3DS MAX TUTORIAL: Beginner Crash Course

hey everyone this is Kyle with simulation lab here in Brooklyn New York today we're going to do a crash course on using 3d studio max this is basically just some tips and tricks that that I've come across that really helped me sort of optimize my my workflow and things that I found really helpful that max offers if you're just getting started with 3d studio max that's perfectly fine there's plenty of really great tutorials out there that that walk you through every single modifier and how to create a how the parameters of each individual object that you can create and etc but for this tutorial we're going to cover some of the basics at the beginning and then maybe a little slightly more advanced methods near the tail end so let's get started let's jump into max so the first thing that I always do is customize unit setup and I want to make sure that the units are whatever I want my objects to to be scaled to right so I typically select US standard from doing like architectural visualization and my client the units on their drawings and units and their CAD files are and imperial units so I typically choose decimal inches or fractional feet and inches right or you can choose metric if if your client is you know using metric system right of course or if you don't care you can choose generic generic a that's right and by default one unit equals you know like whatever you set it to so in this case we're doing one unit equals one inch and we're gonna have you standard decimal inches right so that leads us to the general interface and this is just assuming that you've at least opened and poked around in 3d studio max but we'll cover some that's just the basic like and layout stuff first so you have four standard viewports right that max just opens up with comes as default you have your three ortho graphics you have your top your front your left and just a perspective 3d viewport right so in each of these viewports you see this little plus sign and I click on that and I can maximize people right but there's also the the hotkey the alt W hotkey so if I click on that o W and if I hover over any of you poor called W I can maximize that particular V port right and then there's also if I right click somewhere in some gray space up here I know I got a lot of toolbars will cover what all this stuff means or just real briefly but if I choose viewport they are layouts tab there is little window pops up and this is pretty helpful you can have this open if you would like to switch up your layout every once in a while for did for you know for whatever reason so people like the side by side so you can have just two I can right click and I can delete that if I want some people like this layout where there's you know three orthographic views on the bottom and a one big perspective up top or whatever I just like I like the three standard viewports and I typically if I have camera setup in my scene I'll make this one my camera and the way that you switch what the viewport is looking like is you can click on this front here and you can choose whatever you want so if I have a camera set up on my scene under cameras it'll be here you can choose to see through that camera okay so let's jump in our perspective viewport alt W right and let's create an object right so in the TAT this panel here so i can i can this is the the create panel alright so i can i can drag this out and create a second column and then i have some options here at some tabs so i have a create tab I got the modify tab got a hierarchy tab at the emotion and display and utilities so each of which one of these does different things to create and modify objects right so under your create tab you have your standard geometry if shapes like splines and stuff like that if flights you cameras helpers space warps which is forces and stuff like that and you're like some systems that you can create you can create biped systems and different cat rigs and bones and stuff like that and whatever whatever else you want pretty helpful so under our geometry we also have this little drop-down here which you can choose all kinds of different geometry types you want so standard primitives extended primitives which are slightly more complex shapes compound objects things like blob mesh and boolean objects boolean objects are like say if I have a cube and have a sphere and I want to take it take the sphere and rip a chunk out of the queue right so you can like remove subtract the cube from the sphere which we can get into that a little bit but I'm sure if you're familiar with any other 3d software boolean operations are pretty standard so that's where you find that was right so we can cover how to create a boolean object shortly but understanding primitives box so for really new to 3d studio max some of the the primitives the creating simple primitives can be a little tricky a little confusing so we have multiple operations so in this case the cube has multiple little X click operations that you have to do in order to create a key right so if I click and drag anywhere in the scene it'll create the base of the cube first and if I hold it I'm holding down my first little clicker button on my mouse and I click and drag right it's creating the base of the cube I let go and it lets me create the height so I'm just kind of moving the mouse around I click in anything and I move up and the Z direction and I click and that creates my cube right real quick though how do i orbit and pan and stuff like that I got