-hand side as seen in our illustration we can show the visibility of
curves. You can see all the 3 axes but the y and z are not changing, so it’s better to show only the
x-axis.
Similarly in the other box, we have to turn on the x-axis. Now you can see the difference in
curves. Here we have corner-type points and here, we have bezier points. We can control the
speed by modifying the curves; this technique is used often. Let's now go over to modify this
point. Graphs like this will move the box fast at the beginning and then it will slow down. Here
is the opposite situation. In this case, it will move fast, then slow, and then fast again, and the
opposite. To change the point type, we have to select "Points" and choose the point type here.
We can also add additional points and set them up. The only limit is your imagination. To delete
a key, just select it and use the delete button. We can simulate almost all the options in 3ds Max
and add them together. We can add a rotation for example. With the visibility of this graph
turned on, when we select the point, we can control the values by dragging it or by typing the
new value here. We can make it spin the other way or make it spin faster. We can control the
curve too like we did with the position. We can animate other options too, for example,
modifiers. The principles are the same.
This option will show you the values of the selected key. Here, we can see that on the 80th
frame, the value is equal to 3. We can do some creative things like this too. After you finish
setting this up you can close the Editor and all the changes will be saved. You can reopen it any
time to change something.

Camera movements to use for your Animations

In this section, we are going to show you the camera movements you can use in your animations.
We will also give you ideas of when you can use each of them. Camera movements are part of
storytelling. By strategically combining different kinds of cameras you'll be able to acquire your
viewers for the story, this way, you can add a sense of deeper visual interest.
Zoom
Here, you zoom in or zoom out. It gives an impression that you're moving closer or further away
from your subject.
A quick zoom movement can add a sense of drama and energy. We don't recommend using this
too often and as a default move but when used with intention, can give you great results.
Pan
You can achieve this by moving your camera horizontally. You move the camera left to right or
right to left. You don't have to change the position of the camera itself, just the direction it faces.

It can be used to create a sense of a place or when you want to follow the moving objects here.
Tilt
Here, you move the camera vertically. So you move the camera up or down. The same as with
the Pan movement, the camera is stationary but the camera target is moving. It helps to fit the
subject into a frame and it can create an effective shot.
A slow upwards tilt makes the subject appear bigger and more significant. On the other hand, a
downward tilt makes a subject look less important and smaller.
Dolly
In this example, the camera and the target are moving at the same time, going forward or
backward. Dolly gives the impression that we are going towards or away from the subject.

In animation, you can use the dolly-forward movement to introduce the space while the dolly-
backward movement creates the goodbye effect.
Truck
The same as with the Dolly shot, the entire camera is moving but now instead of going in and
out, you're going either left-to-right or right-to-left.
You can use this when you want to follow the moving object or when you want to create a more
close-up shot of the space and at the same time you want to show more of the side context.
Pedestal
The same as with the previous examples, the entire camera is moving but now we move the
camera vertically (up or down).

It works pretty well if you want to show a more detailed shot of some high subjects such as a
building.
Jib/Crane
Here, we imitate a Jib or crane movement, so we go from the higher level (bird-view level) to the
lower (human eye) level and vice versa.
It gives the viewers a higher point of view. It can be used to set a scene and establish a location.
Orbit
Here, we move the camera around 360 degrees keeping more or less the same distance and
pointing out the subject.

It is used with a wider focal length to have a subject close and to see the surroundings. It creates
a kinematic shot where you can see more of the context.
Tilt/Pan
This is a combination of the basic camera movement. Here, we tilt and pan the camera at the
same time.
It works pretty well in real estate videos when you want to show the entire building.
Dolly Tilt
This is another combination of the basic movements. Here, you pull in or pull out the camera and
at the beginning or the end you will tilt up or tilt down at the same time.

It's a great way to show your subject closer while introducing the context at the same time. If this
movement is fast it can add a lot of dynamism to your shot.
We would like to encourage you to try to set up all these camera movements and practice with
them.

Review Questions
1. What is the Curve Editor used for?
2. Mention the animation keys you know.
3. In your current workspace scene file, apply the Pan and Dolly camera effects.

CHAPTER 42
PERFECTING YOUR ANIMATION SKILLS
In this chapter we are going to show you some animation projects that will get you started.
Continuous practice and mastery of these projects will sharpen your skills and prepare you for
even more complex animation projects.

Making a simple run animation

In this section, we are going to show you a quick way to create bases for running or walking
animations. We are going to show you the process as simply as possible so you can create
different types of characters that you can work with. This is a fairly fast way to do this. In this
case, we are working with a character Studio rig and it is already set up. This character was made
for a game jam so speed is of the essence.

We are going to take the character and make it transparent so we can see the bones. Then we will
change our selection to "Bones" so we don't accidentally select the model again.
We will turn on "Animation," select our BIP and move it over because we want to create the
extreme frames now. We will start with the legs because, with that, we get a better sense of what
the character's pose would be if the legs were in an extreme pose. The rotation axis is set to the
"Local" axis so we can rotate freely, in the case of the forearm, for example, to get the pose off
the hand.

What we are doing is trying to make the character not look down because it doesn't make any
sense that he's running and looking down at the same time. We will now get the feet to move
back a little and also make the hip rotate so it's matching the position of the legs.
We are going to twist the torso a little and also twist the head opposite so it is giving us some
sort of twisting motion. We will now copy all of the poses, and paste them using the “Paste
Posture Opposite” in frame 8 which is halfway of the animation.

We will take the foot that's moving forward and pull it up so it rubs up against the other foot and
for the other foot, we'll put it on the ground then make it a little bit straighter and tilt the tip
forward as well.
For those arms, even though they are moving back we are going to make them closer upwards.
We will now copy this pose again, then go into our frame 12 and paste the opposite.
We have something that looks better but we will need to work on the curves so we'll do more
fine-tuning. Halfway there, we will tilt the foot slightly and make it a little bit lower. Then we'll
take our center of mass, and pull it up at frame 8 so we have it landing on the ground. We will
also ensure we have it on the same height as the back and then on frame 4 we are going to have it
move up a little so that it matches with the ground. The same thing goes for frame 12 so now we
have an up-and-down motion.

With this up-and-down motion, we need to bring it down a little bit so that we have some sort of
pushing up. We are going to do this in frame 9 so it's pushing up and in frame 10 we'll have this
character coming down a little.
So now we have it landing and pushing up. We can also move the two legs forward a bit so now
we have a bit more bounciness but the hands don't look good and it's because they have no sort
of delay. What we'll do is take the right extended hand and move it to the side. We will also take
the cobbler pose from the shoulder, place that at the end and paste the same thing but mirrored
on the other hand.

If we play this we will notice the character is going back for energy however, the problem is
lining up the feet. We'll pull the left and right foot towards the inside and once it lifts off the
ground we don't have to worry much about its position because it's free.
Lastly, we will add a little bit of head tilt just for the sense of things knocking on the ground and
we will also add that for the hands as well so we are going to take both of the hands and on the
same frame as the head we'll move it down just a little like they are knocked down and then
they'll pull up. We will also make them higher and so now we will see some of that bounciness
on the hands as well.

If we now hit the okay button once more, we will see the way the animation wraps itself around
while running. This is a very basic way to start a running animation.
 Animating Object Visibility
In this section, we are going to demonstrate the way you can make something invisible. For our
illustration, we are working on a teapot as you can see in the image below and we are going to
make the teapot invisible.

The first thing we are going to do is take a look at its Dope Sheet.
Looking at the dope sheet we see the teapot here is selected. However, if we were to add a
Visibility Track on it you can see that "Add" is grayed out.

What we are going to do is select the entire word for the name of the object "teapot" and in this
case when we go to "Track," then "Visibility Track" you see that we can now add it.
Looking at the Visibility track we are now going to add some keys so we'll go over to the "Insert
key" button and add a key at frame 0, frame 10, and another one at 20.

By right-clicking on the key we can see the in/out transition in our controller. We are going to
start with a value of 1, fully visible at time 0, and go linearly out to the next key which is key 2 at
frame 11 and we are going to come linearly into that.
Now what we would do is ramp down to a value of zero visibility so we are going to change the
value here to 0 for key 3 and ramp down linearly. Let's check that again: we'll go back to the first
key where we come out linearly with a value of 1 and this is going to stay at full visibility from
key 12 which is at frame 0 then 11 and then ramp down to zero by the time we're at key 21. Let's
see how that works. If we minimize this Dope Sheet and slide our slider we will see that nothing
happens. We're going to right-click on the object and take a look at its properties. So step two,
after setting the keys we are going to change the Render control and instead of doing "By Layer"
we are going to do "By Object."

Now we're going to ramp and we still don't see any change in the visibility of the teapot as we go
from frame 0 pass where we are making it invisible at frame 21. We'll render somewhere in the
first full visibility area; we are going to bring up our render screen and check that we're doing a
single screen then we'll just render that and we can see the teapot is visible in this rendering.
What we'll do now is go out beyond frame 20 where it should be invisible for it to render and we
can see that the object is following the rendering keys that we have put in for visibility. We will
go halfway between visible and invisible rendering at frame 16 which should be somewhat
transparent. If the object itself doesn't move, what we're going to do is go back to frame 0, put on
our Auto key and put on a keyframe for all the transformation factors at frame 0, then come out
here to the end of the animation and put another keyframe there and just record that.

