3ds Max Array Modifier Tutorial | All The Settings You Need To Know

[Music] foreign is very rare that I get excited about updates from Autodesk in 3ds Max because every year they make me update but I don't really get anything that I care about or will actually use Maybe One update out of the many and the truth is that usually I just wait a really long time to update because there's no point but this time's a little bit different in 2023.3 an update to the 2023 version of 3ds Max they've added something that's very useful we're talking about the array tool the ray tool in my opinion is one of the best additions to 3ds Max in many years and frankly it should have always been there I mean it's the most obvious tool ever but they nailed it it works great it does all the things you want an array tool to do and these are all capabilities that were built in the 3ds Max before I mean I could always make this kind of stuff but they made it way way better and way easier as a modifier and this array tool I'm a huge fan so let's check it out I think it will be very useful to your workflow right away in this video I'm going to talk about all the ins and outs basically we're going to go through all the settings of the array so that you don't have to sit and Tinker with it I'll just show you everything it can do and how it does it and again I think it's one of the most useful tools they've added for a real really long time so something you should definitely know about and start using in your daily workflow okay so I'm going to give you a quick rundown of all the tools in the array modifier and then we're going to go through the different kinds of arrays you can do and see how that affects the tools but it's all pretty basic and straightforward and we'll see some of the cool things we can do okay I'm going to start with the grid which is in the thumbnail of the video okay this is all just one apple this is a Apple grabbed from v-ray Cosmos turned into a mesh instead of a proxy and then just array it around so this is the basic setting grid you have the option to use a total dimension which is cool so I can say I want a certain number of apples in a two foot by two foot by four inch volume in these settings here we'll say we want 10 apples in the X and 10 in the Y and then it'll just fill it in with apples you see we have some overlap there so we'd have to change our numbers a little bit to make it fit so let's say eight and eight okay now we've got a nice array of apples going on there you can also set it with relative offset so we have the same numbers but we're just using the spacing and offset to change how they work okay so it's no longer setting inside of a fixed volume it is using the offset that we set to create that array we can add another layer on the Z and go up tell it how we want a space there okay pretty self-explanatory and then with the fill option now it's like using spacing and the overall volume again but this time it's not doing any overlaps so we're not telling it an exact number to fit into that space we're just telling it we want this space filled with apples at this offset and spacing okay when we get down below we have the transform tools which these are overall transforms I don't use these very much because it will transform all of them uniformly what I do use is the randomization which essentially has the same tools but it does it randomly which is what I find myself using a lot more often so I have this set to the position X can move three thirty seconds of an inch if I moved it like six inches you'd see what happens okay super random the only thing this doesn't have that I would like is to automatically avoid collisions with each other it doesn't have that and I can see why that'd be difficult but it would also be cool okay I'm gonna put this back at three thirty seconds of an inch okay and the rotation on X and Y and this is pretty typical if you use Forest pack or any other scattering type of tool you'd be used to these kind of randomization settings so on the X and Y axis I'll do 15 just to kind of tilt those apples a little bit randomly and then on the Z it can randomly rotate between 0 and 360 degrees if I put it at zero they'll all be the exact same rotation in the Z as you can see the stems that's all in X and Y rotation but if I set this to 360 it gives it full capability to rotate anywhere it wants to go randomly change the seed we'll see it rotate again and again the scale I want to lock together uniformly and I put it at six percent that gives it a range of zero to six percent randomization if I put it to 20 here you can see one apple is really huge or a couple of the apples are really huge okay you could uncheck this and do it not uniformly but in this case there's no reason why I'd want to do that some other nice things here is that the material ID can be assigned randomly to the different elements that are created here which is great then you can do a multi-sub-object material and apply different Apple materials two different apples randomly essentially the UVS not much settings going on here just using the existing Apple you can do create here which turns all these into their own individual objects it gets rid of the array modifier okay not going to do that because I want to be able to go backwards I will show you real quick the culling that can happen here so we can go into the array and go down to the bottom and go to remove and we can either remove randomly by a percentage so remove sixty percent of the apples great that's random or we can pick a call object pick this sphere we can even invert it okay so if I hide the sphere you'll see that that sphere is now cutting out of the array which is cool okay if I clear that object now so that's the grid we can of course do all sorts of things with this right we can make this a taller volume so that now we fill up Apple's height wise like this pretty cool okay so any kind of array you want you can make with this tool okay that is the grid array let's look at some of the others if we change this to radio up here we have the same settings applied to radial we don't have all the options of how it's doing the spacing we have different options now so let's just look at this real quick reset the number of clones in the array here it's a little too many we'll have to radius it out there we go okay this strength as you can see it sets the position of the Clones relative to the array's origin so if I put this to like 20 it's going to bring this all in okay and this sets the orientation of the Clones relative to the original object's orientation all right so this is almost like a transform it just slides it we don't want to do that okay so basically we're controlling this using the count and the radius there is an absolute start and end so we can turn this on for example and say end it at 100 degrees right so it only does part of it we can also adjust the number of rows obviously and the number of rings okay so that's rows a bunch of apples we're staggering them so that each row is kind of staggered with each other if you turn that off they'll be straight up and down with each other like that you are seeing some randomization on the transform still going on because that's applied from what we did previously the offset and the spacing is the other thing this is controlling Rings we can put another ring on it's getting kind of heavy now okay now we have five rings look at all those apples yeah so we can set in here the spacing between the Rings using this let's say two inch spacing and that does that for us one thing I don't think I mentioned was that this equidistant thing if we turn this off it's actually going to make way less apples because it'll project out however many apples are in the first Circle all the way out if you have equidistine on it makes it so that it