some I got some options down here but I don't that stuff and this is really annoying I mean you could you could click on that if I click on this little view cube up here I can click and I can click around again we'll just see the front the need right but if you want to be a little more efficient with with viewing things and you hold on your you can zoom by scrolling your scroll wheel on your mouse right I can pan by holding down the scroll wheel button right pan around and then it can orbit by holding down alt on your keyboard and this is assuming that you have a Windows machine you're holding down alt and then then you click on your middle mouse button and that orbits right so that just makes things a lot more efficient you can just look around stuff you can zoom in to stuff you know you don't have to like you know play around with these cubes are these stupid buttons down here right so once you get used to that just just practice doing that a little bit and then we'll take a look at our keyboard real quick look down at your keyboard qwe are are really important keys right these are translation keys by default in Mac's those are your translation hotkeys okay what I mean by translation is that's your your select your move your rotate and your scale right so if I click on something and I click on cue I can I can't really move this it's not really doing anything I see the x y&z there but that's just like selecting things and that's just as your selector and if I if I click on other keys or whatever it I have I have Q selected select object is selected right and I can like I can hold down this little guy right here and that gives me some options for the selector and I can choose a circle selector so I can choose a circle and I can choose you know like a fence select this like if you're who ever play with illustrator or something there's like a little fence scrap tool so I can like that's really helpful if you try to select a series of faces if like a thousand faces on an object whatever and you want to like select only certain faces you can it can be really precise with that that tool otherwise there's like the spray paint tool which you can like basically anything that comes in contact with a little spray spray paint can thing select that so we'll go back to our basic rectangular select all right W moves you see a little move gizmo you can move in XY and z or like a along the x and y e is your rotate you can rotate you know similarly on XY and z or you can just kind of orbit around if you want to be a little more freeform and bought it and our is your scale okay and I'm sure if you guys played with 3d studio max at all you probably know all this stuff but just having those hotkeys like ready available so you'd have to click up here just makes makes your life a whole lot easier you have to look at it you know you just kind of you just kind of intuitively know after a while like where with what you can do there okay so this little drop down here the reference coordinate system is really helpful to let's say if I want to if I move this up and I rotate this like that or whatever you know if I drop this down if I go to screen and no matter you have to you know if you depending on what the operation you're using a scale rotate or move you have to change the reference coordinate system each time it'll remember what would you use foot for screen if I rotate you can tell the I can move this X and X and Y is flat against the screen here however you're looking at the object X and y is flat against the screen right so if I move that around the cube no matter how I move I can always move this in X&Y relative to how I'm looking at it did the screen that can be a pretty helpful for certain things I use local what local changes the move or rotate scale gizmo based on the relative position of the object itself the local position of the object so now it's relative to the apps I can move this up in the Z direction relative to the object so that's really helpful if you're extruding faces or something and you wanted to come away perfectly Z like perfectly up away from the object you know you're screwed screaming that face out you know or just whatever you can come in really handy for remodeling certain things I control C control z works the same way it is an undo in critical if these undo redo buttons up here if you want we'll go back to our view coordinate system there so we'll cover copying real quick so if I want to duplicate an object I can right click and clone and that'll bring up the clone options you can clone as a copy instance or reference so we'll cover what each of these mean real briefly so clonus is copy clone set is copyright in the original location of my previous object right move it away and these are two completely individual independent unique shapes and if I want to sorry one more thing you can right-click and clone or you can hold shift and drag along an axis so I hold shift and drag along the x-axis it creates a clone I think the clone clone options dialog box pops up as well so you can clone as a copy and clone as an instance and a reference right so if clone docent is an instance and I can choose you know like say 3 or 4 or like where I to choose however many copies I want of the you know of the original object but if I choose to clone it as an instance we'll see what happens here so if I go under the modify tab here I can click on any one of these cubes right and if I choose height I could change the height but you see being the word these these three