Now as we play this, we can dynamically see the result of it fading away. What we'll do now is
go back and have it fade back into view at frame 30. We'll go to the Dope Sheet for the teapot
and add another key here at frame 30 and we'll go to another frame 40. So between frames 20,
we're keeping it at value at 0, then we can go out linearly to the next frame 30 which we're going
to keep at 0, and then to the next key at frame 40, we're going to ramp up to full visibility.
Now to look at the final product we will go back to our beginning frame, hit the play button and
as we get to fit, it fades away, stays completely invisible, and then comes back up. With that, we
have controlled our object visibility through the use of the Dope Sheet and the Visibility Track.

How to create a walkthrough

In this section, you are going to learn how to create a walkthrough in 3ds Max. For our
illustration, we are working with a living room as shown in the image below and we will create
our walkthrough where our camera makes a bottle line.
First, we'll go to "Line," and create our line path.

Then go to "Modify" and select the line. We need smooth edges for camera rotation so we'll just
go to "Filet" to make smooth turns and now the spot is smooth.
After that, we'll go to the Camera and select "Free." We are going to click on the line and place a
view height." For the other side, we'll select the free camera and then go to Time configuration.
We will put the Start time at 0 and then put the End time at 350. After that, we will go to
"Animation," "Constraints” and select "Path Constraint."

Now we are going to select the line, then select the Camera view, camera 1 and we can see how
this camera now goes on the spot line.
We will adjust the View height, select “Eye view,” and then go to Camera and select the camera
parameters. Here we want to select a turn, not only for the line but also want to turn the view
angle. We'll go to the “Selection” option, enable the "Follow" option then rotate the camera to
zero. Now if we check the animation, the camera will rotate on a view angle.

We will go to the Modifier and adjust the camera lens. By standard, the lens is 48 but we can
reduce the lens to 8.0. When we shake the "Play animation" we can see that the pathway is
finished. The next thing we are going to do is animate the door because we need the door to
open. Here, what we'll do is select the door, go to "Hierarchy," and select "Affect Pivot Only."
We will adjust the cursor end and now we can rotate this door only on each side. For the passing
of the camera through the door we are going to select 0 to 30. To animate, we'll go to Auto-key,
select "Set key" in frame 0, go to 30, and then rotate the door. We'll then select the key, adjust it
a little and disable the Auto-key.

Now when we select the play button we can see how the door opens up and goes into the
pathway in the camera. This is how you create a walkthrough animation in 3ds Max.
Advanced animation of character running
In this section, we are going to show you how to make an advanced animation and this animation
is a running cycle based on the hunter character from a game.

As you can see in the image above we have our hunter character ready to be animated. What we
want to do is create an animation where the hunter character is running.
This method consists of taking game footage as a reference then you open that footage in a video
editor or a video player and choosing frames that are significantly different from the others in the
game footage and you reproduce that same pose in 3ds Max.
In the end, you're going to have a collection of poses then you can build an animation very
similar to the game using these poses as references and as keyframes.
First, we are going to choose a frame in the game footage and then go to the 3ds Max to
reproduce that pose from the hunter character.
Once we are satisfied with the similarity between the poles we generated and the pose from the
game footage then we can save this pose by clicking on "Copy pose" and writing a name for the
pose. This will be "Pose 1."
Between each frame, we select for building the poses we are going to skip some fields and it is
good to take notes about how many frames we are skipping because this information may be
useful when we build the animation so we know exactly how much movement is between each
keyframe. Based on that, this method that we are going to teach you work very well and with it,
you will generate very natural animations. What we are doing at this point is going back and
forth many times to the video editor, looking at the frame and then going back to 3ds Max,
editing some bonds, then going back to the video editor looking at the frame again, and then
going back to the 3ds Max. This way we are ensuring that what we are creating is similar or
equal to the pose in the frame of the game video.

One important piece of advice for running animations is that not only the legs are moving.
You have to twist other bones as well like the spine bones, the shoulders, arms, and head, as all
these bones will be moving while the character is running and not only the legs.
If we move only the legs in the running animation then our character looks very robotic when
running.

Another good reference from running animations is that when the character's right leg is on the
front then the upper body of the character will turn to the right and when the character's left leg is
on the front then the upper body of the character to chest the spine bones will turn to the left, so
this is a good reference to make the animation look more natural.
As you can see from the illustration below we have a collection of poses that we have built
using the frames from the game video as reference. If we click on "Paste pose" then our 3d
character will adopt that pose and this function will be very useful for our animation.
We will now disable the Figure mode to start working on the animation. First, we will enable the
Auto-key mode so now every time we want to set a keyframe we just have to paste that pose in
the frame that we want.

We will skip a certain amount of frames and those notes which we kept earlier will come in
handy now. For setting a new keyframe we just have to paste another pose and the Auto-key
function will automatically create intermediate frames between those keyframes.
We will keep going back and forth in the animation timeline to check if the animation looks
smooth so far or if there are any jumps or any weird movements that should not be there and we
can always fix those problems by going to a keyframe and resetting some bond positions and
orientations. Another thing about running animations that will help you a lot is that when you are
doing a running animation you don't move only the limbs (the legs, arms, and bones) but you are
also moving the whole body forward so you can have a notion of how the animation will look
like inside a video game, for example.
Most people would stop the animation when the character is just moving his bones, legs, arms,
and spine though it is not being displaced in the XYZ axes. Sometimes this stopped animation is
necessary for importing animations to a game engine but it's easier if you build the animation by
moving the character forward and then after the animation is done and is smooth as you want,
you can delete any displacement in the XYZ axes and then have your stopped animation very
easily. This is easier than trying the stopped animation first. Another important thing about
running animations is that when you make your model move forward while it's running you must
be careful about the foot position. If the foot that sustains the body slides in the ground the
animation will look very artificial. It will look like the character is floating and trying to run in
the air so the foot that sustains the body during the run needs to be planted in the same place. So
what we are trying to do here when we move the body forward and backward is to find a point
between the frames where the foot that is sustaining the body is not sliding so much. Now have a
very basic running animation for our hunter character.
Making an animated character handle an object
In this section, we are going to teach you how to make a character handle an object in an
animation using 3ds Max's Link Constraint.
Let's say you wanted to create an animation where the character picks up a bottle of water and
then takes a drink from it. To make the bottle move with the character's hand what you'd
normally want to do is go up to the Link tool, click on the bottle of water, drag it over to the
wrist, and then the bottle would be linked to the wrist making it move up to the character's mouth
as his hand moves.
However, if we go back past the point where we linked the bottle we can see that it's still linked
and it's now moving with the hand when we want it to be resting on the table, so that only works
if the character was holding the bottle from the start. In this case, instead of the normal Link tool,
we will use the Link Constraint which is useful for when we need the object linked to different
things at different times. The first thing we want to do is to make sure that our timeline is at 0
because we want to start by making sure the object is linked to what we want it linked to at the
beginning. After that we will click on the bottle and then go up to the Animation tab, scroll down
to "Constraint" and inside that menu we'll find the "Link Constraint."

When we click on that we'll find some dotted lines coming out of the bottle. That indicates that
whatever we click on next is what the bottle will be linked to first, so we want to click on
whatever we want the bottle linked to at the beginning. In this case, we don't want the bottle
linked to anything at the beginning so it doesn't matter what click on because we're going to be
deleting that link later but we will just click on the wrists for now and that will automatically
open up the Link Params menu in the sidebar at the right.

What we are going to do here is click on the "Delete Link" button (which is the third button
down from the top) then we are going to click on "Link to World." Linking it to the World is the
same as the bottle not being linked to anything in particular. It's just needed so that the object has
a key in the timeline where it knows that it's not linked to anything.
Next, we want the bottle to be linked to the character's hand at the point where he picks up the
bottle. We will simply move the timeline to the point where we want that to happen, in this case,
frame 7 then we will click on the "Add Link" button.
All we have to do now is click on the wrist and now starting at frame 7 the bottle switches from
being linked to the world to linking to the character's hand. We can see how the character now
picks up the water bottle then lifts it to his mouth and it sits on the table where it's supposed to go
back to at the beginning.

Something to be aware of at this point is that the "Add Link" button will still stay on and we
have to click it again if we want to turn it off. If we try to select other objects without doing that
it'll just keep linking to other things instead. We are going to leave it on for now because we are
still using it.
The next thing we want in the scene is for the character to drop a now empty bottle into a
recycling bin and to do that we need the character to first switch the bottle into the other hand.
Each link listed for this object in the sidebar here only lasts until the frame before the next link
starts. The object is only ever linked to one thing at a time and we can change what it's linked to
as many times as we need to. So now we just need to go through the timeline until the part where
the character's hands come together, then we'll rotate the bottle to where it needs to be for the
other hand. After that, we'll make sure that our "Add Link" button is turned on, then now we will
just click on the other wrist and since we don't need it anymore we are going to turn the "Add
Link" button off.

Now we will see that at this point the character switches which hand he's holding the bottle in.
The character will move his arm over the bin and here we will have him drop the bottle down but
the bottle is still linked to his hand so instead of going straight down into the bin the bottle now
comes back when he moves his arm.
At this point, we want the bottle to once again not be linked to the character at all so in frame 34
we are going to "Link to World" once again, and now the character just drops the ball straight
down into the bin where it belongs.