projects the same distance between Apples all the way out so if I turn this off see now it's like a star emanating out from the center turn the Stagger off too okay see so the equidistant on or off gives you very different results okay that is the radial one and the randomization will work the same so we'll all these other settings down here okay but some interesting things that they've done with this is add in things like splines and surfaces that you can do arrays with okay so let's take a look at that and I used to use the the spacing tool quite a bit and also the path to form modifier this array tool kind of replaces both of those and several other techniques that I used to use I even had a tool where I would take a bunch of apples set a pivot in the center here and rotate instance it around and then I had a script that I could select all those and ran and rotate and scale them so this has all that built in and then not to mention changing the materials randomly on all of them that's another tool so this this like optimizes things by putting several different tools that I used to use all into one simple modifier that actually works really really well and has all the things that I would want it to have so let's look at that spline thing real quick spline array and it's pretty self-explanatory we can run an array along a spline okay my computer's getting very upset with me right now because of all these settings I need to turn everything down hold on okay giving you a little preview here something I was going to talk about in a minute let's clear that so let's just go to the spline and the Apple and the array okay so I just drew a spline when you choose spline as your type of array then you just pick a spline that you want to use out of your scene please note that setting the repeat on an Apple like this with this much polygons was bogging down my computer pretty hard and I don't know if that's because of the amount of array objects or the amount of polygons overall but either way it's something to keep in mind okay with the spline pretty simple here it gives you the ability again to tell it how to space and this is exactly what I used to use the spacing tool for so we can go with overall count and say like 20 apples now it'll just fill along that spline with 20 apples we can go to relative offset which is going to tell us 20 apples plus a spacing so we want 20 apples at every 5 inches great The Fill is we set the spacing yep spacing right there so every foot and you just tell me how many apples are going to go in there so really I want one inch or so put a bunch of apples keep them all an inch apart again of course we can do it with the Y and Z2 make this a whole volume of apples there's knots okay so that's where there's knots in the spline it just puts them there and then there's also segments so on each segment it puts one apple okay those ones I don't find super useful but maybe maybe for some things okay so let's go to fill so the other thing here is how it terminates at the end okay so if I'm filling here with spacing of 16 32 no one inch right here let's say five inches and then I set this to continue this tells it where to start the array along the spline so if I put it at 50 percent it starts 50 along that spline and then I have it continuing when the spline ends to just continue out in that same direction this is very similar to the pathy form modifier that I may have used in the past okay you can also vary it along here so if you wanted say 15 variation that'll change how they're spaced along here too so you can continue it you can Loop it so it goes back around to this side you can end it so it just terminates you can remove it so that it just deletes anything that's beyond the end of the spline okay so there's those things you can do I want to just do continue but set this to zero percent again okay and then all the other settings again will remain the same randomization and all that kind of stuff okay another kind of array is a surface array and I have a surface in here this one I think is maybe the least useful but you can use it in combination with a spline which I'll show you as well which is kind of useful okay so this is the surface array and all you do is change it to surface and you would go in here and say I'll show you how to do it so you would say pick surface boom now the reason why I say this is the least useful is because there's no way to control the number of apples except by the geometry underlying it so right here it's taking the edge Center so every Edge on the center of every edge of the polygon it is placing an apple you can also do vertices knots on every vertices or vertex and now you can put it in the center of each face so it's going to go here and here like that okay so that's not a ton of control on the actual array part of this all you can do is either retain the orientation of the apple or not so that means it's either going to follow the normals the curves or the normals or it's not see now all the apples are sitting straight up or you can turn that off and they'll follow the surface okay so that's the only controls you have there so could I see this being useful for some things but I'm not going to use this as much as I use the other array Tools in here okay now let's just look at the last thing which is a spline combined with the surface which is actually pretty cool got to go back into the array go back to the spline it'll retain our settings from before and then we can also add a surface in to here and it will project our spline array onto a surface which is pretty cool now I have removed missing projections on so anything that goes over the edge of this surface it just deletes and then we just would control it just like we do with the regular spline array so we could say the Y count is 3 here and there you go now we have an array of apples going along and I want this to be a fill and the spacing is going to be 0.5 inches now we're going to have a pathway of apples going along this surface now that's pretty lame I mean why would you ever want this but if this was a paver model and you wanted to put pavers or rocks or Stones along this surface then this would be really slick okay so there you go I tried to cover all the settings of all the different ways you can use the array should be largely self-explanatory but I wanted to show you some of the possibilities so that you can start getting ideas of how to use this I know I have when I saw what it can do I have lots of ideas of how we use this I believe it'll replace several tools and combine them into one and this tool is better than all of them anyway because a it's all combined into one and has the power of multiple tools together but also it's just clean and parametric and non-destructive which is the kind of tools I love because things change in my scenes all the time so I like to be able to go back and parametrically adjust them so thank you 3ds Max for updating with something that I actually use I see this being implemented into my workflow right away because it streamlines things it makes things easier and it's going to make my work faster so thank you Autodesk this is a great tool check out the array tool and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Adam Z - Learn Archviz

Views: 4,870

Keywords: archviz, learnArchViz, array modifier, 3ds max array modifier, 3ds max 2023.3, array, array along spline, surface array, autodesk 3ds max, 3ds max update, 3ds max 2023 new features, array tool, 3ds max new features, using the array modifier, array along surface, radial array 3ds max, array tutorial 3ds max, 3ds max array tutorial, 3ds max array modifier tutorial, array modifier tutorial, array tool 3ds max, array tool archviz, array modifier 3ds max

Id: qa254TG6fxE

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2023