cubes were cloned as an instance from the original cube the instance properties allow me to change all of them simultaneously okay so that's pretty helpful for certain things let's say that even works for things like lights let's say if I have a hundred lights in a scene if I want to instance some of them or all of them I can instance all of them and then I can just change one of them that'll change the properties for all of them pretty helpful alternatively I can clone this as a reference they have a bunch of references right so the original object is just stays the same right and the reference objects you can tell that there's a little space above things right there's a little there's this little blue bar I love them right and if I click down into the box I can still modify the box same as an instance if I go above the blue box and I add a modifier to this one particular object right there's one cube let's say I'd put an edit poly modifier something on there and I drag this up none of the other boxes change okay but if I go back to my original object that it's been cloned from if I go back to the original source the original cube here I can modify it and the the referenced clone will change too which is really helpful if you just want to like modify one thing in an array of objects right so I can go back here and I can like modify this one move this out I could screw around with that for one and I go back to my reference my original object I can still modify that which is pretty cool and if I want to make any one of these boxes completely unique right so I don't want to have any reference parameters retain from the original object click on this box right click and I can convert to editable poly and that all just completely erase all of the original source info so if I scale these it'll retain that otherwise if I want to you know if I say if I create some instances from this one again if I want to make this one completely unique to where if I change this one you know all of us are still changing right but I want to just make this one you can click this little make unique button it's that way if I click on any one of these they all change besides this one oh and this one too because I did same thing so yeah pretty simple pretty simple copy copying cloning reference instances stuff like that it'll come in really handy the more you use it okay okay so let's say if I have let's say create a couple more copies and up here there's some really helpful tools there's the snaps toggle which right now my snaps are by default snapping to the grid so if I right-click on this you get an advanced settings option so you can tell the grid points are turned on so we turn that off and it turn on let's say vertex so that'll snap to the vertices in particular object so I click on this cube you can tell like the little move icon shows up and I can move this to that to this vertex perfectly I can hold ctrl and click multiple objects and select multiple and then hover over the vertex and I can move that perfectly so that works really well that is super helpful for being really precise with model and say you're modeling a you know a table or a piece of furniture or like a you know an architectural scene and you want to snap the wall to the floor or something you can perfectly snap that so you can be very precise with that which is really helpful and then really quick I turn that off and it turn on this angle snaps I can you know if you hit II you know your little suction rotate changes back to view I can rotate this based on a particular degree so you can tell you can see the little degrees pop up there on top the object so right now it's at a five degrees snap this is super helpful like let's say if I rotate this and I go on working on some other stuff and my singing on a shape that's rotated so I can easily come back and one you know like one of the or third you're gonna come back in one of the orthographic views and then rotate that make it perfect again and continue working so I usually have that stuff on especially when I'm doing like architectural stuff that do these not do the percent snap there's a spirit snap which we're going to skip those for now there's the mirror which that's pretty helpful let's say if I have created the standard teapot there I can mirror this teapot by clicking mirror and it's just gonna mirror it or I can mirror it as a clone or a copy or a reference copy in instance or a reference I'm sorry and I can offset it pops out the clone however much I want okay click okay and then that's just a reference to clone there that's pretty helpful so you can mirror stuff you can align this stuff though so let's say if I have this teapot selected and I want to line it and say if I rotate the teapot or something and then I turn on one thing I didn't cover yet is you can this is pretty basic stuff if you just poke around max you'll find this but standard shading this is just shading your viewport with the standard high quality I don't really have any lights or anything set up so that's not really doing the elephant doing much but just showing you some basic shadowing information based on whatever lights you got set up in your scene default shading I have that selected you can do facets you can choose you can play with all the stuff you can do a clay model you can override it and choose wireframe and then okay so if you have edged faces selected that's super helpful if you want to see the individual faces of these objects so back up to our top menu bar up here I we're