That's how you make a character manipulate an object with the Link Constraint. This method
which you have learned in this section should make it easier to have the characters in your
animation pick up and place objects freely.
Review Questions
1. Create objects of your choice and apply animation effects to them.
2. Select a favorite game of yours, model a character in the game and animate that
character.
MASTERING 3DS MAX 2023
 CHAPTER 43
WORKSPACE SUMMARY
In this chapter we will briefly walk you through the workspace which is what you'll see after
opening 3ds Max.

First, we can start with the File menu. You choose "New" if you want to start a new file. You can
also use "Reset" to clear all data and reset the setting. You can open the file by choosing the path
or you can use the "Open Recent" option if you have opened this file previously. In the
workspace, you can also find all "Save" options. To import or export the files, you also go to the
File Menu. What is pretty cool here is you can adjust the workspace to your needs and
preferences.

Adjusting the workspace

You need to click and hold what you want and then you can place it where you want. You can
also delete this from the workspace by clicking the cross symbol. If you want to add something,
you need to right-click on the toolbar space and you'll see the list of options you can add. If it’s
already added, it will have a tick icon next to the name. If you want to delete it from the
workspace, you can click on this and it will disappear. Let’s say we want to have the Time
Slider back. We can right-click, and choose "Time Slider" from the list then drag and drop it to
the proper place. And the same way, we can turn the other option on.

Viewports
At the moment, we have 4 viewports. From our illustration in the image below you can see the
box in the Perspective view and we have the Standard preview chosen.
We can move around the viewports by clicking on them. You can see this yellow frame around
when we click on the specific viewport; that means that this viewport is active. Now, if we click
on the plus icon here, we can choose different options. We can, for instance, maximize the
Viewport, we can also hold the ALT+W shortcut instead which we advise using to turn on and
off this option. Also, we have different views in each viewport. Top, Front, Left, and
Perspective. If we click here on another side, we can choose from different shadings, for
instance, we can turn off "Edged Faces." We will add some segments so you can see the results
better. We will use the F4 shortcut now to do the same thing. By clicking F3, we change the
shading to Wireframe. We can change it here as well. Using shortcuts is way faster though. To
change the views you can click here and choose what view you want to have in a particular
viewport or you can use shortcuts that are written down next to the names. You can Orbit the
viewport by holding the ALT and holding the middle mouse button. By holding the middle
mouse button and scrolling you can zoom in on the viewport. The quickest way to access Pan
Mode in 3ds Max is to hold and drag the middle mouse button. We can change the shading to
Clay for example or go back to default shading. Here, on the other hand, we can set the "Display
quality." Most people use Standard to avoid a flaggy screen. By clicking Z on your keyboard,
you can zoom into the selected objects.
Here, we have the Viewport Navigation Controls. By using them we can easily move around
the viewport. This is a Field-of-View option so you can set a wider or narrow view. If we click
on the eyeglass icon, we can zoom the view. This is used to pan the view. Thanks to this, we can
orbit the view. And here we have a couple of zoom options. This is the same as the Z shortcut
we’ve shown you before. From this level, we can also configure the viewports and set them up to
our needs.
In the "Display Performance," you can determine how objects are rendered and displayed.
Here, we can adjust the background preview. We can, for example, use Gradient Colors or Solid
colors - so we have one color on the background displayed. We can also set up the layout. At the
moment, we have 4 viewports, but we can change the layout to something different. We can also
easily change it from here so we don’t have to go to these settings. We can quickly choose from
different variations here. There is one more cool option you can find useful and not everybody
knows about it. We can create a floating viewport that can be helpful when we present something
to the client for example. You can extend the viewport outside the 3ds Max, for example, to see
it on another screen.

Command panel
Now let’s talk about the Command panel that gives us access to most of the Modeling features of
3ds Max. We will start from the Create panel. It contains controls for creating objects like
geometry, cameras, lights, and so on. We can choose Geometry and choose different types of
objects from the roll-out. To create the object, we need to click the mouse in any viewport, hold
the mouse button and drag it to define the first parameter of the object, in this case, the radius,
and then release the mouse button. You need to follow the procedure for different parameters,
and the number of parameters differs, depending on the object. Next, we have the Modify panel
where we can change the settings of a specific object. Again, these options will differ depending
on the object we create. Let’s create a sphere now so you can see that it works similarly in other
objects. We can also create different shapes, like lines, for instance. If you hold the mouse, you
can create a bezier point instead of a corner. Next, we have lights. Depending on the render
engine you will use, you will have different types of lights, however, the way of creating the
lights and modifying them is the same. We have the same for the cameras. We can also create
helpers that help us position, measure, and animate the scene's renderable geometry. We can also
create a Chaos scatter, the tool that helps in the random distribution of the objects. So we can
choose different objects to create from this Geometry panel. It’s good to test them by yourself so
you have a great understanding of what options you have. We also have some parametric
objects like doors, for example. Another cool one is the stairs, so we can easily modify their
parameters. Now let us show you some basic commands. In the Edit menu, we can find
commands for selecting and editing objects in a scene. One of the most common ones will be
"Clone." We can alternatively clone objects by moving the object with SHIFT, or we use the
CTRL+V shortcut. We have "Copy" and "Instance" options here that you will use a lot in your
3ds Max journey.
We use copy if we want to create a completely separate clone from the original which means that
when we modify one, there will be no effect on the other. The Instance method instead creates a
completely interchangeable clone of the original so by modifying an instanced object, the other
instances and the original are also changed in the same way. So you can easily notice that if we
are changing any parameter in one of the instanced objects, all of them are changing. It can be
really helpful if you create lots of the same objects and you don’t have to change everything one
by one. Now, we are going to focus a little more on selection options as they can drastically
speed up your workflow so it’s worth knowing them from the beginning. We have different
selection options, you can also use the shortcuts that you see next to the names.
We can select objects in many ways. We can change the selection type here. These options
make lots of sense during the production process. You can change this by clicking Q. This
option can be really helpful as well. If you choose "Window Selection," it will select the object
only if it is entirely within the selection region while "Select Region Crossing" selects objects
within the window and also objects it crosses. We can also use the "Select Invert' option. So all
objects that are not currently selected are selected, and all objects that are currently selected are
deselected. You may find "Select Similar" useful as well. The same goes for "Select Instances."
We can click one Instance and use this option instead of selecting them one by one. All these
features are to speed up the workflow. What is pretty handy as well is that you can select by type
of object, for example, only Geometry. If we want to select all Geometry in the scene, we need to
choose "Geometry" and use CTRL + A shortcut. We can also select only the Shapes. Another
awesome option is creating selections. We only need to select the objects and type the name of
the selection here. If we need it during the production process, we can choose it later from the
list.

Quad menus
In 3ds Max, we also have Quad menus that are super helpful. You can turn them on by right-
clicking your mouse and you will get a list of options here, like "Freeze Selection." With this
option, the selected objects will be visible in the viewport, but they can’t be selected. We can
easily unfreeze them at any time. Under the Quad menu, we can also Hide some objects or
unhide them. We can unhide by typing the name of the object. The "Isolate Selection" can be
pretty handy as well.

Transforms
Now that we've seen how to change our viewpoint in 3d let's also look at how to manipulate
objects using the Transforms. Transforms in 3d are position, rotation, and scale, and you'll see
these three buttons up here on the main toolbar: "Select and Move," "Select and Rotate," and
"Select and Uniform Scale."

Note that if we have our "Select Object" tool active and we click on something it'll be selected
but we won't be able to move it. The "Select Object" tool is great when you want to just select
something but not transform it or position it.

Changing the position of an object

To change the position of an object use "Select and Move" then activate that button and that'll
allow you to select and position the object. Now we can see this a little bit better.
Gizmo effect
We are going to orbit around to the other side, grab that Orbit tool then just spin around the
position and then go back to our Move tool and we can see that there is an axis tripod here in
3ds Max.

This is known as a Gizmo. It is a manipulator that allows us to move an object, for example, and
in this case, we have three directions. We have the X, Y, and Z axes and by default, those
correspond to the X, Y, and Z directions of the world or the grid. You can see that here in the
lower left corner of the Perspective view, there's another access tripod that indicates the
orientation of the world, and by default the Move Gizmo is oriented with the world; we can
move in world Y, or world X or world Z which is the blue line or blue arrow (as you see in the
image below) and that's the elevation.
We can make that gizmo larger or smaller using keyboard shortcuts: press the equal sign (=) on
your keyboard to make that gizmo larger and the minus sign (-) on your keyboard to make it
smaller.
Additionally, there are three-angle brackets here on the Gizmo and if we hover our mouse over
the XY angle bracket and then click there, we can position the object in both x and y
simultaneously, we can move that around and keep it at the same elevation or height. From our
illustration, we can see that in the front and left views, the plant is not moving up and down in
the world; that's the Move tool.
Rotating your objects
Next, we have the "Select and Rotate" tool. If we activate that, you can see that similarly we get
three color-coded circles instead of arrows here and this allows us to rotate around one of the
three axes of 3d space. X is red, Y is green and Z is blue.
If we rotate around Z, it's highlighted in yellow and we can do something like spinning around
the Z-axis. We can spin around the X or Y axis as well. If you click in the center here you're
now rotating in all three axes at once with a kind of trackball interface that can be a bit
confusing. We do recommend that you stick with just rotating one axis at once.
Scaling
Now let's come to Scale, and Scaling is kind of tricky and problematic. We would recommend
that you try not to scale objects whenever possible. If you want to change the size of an object
that has a size parameter, use that.

