Autodesk 3ds Max 2023 Bible: Complete Beginner to Master Step-by-Step Practical Guide for 3D Modeling, Animation and Visualization

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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 This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law and fair use. Disclaimer and Terms of Use The author and publisher of this book and the accompanying materials have used their best efforts in preparing this book. The author and publisher make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of the contents of this book. The information contained in this book is strictly for informational purposes. Therefore, if you wish to apply the ideas contained in this book, you are taking full responsibility for your actions. Printed in the United States of America

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 developmentfriendly 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. 2. 3. 4.

What is the recommended unit when setting up your software? Explain the importance of the column. Explain the process of getting rid of the view cube. 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 contextsensitive. 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, rightclicking, 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 rightclick. 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 nonmirrored 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 yaxis, 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 rightclick 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 dropdown 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 rightclick 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 yaxis 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 fivedegree 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 sublevel, 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 selfintersecting. 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 selfintersecting 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 selfintersecting 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, lowlevel 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 threedimensional 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" dropdown 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 doubleclick 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 doubleclick 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 redonly 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 Multisub-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 threedimensional. 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 realtime 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 GPUbased 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 TiltShift.

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 dollybackward 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 rightclicking 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