For example, from our illustration, in the Modify panel of the plant over here, it has a height
parameter. We can adjust that height to make the plant larger or smaller, but the scale of the
object, which is its Transformation, is staying at a hundred percent.
With the Scale tool active and the object selected down here in the "Transform type-in" area, we
can see that X, Y & Z values are all 100 and the object is at 100% scale even though we've
changed its parametric size.
You don't have to scale things if you can help it because if this height over here for example,
says 20, and then we go and scale it by clicking in the center, (which is that Scale manipulator
or Gizmo), we can make the object larger in the world, we can bring that up to about 300% size
but now at this point, the height parameter is no longer accurate.
Currently, it says its 20 inches tall but we've just scaled it up by a factor of 300% which makes it
60 inches tall in reality; that's only one of the problems that can come from scaling.
As we'll see later in our section on hierarchies, if you stretch objects by scaling non-uniformly in
one or more axes then you can incur some very problematic effects. When you link objects
together into a chain or hierarchy, if possible, don't scale the object. If you can change its size
with the parameter use that, but if you don't have that ability then scale all the components or
sub-objects at the same time and leave the Transforms at their default of 100. Again, we'll talk
about this as we proceed as we'll go into depth about the problems that can happen with scaling,
how to avoid them, or how to fix them once they occur. What we'll do now is go back to our
illustration, and restore it to its 100% scale. We can go down to that "Transform type-in" and just
type in a value of 100 and now it's 20 inches tall.

To sum up, by integrating all these different options into our workflow we can successfully work
in 3ds Max.

Review Questions
1. What is the name of the tool that helps in the random distribution of the objects?
2. What are parametric objects?
 CHAPTER 44
5 AWESOME 3DS MAX TOOLS YOU SHOULD USE
OFTEN
In this chapter, we will look at five awesome tools in 3ds Max that you probably aren't
using but should consider using.

1. Transform toolbox
You'll find that hidden under "Edit," then "Transform toolbox."

Here, there are loads of handy tools such as rotating by 90 degrees and this is based on the
viewing angle, so just be aware that if we're viewing it like this it's going to spin it on that axis.
2. Line pivot
You're also going to find a Line pivot here. So we can see at a minute our Pivot is in the center of
the object and if we hit Z it's going to ground that object.

3. Select and place

We can select that up there and just click and drag and that's going to place our object setting
into our object, for example, it will place our table setting onto our table.

We can also just hold Shift and move these objects around; select both of them and move them
across our table and use our rotate tool.

4. The substitute modifier

Looking at our image below, if you want to change an object to another, you will go to the
Modify tab, find "Substitute," pick your object (in this case the placemat) and change it to the
object you want (in this case, the strawberries).

For example, if we want to spread those lemon trees across the terrain paint we can change that
to a scene, so that's going to paint on everything in the scene and we're going to "paint with
selected," and now when we click and drag it's going to paint onto our terrain.

From our example, the spacing needs to change so we can turn that up into a hundred and we can
also change those scatter settings in the scene.
5. Search function
The shortcut for this is X on the keyboard. Let's say you just want to build a teapot, you can just
type teapot, and let's say you want to add an "Edit poly" to that you can just type "Edit" and add
an "Edit poly."

If you are not already using any of these tools, you should consider using them because they'll
make things earlier and make the experience more fun for you.

Review Questions
1. Explain the function of the substitute modifier.
2. What tool would you use to change an object to another?
 CHAPTER 45
IMPORTANT KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
In this chapter, we're going to look at the most important keyboard shortcuts that every visualizer
needs to know. Let's start with the top order of the keyboard and to better understand how these
shortcuts work, we will be applying them to objects. So we have drawn a box here, and we will
go into the F key. If you press F3 you can see the wireframe and it is interchanging between the
wireframe and the default shading. If you press F4 you can see that the white lines around this
box will disappear, so it will be interchanging between the disappearance and appearance of the
lines of that object. F9 is the shortcut for rendering. There is another shortcut for rendering we
will be showing you later though. F10 is for render setup and this we have shown in a previous
chapter. F11 is the Max script shortcut for Max script listeners so those who are working for
advanced and also who are into Python scripts will find this useful. F12 is a very important
shortcut. It is called the Move transform type. Going to our object, we have drawn this box in
millimeters so if we want to move in any of the axes by one meter, let's say for the x-axis, just
press 1 meter and it will be moving towards that value. We can type the values in any of the
directions like x, y, or z and for that, the F12 comes in handy. We will now move to the Q key.
This is called a Marquee and it is also known as the Selection tool. If you long press this tool
you will see that there are about five types of Selection tools. If you press the rectangle for
example and you drag the mouse around the object you will see the rectangle selection being
formed there. Also, if you go to the circle and do the same thing you can see the circle is formed.
There is another shape like this called the line. In the same way, if we drag it around our object
and close the selection, we can select the object like that also. So Q is the shortcut for changing
the selection options. The next shortcuts we will look at are used for transformation. So R is for
Scale, W is for Move and E is for Rotate. The next shortcut we will go to is T and this is for the
Top view. Pressing F will show the front of this box, l will take you to the left view, and with P
you can see the Perspective view. If you were drawing a line and you see yourself going outside
of the viewport, if you press I it will come into the middle of the point where you have been
drawing and will continue the lines again. So if you are again going outside the viewport you can
either zoom in but if you press I that is the best. If you are going down, you can also press I and
go like that. If you are going right again you can press I. That is what the shortcut I is used for
and that's also very important. We will now talk about the shortcut S which is Snaps Toggle and
A is for Angle snap toggle. The Snap toggle is used for snapping one object to another object and
the Angle toggle is used to angle slam. There are so many things inside that tool but we are
giving the rotation values for the angle. So if we press 90 degrees, we can rotate an object to 90
degrees.
Next, we're going to Z. Let's say you have an object in a scene that is the only object in the
scene, but you are not able to see it, pressing Z will make that object visible. For example, if
there is one object very far in the scene and you press Z it will frame around those two objects.
We understand that by pressing Z the objects are only in that area of the viewport where we have
pressed z. We will now go into C. If you've created a camera and want to go into that camera,
just press C and it will show the list of the cameras you want to select. Let's look at the shortcut
G. Pressing G will make your grid appear or disappear.
Now let's go to V. Pressing V shows which view you want to go to. You may not need to use this
because by pressing the individual shortcuts of this view you can go into those views. If you
press N you will see a red band getting formed. This simply tells you that the Animation mode
has been enabled. Let's do a quick illustration. We will click on an object then press N and now
we are going into the first frame of the animation timeline. We will go into the 50th frame and
move the object and now if we drag the timeline you can see that we have created a box
animation here from 1 to 50 ranges. Next, we will go to M. As you already know and have seen
countless times, this is the shortcut for Material Editor. We will now go to the next section which
is shortcuts for control and other alphabets. The first one we will look at here is Ctrl. For
illustration, we will draw another object in addition to the object we already have, and if we click
on the first object and then press Ctrl, the other object will also get selected. So the Ctrl is the
shortcut for Inverse Selection. Now if we press Ctrl+A, all the objects in the scene will be
selected. Pressing Ctrl+S will display the “Save as" window where we get to save the file. If we
have all the objects selected and we press Ctrl+D it gets deselected.
Ctrl+Z is for undoing all the steps we have done. Ctrl+C is used for creating the camera. Before
we had told you that when we have created a camera, if you press C you will see the cameras
which you have created but in the Perspective view if you want to create a physical camera and
you press Ctrl+C then the Perspective will convert into Ctrl+C so if you press C now you can
see the two cameras we have created here by using shortcuts. Now we are going to the next
section which is the Alt section. Alt+W is for maximizing the viewport. Normally, when we
open 3ds Max we can see four viewports but if you want to maximize any of the viewports press
Alt+W. Note that most of the Alt shortcuts are used for all the tabs you are seeing at the top of
the 3ds Max software so we don't use these shortcuts very much because you can directly go into
the tab and you can select it. Alt+E is for Edit. Alt+R is for rendering. Alt+D is for tools. Alt+A
is for Align Objects. Alt+D is for graphic editors. Alt+F is for file. Alt+G is for Group. Alt+C
is for Create. Alt+V is for views. Alt+M is for Modifiers. Alt+B is for viewport configuration.
With this option, you can customize the interface colors and you can change the background and
roll. As we mentioned, you don't need this Alt section because you can always go here and click
on this one. The last section we will look at is the Shift. If we press Shift+Q you can see the
objects getting rendered. When we looked at F9 we said we were going to show you another
shortcut, that shortcut is the Shift+Q. So both F9 and Shift+Q will do the same thing but we use
Shift+Q often because we may sometimes not get the correct viewport while using the F9 tab so
we suggest that you use Shift+Q only. Shift+T is for asset tracking. Shift+F is a very important
tool that helps you see the final output size of the render. Pressing Shift+G will make all the
objects in your scene disappear. With Shift+C you hide the camera. If you're working on heavy
files and you have created multiple cameras, those cameras can be quite annoying so if you don't
want to see the cameras while working just use Shift+C to disable them. The last one we will
look at is Shift+J. If you click an object, you can see the corners are getting wrapped like corner
lines are formed here but pressing Shift+J will disable it.

Review Questions
Mention the uses of the following shortcuts in 3ds Max:

1. Shift+Q
2. Alt+B
3. A
 4. Ctrl

Thank you so much for your order and for taking your time to read this book. We are
constantly striving to improve our customer satisfaction, hence, we are curious to find out how
helpful this book is to you, if you can spare us a minute to leave us a review, we’d be super
grateful.

INDEX
"
"Position object" , 369
"Villa 2" , 75

1
1. Transform toolbox, 484

2
2023 version , 12, 13, 15
20th-century fox logo , 220
2D Pan View , 92

3
3D design , 1
3d logo , 192
3d modeling and rendering , 9
3d Studio Max , 4, 5, 111, 162, 227, 297, 361, 371
3d Studio Max was developed by Autodesk , 4
3DS MAX, 3, 4, 7, 21, 472, 484
3ds Max and other Modeling, 5
3ds Max API , 20
3ds Max file , 75, 76, 77, 104
3ds Max Interactive , 10
3ds Max Interactive is a VR engine , 10
3ds Max is a 3d app , 17
3ds Max model , 76
3ds Max now supports Gltf , 18
3ds Max now supports Gltf exports. , 18
3ds Max or Maya. , 5
3ds Max scene , 332
3ds Max software , 490
3ds Max suitable for VFX work , 8
3ds Max tools , 8
3ds Max users , 9, 40
3ds Max Viewports , 94
3ds Max's vast collection , 2
3dStudio File , 105

A
a 2D shape , 218
A Container Definition File , 341
A new and improved progress bar. , 19
A new Autodesk , 19
A new Autodesk Standard , 19
A new Autodesk Standard Surface , 19
A new layout of UV hotkeys , 19
A new layout of UV hotkeys for more cohesion. , 19
A new Max to viewport material conversion , 19
A new Max to viewport material conversion API , 19
A new Output menu , 13
A quick zoom movement , 437
a shell modifier , 308
a Spawn operator , 369
a turbo smooth , 360, 377
about the User interface , 50, 63
Absolute world , 82
Absolute World , 82
Absolute world and Offset world , 82
access the location , 73
Adaptive , 168, 169, 180, 185, 192, 201
adaptive curve , 168
Adaptive means , 168
Add keys , 85
Add to active layer , 89
Adding items to a group, 244
additional fixes , 14
additional points , 84, 179, 251, 436
Adjusting the workspace, 473
advanced scripting knowledge. , 10
Advertising, 9
advice from industry professionals , 2
aided design software , 9
ALL NEW FEATURES, 11
Alt+B , 490
Alt+D is for graphic editors , 490
Alt+E is for Edit , 490
Alt+W is for maximizing , 490
an idea of what 3ds Max is , 21
an Isometric view , 62
Angle snap , 87, 489
Angle Snap , 38, 148, 149, 154, 161
animate realistic characters , 1
animate realistic characters and environments , 1
animated films , 8
animating complex , 8
Animating Object, 449
Animating Object Visibility, 449
animation, 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 44, 52, 54, 79, 89, 113, 298, 368, 370, 371, 378, 414, 422, 431, 434, 439, 442, 443, 445, 449, 453,
457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 471, 489
Animation, 8, 44, 444, 456, 466, 489
ANIMATION, 433, 434, 443
animation in 3ds Max , 2
Another option , 73
APPLICATIONS OF 3DS, 7
apply to all duplicates , 345
Applying the Bump map, 318
ArchiCAD program , 105
architectural digest , 421
architecture , 1, 9, 10
Architecture, 8
Architecture and design, 8
architecture work , 9
Arnold 7.1, 17, 18, 20
Arnold render , 9, 432
Arnold rendering , 39
Arnold volumes , 17
Array, 228, 229, 230, 231, 236, 239, 240, 301
ARRAY, 236
as UV Channel , 22
Asset files, 332
Associated Application , 332
Atmosphere channel. , 418
Attach multiple , 181, 182
Auto key option , 434
Auto Window/Crossing , 34
Autoback file , 16
Autoback file. , 16
Autoback Improvements, 15
Autoback in 3ds Max , 15
Autoback is also smarter , 16
Autobackup , 16, 24, 25, 26, 31, 74
AutoBackup01 , 25
AutoCAD , 76, 145, 193, 194, 207, 208, 338
Autodesk 3ds Max , 1, 2, 104, 347
Autodesk 3ds Max 2023 , 1, 2
Autodesk introduced Gltf support , 30
Autodesk products , 4, 156
Autodesk programs , 34, 61
auto-edge options , 13
Avatar 2012 , 8

B
Base to Pivot , 118, 119
BASIC CAMERA SETUP, 399
basic corner , 173
Being back the welcome startup screen that was hidden. , 113
bend to a space warp , 79
Benefits of 3ds Max, 4
bent to a spacewalk , 79
Bevel modifier , 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 384
Bezier , 171
bezier points , 436
big market for studios , 9
bird-view level , 440
Birth operator , 369
bitmap , 18, 269, 272, 273, 278, 279, 280, 288, 290, 295, 302, 319, 320, 356, 390, 408
black and white , 289, 318
black-and-white filter , 318
Blin , 394
boundaries of your creative potential , 1
Brush options , 364
Brush strength , 362, 363
bump map , 278, 279, 289, 318, 319, 321, 325, 326
Bump map , 278, 279, 280, 282, 289, 290, 318
Bump map slot , 318
Bump maps , 290, 319

C
CAD background , 338
CAD software , 357
camera daylight system , 76
Camera movements, 437
Camera movements to use for your Animations, 437
CAT and Character studio , 8
Century Fox , 220, 224
certain main tools , 54
Chamfer box , 237
Chamfer modifier , 384
change the Active view , 53
Change the color of your Front viewport to Green. , 104
changes the parametric object star , 165
changing object colors , 19
Changing the color of a box, 66
Changing the position of an object, 478
Changing your views, 53
channel reads , 318
checker map , 390
choose Grid Lines , 103
CHOOSING A TRANSFORM CENTER, 98
cinema 4D or Maya , 55
cinematics , 7, 8
click Shift Chair , 83
Cloning, 226, 231
CLONING, 226
CLONING AND ARRAYS, 226
cobbler pose , 447
Collide multiple times , 370
color correction modifier , 320
Color Selector launches , 103
Column section , 41
Columns, 36
COMBINING SCENES, 342
COMBINING SCENES WITH XREF, 342
Command panel, 82, 475
commands in 3ds Max , 43
Compact Material Editor , 356, 388, 393, 397
complement the native tools , 9
complex projects , 388
Compound objects , 359
Compress for Autoback files , 16
CONFIGURATION, 33
configure modifier sets , 213, 214
Configure Viewport Background , 187
Configure viewports , 49
Configuring panels, 95
Configuring panels using viewport layout tabs, 95
CONFIGURING VIEWPORTS, 94
connection option , 373
construct sophisticated 3D , 2
construct sophisticated 3D models , 2
control points , 385, 387
Convert the 2D line , 225
CONVERTING FROM 2D TO 3D OBJECTS, 193
cool feature , 28, 74
coordinate system , 98, 99, 145
Coordination system , 84
coordination systems , 84, 251
Corner and Smooth , 171
corner-type points , 436
Corona material , 388, 392
correct Autobackup , 25
Correction map , 391
couple of boxes , 55, 56
Crazybump , 321, 322
Crazybump software , 321
Create a big box, change the color to red and apply the "Line pivot" to it. , 252
create a Boolean , 29
Create a box and an instance of that box. Move the original box in the direction of the y-axis. , 161
Create a box, come and pyramid and save only the box. , 77
Create a circle and 7 copies of it at once. , 230
Create a material and apply the "Concave" effect to it. , 352
Create a new viewport layout tab. , 97
Create a staircase with 12 steps using the clone method. , 235
create amazing VFX-heavy movies , 8
create complex and organic motion , 8
create fluid simulations , 8
Create lights , 412
Create Modify, , 43
Create new , 68, 95
Create new layer , 68
Create one big sphere and 2 smaller ones. Group the smaller spheres and link them to the big sphere. , 248
Create Xref record from file , 344
creating 3d models , 4
Creating a new layer, 68
Creating text, 215
crossing window , 34
Ctrl+Z is for undoing , 489
current workspace , 432, 442
Custom Preferences, 34
Customize hotkey Editor , 252
CUSTOMIZING COLORS, 102

D
Default shading , 57
default UI , 104
default User Interface colors , 104
delete button , 69, 179, 436
Deleting a layer, 69
deleting a segment , 176
designs with photorealistic precision. , 1
detailed scenes. , 8
developers use 3ds Max , 7
developing the native simulation , 8
developing the native simulation tools , 8
development like Warcraft , 7
development studios , 7
Difference between 3ds Max and other Modeling software, 5
different 3ds Max file , 77
different boxes , 57
Differentiate between Modifiers and Tools. , 384
diffuse channel , 306, 314, 316, 320
diffuse color , 266, 270, 309, 314
direct illumination , 312
Disable the Screen Explorer , 49
Disable the Screen Explorer panel. , 49
displacement map , 320, 321, 325
Displacement map, 321
displacement map. , 320
displacement maps , 319, 321, 323
Display , 17, 33, 43, 248, 254, 475
Display children , 248
distance parameter , 314
Dolly, 401, 402, 439, 442
Dot loops , 349
drag and drop the material , 360, 388, 391
drag the Scene Explorer , 48
Draw a box, change the color to blue and rename it as "Blue Box." , 72
draw a shape , 28
Draw out a flat square and apply a chamfer box to it. , 241
Drawing with tools, 166
duplicated objects , 231
DUPLICATING OBJECTS, 231, 236
DUPLICATING OBJECTS WITH CLONE, 231
Dynamic image , 421

E
edge center , 11
edge vertex , 11
Edged faces , 59, 60, 238, 254
Edged Faces , 474
edged faces. , 253
Edit mode , 85
Edit poly , 293, 347, 351, 352, 375, 376, 377, 381, 384, 426, 487
Edit Poly , 14, 381
Edit Spline , 381
Edit value modifier , 85
Editable poly , 23
editable spline , 164, 165, 166, 169, 175, 181, 182, 190, 196, 197, 210, 223, 381
Effect diffuse , 415
Elements drop-down list , 103
emissive materials , 312
emitter objects lists , 369
Environment and Effects , 406
Environment map , 407
environment settings , 39
Environment slot , 419
exact measurements , 4
existing Max file , 73
Explain the importance of the column. , 41
Explain the process involved in creating a new layout. , 97
Explain the process involved in exporting a file. , 110
Explain the process of getting rid of the view cube. , 41
Explain the term "Helper point." , 89
Explain the term "parent object." , 248
Exploring the Screen, 50
Exporting and uploading Gltf file, 108
Extending Objects, 185
Extrude bevel , 349
Extrude modifier , 205, 206, 207, 208, 210

F
face center , 11
falloff map , 29
false geometry , 19
false geometry and the maximum number of segments , 19
FFD, 376, 385, 387
FFD MODIFIER, 385
Field of view, 91
file from Revit , 76
film and television production , 1
FIRST LOOK AT THE NEW 3DS, 21
five sections , 2
flat black matte material , 395
Font selection , 80
four viewports , 50, 91, 490
free Hdri map , 408
FreeForm Deformation , 385
freeze 3 objects. , 337
from spaceships to space stations to planets , 2
Fstorm , 293, 299, 300, 301, 302, 304, 306, 322, 412
fume effects , 8
fume effects and Phoenix FD , 8
fume effects and Phoenix FD for fluid dynamics , 8
fundamental steps , 2
fundamentals of 3ds Max , 1
future materials , 39

G
Game development, 7
Gamma Correction , 395
Generate topology , 352
generic heavy , 378
Generic units , 33
Geometry extended primitives , 237
geopolis , 349
Geosphere , 118, 119
get rid of the Viewcube , 41
GETTING CREATIVE, 353
Getting familiar with objects, 55
GETTING FAMILIAR WITH THE INTERFACE, 42
GETTING STARTED, 32
GITF, 30
GITF support, 30
gizmo , 11, 80, 82, 85, 144, 324, 325, 479
Gizmo effect, 478
Global elimination , 409
Global Illumination , 2
Global Illumination and Radiosity , 2
glossiness , 266, 267, 305, 306, 309, 310, 311, 317, 318, 319
GLTF, 18
GLTF Exports, 18
Gltf Material Preview , 31
gold material , 311
good visualizations , 5
GPU-based rendering engine , 315, 412
graphic card , 119
GRAPHITE, 347
GRAPHITE MODELLING, 347
GRAPHITE MODELLING TOOLS, 347
grass displacement , 322
grass material , 320, 325
great plugins , 9
Grid point , 37, 177
grid setup , 236
Ground Deformation, 367
GROUPING, 242
GROUPING AND LINKING, 242
Grouping objects, 242
Guardians of the Galaxy , 5

H
HardDrive , 332
HDRI , 302, 310, 329, 406, 407, 408, 411
Hdri map , 305, 420, 423
HDRI map , 406, 408, 411
Hierarchy , 43, 82, 458
high-quality video , 7
high-quality video game , 7
high-quality video game assets , 7
history of game development , 7
hit Line pivot , 250
hitting the escape key , 167
Hotkey Editor , 26, 31, 84
How a Layer works, 69
How do you select an object? , 72
How does 3ds Max apply to advertising? , 10
How does 3ds max benefit architects? , 10
How to create a walkthrough, 454
How to navigate it and how to change the look of it, 63
How to Paint on Grass, 353
How to use Terrain, 355

I
iconic video games , 7
IDs , 13
Ignore backfacing , 23
imagination run wild , 1
import ArchiCAD into 3ds Max , 105
import materials , 76
IMPORTANT KEYBOARD, 488
IMPORTANT KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS, 488
IMPORTING AND EXPORTING FILES, 105
Importing files, 105
Importing images, 193
importing them per entity , 207
Improvements in Modeling, 13
Improvements on loading times , 19
incorporate dynamic effects , 2
individual elements , 244, 245
Insert menu , 374
Instance at RenderTime API , 17
Instancer , 18
Instancing , 17, 18
Instancing at rendertime , 17, 18
Instancing on Viewport, 17
Instancing on Viewport/Rendertime API, 17
interact with objects in your 3d scene , 43
interactive architectural visualization , 10
Interactive cloning, 233
Interactive rendering , 30, 89
interior scene, 405, 411, 423
INTRODUCTION, 1, 3
inverse kinematics , 113
irradiance map , 409
Isolate selection , 71
Isometric view , 62, 63, 145, 204

J
Jib or crane movement , 440
Jib/Crane, 440
Jim Blinn , 394
jpeg , 137, 139, 269, 319, 322

K
Key Ways, 405
keyboard shortcut , 37, 58, 59, 61, 63, 71, 85, 143, 154, 164, 262, 393
keyboard shortcuts , 26, 44, 53, 55, 58, 61, 62, 153, 479, 488
keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys , 44
keyframe and resetting , 464
keyframe animation , 2
keyframe creation tools , 44

L
Lasso spray , 80
Layer Explorer , 68, 379, 411
learning the game engine , 10
Legacy 3ds Max Map Support , 39
Legacy 3ds Max support , 40
Let's do it again , 72
level filter. , 318
light bounces , 312, 314
light bulb , 312
lighting , 2, 8, 39, 133, 135, 205, 291, 303, 405, 406, 411, 415, 418, 419, 421, 422, 423, 425, 428, 429, 430
LIGHTING, 398, 405
lighting and rendering , 2
LIGHTING AND RENDERING, 398
Line pivot, 252, 485
linear point. , 171
Link and Unlink , 79
Link Revit , 76, 77
linking and unlinking , 245
Linking and unlinking, 245
little map slot , 408
lock on emitter option , 369
lock the user interface layout , 48
Lock UI layout , 48
locking and unlocking , 11
lot of big studios , 8
low RAM utilization , 18
LUT stands for LookUp Tables , 113

M
magazines , 421
main toolbar , 46, 47, 50, 54, 78, 143, 335, 347, 393, 477
Main toolbar , 46, 261
Make Unique , 160, 161
Make Unit , 88
Making a simple run, 443
Making an animated character, 465
Making an animated character handle an object, 465
Making video games , 7
Manage selection set , 87
Managing Files, 328
Managing Files with Explorer, 328
Manipulating Objects, 194
many more maximums in the X Y Z direction , 83
many views , 77
mapping type , 408
Maps panel , 389
MASTERING 3DS, 472
match the bitmap , 187
Material editor , 108, 294, 302, 423
Material Editor , 39, 85, 86, 89, 257, 262, 264, 265, 267, 269, 273, 276, 278, 287, 294, 295, 345, 356, 375, 388, 391, 392, 393,
397, 410, 428, 489
Material Map , 388
Material Map browser , 388
Material Parameter Editor , 388, 391
Material Parameters , 389
Material Parameters Editor , 389
materials and textures , 2
Matte Black , 396
Matte material to the scene. , 397
Max 2022 updates 2 and 3 , 14
Max 2023 , 14, 15, 20, 33, 74, 83, 249
Max fuse effects also use Scanline , 8
Max Interactive , 10
Max setup , 431
Max start UI.C al Rx , 104
Max viewport , 356
maximizing the viewport. , 490
Maxscript Mini, 45
Maxscript mini listener , 45
Maxscript Mini Listener, 45
Mention 2 external programs that work with 3ds Max. , 110
Mention 2 important tools used in the conversion of 2D objects to 3D objects. , 225
Mention 2 tools found under this menu. , 252
Mention 3 areas where we can locate the Snap pivot tool menu. , 252
Mention 3 options found in the command panel. , 49
Mention 3 types of views. , 93
Mention 3 ways in which you can clone an object. , 235
Mention 7 actions that can be carried out using the File menu. , 77
Mention 7 modifiers you learned in this chapter. , 384
Mention one important setup that should be done in the Preference tab. , 113
Mention one important tool , 31
Mention other industries where 3ds Max is useful. , 10
Mention the tools found under Extended Primitives. , 241
merge an existing 3ds Max , 76
middle button of your mouse , 93
military archeology , 10
minds of your viewers , 1
minimum of all current objects , 88
mirrors are non-reflective , 311
missing assets , 332, 333, 334
missing links from files , 334
mobile , 10
Model a Perfect Couch, 375
Model a Perfect Couch Cushion, 375
model dialog , 16
modeling , 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 20, 26, 27, 29, 38, 46, 89, 113, 188, 212, 226, 236, 371, 375, 380, 383, 384, 402
Modeling methods , 13
Modeling ribbon , 33
modeling section , 2
Modeling Wood Planks, 379
Modifier stack , 284, 324, 402
Modifying individual items in a group, 243
modular game , 7
modular game environments , 7
most iconic movies , 8
Motion , 43, 77
motion capture , 8
motion routes , 2
Move Gizmo , 478
Move transform type , 488
Multiple actions , 19
multiple Max sessions , 16

N
name clash , 345
navigate a 3ds Max scene , 50
NAVIGATION, 90, 399
navigation and fighting mechanics , 7
neighboring segments , 173
new API for displaying volumes on viewports in 3ds Max , 17
new backup , 16
new backup file , 16
new backup file menu , 16
new features , 11, 348
new Gltf material , 18
New Icon, 19
new icon for 3ds Max , 19
new improvements , 20
new keyframe , 464
new keys to linear , 435
new preprocesses method , 13
new Zeta Standard , 15
new Zeta Standard compression , 15
new Zeta Standard compression engine , 15
newest Snap Pivot bar , 11
next Autoback , 15
node map , 316
normal parameters , 11
Normals , 21
Now let's do what we did before , 175

O
object creation , 51
Object creation , 2
OBJECT CREATION, 114, 115
OBJECT CREATION AND MANIPULATION, 114
object in five-degree steps , 38
Occlude Mod on 2022.3 , 13
off Autoback , 15
Open chamfer , 383
Open photograph from file , 321
options like Merge , 76
Orbit, 92, 93, 441, 474, 478
orbit movement , 63, 64
ORGANIZING MATERIALS LIBRARY, 327
original rectangle , 381
Orthographic view , 62, 64, 65
Orthographic view. , 64, 65
OSL , 19
Other Improvements, 19
Outline the benefits of 3ds Max to you. , 6
OVERVIEW, 2

P
Paint Deformation, 361
Paint objects , 354
Paint with objects , 353
Painter options window , 364
Pan, 62, 63, 91, 92, 401, 438, 441, 442, 475
pan movement , 62, 63
parallel Orthographic projection , 63
Particle view window , 370
particular object , 320, 324
particular sphere , 326
Paste Posture Opposite , 445
Path Constraint , 456
PC , 10
Pedestal, 440
pen tablets , 351
Perspective view , 57, 59, 62, 63, 91, 94, 96, 111, 118, 132, 135, 140, 143, 192, 194, 208, 223, 236, 238, 268, 345, 361, 429,
474, 478, 488, 489
Perspective view. , 63, 91, 135, 194, 361, 488
Perspective viewport , 93, 307, 315, 317
Per-Viewport filtering , 19
Photoshop , 318, 320, 321, 326, 363, 422, 432
piece of geometry , 184, 263, 287
pipelines , 7, 8
Pivot effect , 308
Place pivot point binding box , 84, 251
Place Working Pivot , 26
Planar map , 324
playing back the animation. , 44
plenty of keyboard shortcuts , 40
plugging in values , 45
plugging in values for a position , 45
plus icon , 75, 434, 474
Poly modifier , 14
Polygon Selection , 23
polygon sub-object , 262, 349
polygon target , 12
pop-up or context-sensitive menu , 47
Positioning a copy, 157
Post-processing, 418
powerful 3D modeling , 1
powerful 3D program , 2
Practice, 220
PREFERENCES, 111
Preferences Settings , 34
prepend the scene name , 16
Preprocessed Mesh , 12
preserve UVs , 13
pretty cool. , 312, 421, 424
preventing different Maxs , 16
previous version of Max , 25
pre-visualization , 8, 9
proboolean , 341
product design , 1, 4
products online. , 31
professional animator , 8
Project Manager, 327, 331, 332, 333, 334
project manager in 3ds Max , 334
ProOptimize , 21
psychology , 10
pure black material , 314
Push and pull , 361
Push and Pull , 362, 363, 364
Push and Pull button , 364
Push-pull Value, Brush size , 362

Q
Quad menu , 26
Quad menus, 477

R
radiosity , 113
random color , 57
real map size , 357
realism of a particular scene , 311
realistic models and high-quality assets , 5
realm of photorealism , 319
Real-time Exporter , 31
recent files , 73
recommended unit , 41
reference copy by accident , 160
References , 77
Refining your objects, 179
reflection texture map , 311
Renaming a box, 65
Render an image , 46
render engine , 9, 38, 39, 132, 263, 476
Render Engine, 38
Render operator , 368
render settings , 39, 291, 293, 297, 299, 315, 326, 409, 419
render settings of Phoenix fd , 315
render soft microfiber fabrics , 29
renderable , 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 476
Rendering and Environment , 407
rendering engine , 258, 293, 297, 299, 300, 301, 303, 407, 412
Rendering environment , 423
rendering tools , 9
RenderTime , 17
Replace , 76, 77
requires one edge to be selected , 352
Reset layout , 94
Retopology, 12, 13, 21
retopology mesh , 13, 22
Retopology modifier , 21
Review Questions, 6, 10, 20, 31, 41, 49, 72, 77, 89, 93, 97, 101, 104, 110, 113, 140, 161, 192, 225, 230, 235, 241, 248, 252, 255,
262, 290, 326, 334, 337, 341, 346, 352, 384, 387, 392, 397, 404, 425, 432, 442, 471, 483, 487, 490
Revit , 76, 77, 208, 210
Revit or ArchiCAD , 208
rigging and skinning , 2
Rotate and Scale , 46
Rotate Gizmo , 98, 99, 101
Rotate tool , 98, 254
Rotating your objects, 479
rotation , 45, 82, 87, 147, 149, 150, 151, 254, 255, 277, 324, 354, 367, 413, 436, 444, 455, 477, 489
roughness values , 30

S
Sample slots , 264, 388, 393
satin , 29
Save selected , 75
saving performance , 14
Saving Performance, 14
scale , 10, 34, 45, 79, 82, 83, 141, 150, 151, 152, 153, 174, 181, 211, 212, 221, 223, 240, 254, 255, 276, 325, 354, 358, 371, 477,
480, 481, 482
scale by percentage , 82
Scale manipulator , 481
Scale tool active , 481
Scaling, 150, 480
scaling and rotating , 173
Scattering , 314
scattering tools. , 18
Scene Explorer , 47, 48, 53, 67, 68, 88, 255, 335, 337, 338, 379
scene from a different file , 76
scene imaginable , 2
Scene List, 35
SCENE MANAGEMENT, 338
SCENE MANAGEMENT USING CONTAINERS, 338
Scene Materials panel , 388
SceneName , 25
SceneName_AutoBackup01 , 25
Search function, 487
second category , 51, 121
Segment mode, 173, 174, 192
Segments , 174, 238
Select and length , 368
Select and manipulate , 85
Select and place , 82, 485
select by polygon , 374
select multiple objects. , 65
Select object , 46, 79
selecting objects , 64
Selecting objects, 64
Selecting Objects, 121
Selection Bracket , 238
selection brackets , 253
Selection button , 350
selection highlighting , 238, 253
selection pivot , 83
selection region , 80, 476
Selection set." , 87
Set by color , 103
Set by intensity , 103
Setting the Snap, 37
Setting Up Your Camera, 399
settings for Arnold renderer , 40
shade mode render , 432
shading styles , 60
Sheen Layer, 29
sheen reflection dominates , 30
shelled thickness , 325
Shift+Q , 490
shortcuts available in 3ds Max , 2
shortcuts in 3ds Max , 85, 490
shorter influence , 171
show buttons , 213
Show grid , 58
show shaded material , 317, 357
Show the view cube , 49
showcase 3D previews , 31
Shrink wrap , 324
significant progress in 3ds Max , 8
silk , 29, 375, 377
simple objects , 2, 140, 169, 263
SIMPLE RENDER, 426
SIMPLE RENDER SETUP, 426
SIMPLE RENDER SETUP USING ARNOLD, 426
SIMPLE RENDER SETUP USING ARNOLD RENDERER, 426
simple shape , 119, 201, 359
simulation rendering , 9
single GPU , 315
single objects , 69
size map , 324
Size multiplier , 422
Skylake , 419
Skylight portals, 418, 419, 423
SLATE MATERIAL, 388
Slate Material Editor , 356, 388
SLATE MATERIAL EDITOR, 388
Slower Interaction mode , 113
Smart Extrude , 14, 26, 27, 29, 225
smooth and Bezier , 171
Smoothing Curves, 167
smoothing groups , 13
Smoothing Groups , 21
Snap working , 83, 249
Snap Working, 11
Snap working keyword , 249
Snap Working Pivot, 11
SNAP WORKING PIVOT, 249
SNAP WORKING PIVOT TOOLS, 249
Snap working tool , 83
soft ambient light , 421
solid cube of glass , 308
solution to Instance at rendertime , 17
sophisticated approaches , 2
sort of pushing up , 447
special effects. , 5
special version , 8
specialized software , 7
specific Autoback bar , 15
specify a gripping point , 82
specular highlights , 30
spherical , 302, 373, 408
Spherical , 324
Spline, 175, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 191, 192, 202, 203, 213, 215, 381, 384
Spline number , 202
standard bitmap , 316
standard feature , 121
Standard material , 395
Standard Midpoint , 157
Standard preview chosen , 474
Standard Primitives, 115
starting message geometry , 18
step-by-step instructions , 2
storm bitmap , 302, 316, 322
SubDivide , 21
Sub-object mode , 383
substance painter , 7, 318
substance painter or quicksilver mixer , 318
Summary, 20, 325
surface information , 304, 318, 319, 320, 321, 323, 325
surface of the shader , 321
surface variation , 318, 321, 325
System units , 34

T
tabs panel , 95
tearing into work , 360
templates for various VR platforms , 10
tens of millions of polygons , 8
tessellation , 378
TextPlus , 119, 120, 125, 219
TextPlus element , 119
texture map , 302, 311, 318, 319, 321, 323, 324, 325
texture map in the glossy channel , 311
texture maps , 295, 316, 318
textures for 3D models , 2
textures.com , 311, 321
texturing , 2, 7, 8, 426
the "Add Link" button , 467, 469
the "Align pivot" section , 83
the "Environment and Effects" panel , 406
the "Modify" panel and playing , 231
the 20th-Century Fox logo , 220
the 3d Snap , 86
the 3D snap , 37
The 3ds Max 2023 , 11
the 3ds Max Help menu. , 42
the 3ds Max interface , 42, 49
the 3dStudio file , 105
the ALT+L shortcut , 26
the Auto Edge option , 22
the Autobackup folder , 16
the automatic process , 113
the background grid , 58, 115, 143, 193, 264
the basic corner , 173
the beziers , 358
the Birth operator , 369
The bottom right , 53
the box command ends , 56
The brush size , 363
the CAD program , 203, 211
the Chamfer. , 373
The Color Pencil , 60
the command box , 55
the command panel , 49, 51, 54
the Command panel , 43, 79, 361, 475
The Command Panel, 43
the context-sensitive , 47
the current position and orientation , 84, 250
the Curve Editor , 89, 442
The deep parts , 318
the default system , 84, 250
the default system of 3ds Max , 84, 250
the default system of 3ds Max pivot , 250
the drop-down menu , 109
the field of 3D modeling. , 1
The File menu , 73
THE FILE MENU, 73
the filet radius , 163
The focal length , 402
the font style , 121, 219, 220
the Geometry , 219
The Geometry here is TextPlus , 219
the Gltf material , 18, 30
the gltf viewer , 108
the GPU engine , 322
the Hdri map , 410, 419, 423
the height segment , 121
the IOR , 308, 309, 314
The keyboard shortcut , 58
the keyboard shortcuts , 58, 153
The Last Airbender , 8
the Link Params , 467
the location of your object , 82
The Main toolbar, 46
THE MAIN TOOLBAR, 78
the Maps and Materials , 89
The Models section , 329
the Modify panel , 238, 363, 372, 374, 475, 481
the new API , 20
The next feature is Mirror , 88
the node-based material editor , 89
The object color , 67
the original mesh , 12, 13
the Perspective user , 62
the Position object , 369
the Quad menu , 11, 477
the rectangle , 56, 89, 163, 169, 175, 182, 211, 276, 380, 381, 488
the ReForm option , 21
the Render multiplier , 411
The render setup , 38
the Rendering tab , 113
the Revert operator , 364
the Revit file , 77
the Rotate Gizmo , 98
The same thing applies to the rectangle , 163
the scene explorer , 54, 392
The Scene Explorer, 47
the Segment level , 179, 180, 210, 223
the segment mode , 173
the Selection filter , 79
the several tools and methods , 2
The Sheen layer , 29
the Slate Material Editor , 89, 257, 393, 397
the slider and object and 3ds Max , 434
the Smart Extrude , 14
The software program , 1
The software program Autodesk 3ds , 1
the Spinners , 81
the spline level , 165, 175, 184
the Standard primitives , 119
The substitute modifier, 486
the surface variation , 325
the Symmetric view , 89
the symmetrical options , 374
the TextPlus tool , 219
the Tool menu , 26
the Tools menu , 47, 111, 249, 338
The Transform Type-in Area, 45
the unit setup , 33
the Vertex level , 176, 178, 179, 183, 184, 191, 192, 203, 210
The View cube, 40
The Viewcube, 48
the Viewcube tab , 49
The Viewport Area, 43
the viewport or render , 19
the V-ray , 399, 400, 404, 407, 409, 419
the White flange , 201
the XY angle bracket , 479
the XY direction , 324
third-party developers , 18
three different colors , 153, 180, 285
three Orthographic panels , 94
tileable wood texture , 381
Tilt, 402, 403, 404, 438, 441, 442
Tilt/Shift , 403
Tilt-Shift , 402, 403, 404
Time configuration , 456
Toggle Scene , 335
toolbar commands , 16
Toolbar toggle , 47
tools for Pipeline Integration , 19
TOOLS YOU SHOULD USE OFTEN, 484
total of three segments , 180
Traditional Application, 42
traditional application menu , 42
Traditional Application Menu, 42
transfer important mesh data , 22
Transform Coordinate Center , 100
Transform type-in area , 45
transform type-in area down , 233
Transforms, 477, 482
transport tools , 44
Trimming Objects, 183
Truck, 401, 402, 439
turbosmooth , 377
turn 2d lines into 3d models , 192
turn off the Autogrid , 218
turn off the Gizmo temporarily , 84, 251
Turning on/ off categories, 67
turning one edge , 383
two-dimensional object , 117

U
UNDERSTANDING HIERARCHIES, 253
Understanding Keyboard, 58
Understanding Keyboard shortcuts, 58
Understanding Layers, 68
UNDERSTANDING THE USER INTERFACE, 50
undo and redo , 50, 78
Ungrouping objects, 243
unhide all objects. , 71
Units Setup, 33
Unlink selection , 247
Unlinking, 247
Unwrap section , 26
Unwrap Shortcuts, 26
Unwrap UVW category , 26
unwrapped modifier’s result , 22
Updated Python , 19
Updates on EXR and Open Shading , 19
Updates on EXR and Open Shading Language , 19
Updates on EXR and Open Shading Language (OSL). , 19
Updates on security. , 19
use merged material , 345
Use pivot point Center , 98
Use Pivot Point Center , 99
Use Transform Coordinate Center , 99
using 3ds Max , 8, 89, 405, 465
using an SSD , 15
Using any of the objects you have created , 110
Using any of the objects you have created, export the object as Gltf file. , 110
using Autogrid , 217
using F3 , 59, 63
using F3. So F3 is a wireframe , 59
using Maya , 5
Using Simple V-ray lights, 411
Using Standard lights , 415
USING THE COMPACT, 393
USING THE COMPACT MATERIAL, 393
USING THE COMPACT MATERIAL EDITOR, 393
using the Reset Timer icon. , 25
using V-ray , 407
usual Grid Snap Tool , 28
Utilities , 43
UVs , 21
UVW map, 323, 324, 428
uvw map modifier , 277, 278, 283, 316, 325
UVW map modifier, 323, 428
UVW wrap modifier , 326

V
various interface elements , 47
velvet , 29
Vertex mode, 169, 192
vertical lines , 403, 404, 417
VFX and ILM. , 8
VFX for film, 8
VFX for film and TV, 8
video game , 7, 8, 92, 464
view one box , 85
View panel , 257, 388, 390, 391, 392
Viewport background , 102, 187, 190
Viewport buttons , 317
Viewport configuration dialog , 48, 49
viewport in 3ds Max. , 18
Viewport Layout , 95, 96, 97
Viewport Navigation Controls , 475
viewport navigation icons , 44
Viewports, 474
Villa 1 , 75
Virtual Reality, 10
visualization workflows , 10
Volume Display API, 17
volume parameters , 314
volumetric material , 314, 325
Volumetrics on Viewport API, 17
VR is an important part of mankind , 10
V-ray light , 412, 425
V-ray Sky , 424
V-ray sun , 419
V-ray tune , 418

W
websites , 311
What are color swatches? , 104
What are containers? , 341
What are Dot Loops? , 352
What are parameters and why are they important? , 225
What are parametric objects? , 483
What are the options available for setting up your preferred colors? , 104
What differentiates cloning from interactive cloning? , 235
What does it mean to position an object? , 161
What happens when you don't set up your preferences? , 113
What is 3ds Max?, 4
What is a Name clash? , 346
What is a viewport? , 72
What is an Active layer? , 89
What is the extension used for containers? , 341
What is the function of The "Preprocess" option? , 31
What is the function of the Chamfer Box? , 241
What is the meaning of 3ds Max? , 6
What is the relationship between cloning and array? , 230
What is the standard viewport layout? , 97
Where are the Graphite Modeling tools located? , 352
Why are external references important? , 346
Why is grouping important in 3ds Max? , 248
Why is scaling not advisable when working with objects? , 161
Why is the function of the "Archive" option? , 77
Why is the ribbon tab important? , 49
Why would you choose 3ds Max over other similar software? , 6
wide variety of applications , 8
Window/Crossing , 34
Window/Crossing by Direction , 34
Wireframe views , 57
wireframes , 372
wireframing , 372
wireframing options , 372
wood material , 316, 317, 318, 323, 325
wood platform , 383
Working Modes, 169
working pivot , 12, 28, 83, 84, 249, 250, 251
working pivot system , 250
Working pivot system , 84
Working Pivots, 26
WORKING WITH 2D LINES, 162
Working with Bitmap, 187
Working with Editable Splines, 162
Working with Parent Object, 246
working with photo-scanned , 22
working with photo-scanned geometries , 22
WORKING WITH SCENE EXPLORER, 335
WORKSPACE SUMMARY, 473

X
xrefs , 332, 342

Z
Zoom, 90, 91, 93, 261, 437
Zoom Extend , 90, 91, 93, 261
zoom in or zoom out. , 90, 437
zoom in using this option , 435
zoom in/zoom out , 63
Zooming, 90