going to cover the align tool so let's say if I have this teapot selected and I can align it to this box right and then I can choose a line x y&z I can choose to rotate it based on the position x y&z position of the box and then I can match the scale to if I want to but I didn't really scale the objects so go ahead and apply okay so that's it's basically aligned it to that to that box now let's say I create a few other things right before we get into anything else if I want to create a let's say if I want to create another mistake you can create another teapot right and I want to create it on top this box no matter how hard I try you can't really put it on top that box right so built-in is this Auto grid tool so I click on that button now I can create a teapot relative to the face of wherever them whoever where I'm choosing on that particular object right so it'll it'll create a new teapot based on wherever I click so that's super helpful you want to just make stuff right cool so move move along down the line here on the on this top panel got your toggle layers layers are something I use all the time so you can dock this if you want I typically have another monitor open I just toss it over there and just have layers open all the time so layers shows you everything in your scene you can select stuff here you can delete stuff that's instantly just like one teapot and then you can create new layers or this little button here so if I want to assign this teapot to a new layer I can click on it and create a new layer and it automatically assigns it to that layer you can double click T box right you can name a layer if I want to assign you know if I make a duplicate or something it automatically assigns it to that layer or whatever is it's you know whatever the previous object was on select it on I want to assign this cube to the teapot layer I have the cube selected and then I can choose this little button here and then it'll automatically assign it to the teapot there okay so that's pretty handy so these layers all the time just basic seeing organization right you just got to use it if your material editor which we'll get to later your render settings and stuff like that and I got a few plugins here so let's hop back in our create panel okay so we covered some standard primitives maybe we'll do like a real quick you know let's say I mentioned boolean x' earlier so people create a simple little boolean object here so I'll move this sphere into the cube there this something and I want to remove this fear from the cube right so if I click on the cube they go to extended primitives sorry compound objects with the cube selected I have this this list these these are no longer grayed out if I have this selected so I can go pro boolean or boolean probe ruling is used if you want to subtract multiple objects from or if you want to boolean multiple objects from a source object or you could just use a standard boolean which you could just kind of do one at a time so if I go to let's say subtract in the operand parameters list there and then add operands click add operands that can choose my sphere and then it will subtract it now let's say if I want to subtract it as a copy or something compound I can do probe boolean which gives you a little bit more options it's not only from subtracting or you know unioning or bullying a bullying multiple objects you can also yeah as a few free other features you can do you can choose copy instance reference right so if I want to do a copy of the whatever I'm picking write whatever happened I am adding second choose the subtraction operation and then I can start picking and I can choose my sphere and it'll still keep the sphere but it'll chop it away from the cube which is pretty cool and this stuff is an animation you can you can you know animate the boolean operations happening which we can we can cover that if you guys are interested in that let's say if I wanted to have the sphere pass through and then it kind of just likes abstract sit as its passing through it looks like it's like eating away at it or eroding that cube or whatever you can do all kinds of fancy stuff with yeah that covers some basic compound objects in your extended primitives you got you got an oil tank all kinds of different stuff in here got Hedra hedron's mcdonald shapes all kinds of stuff you guys could play around with all these shapes the really important thing about all of these different shape types is depending on what your end goal is right you want to start with the simplest version of whatever you're trying to model right and that's just again a general philosophy of using 3d studio max of using polygon modeling right or sub D modeling so let's say if you wanted model something like relatively complex like your hand right modeling your hand you you wouldn't just like create an outline or anything like that or whatever you wouldn't create multiple objects you would start with like Cube right the cube would represent your palm right and then what you would do is you could like subdivide the cube and give it a bunch of faces and you can start extruding faces and then create the cube create like a cubic version of a hand right and then later on you can add more subdivisions and then you can smooth it and then you know make it look like a hand so kind of like practice with that a little bit so maybe we'll just delete this stuff we'll start with a brand new scene and so we'll create a standard print of it and like so this list has a ton of different features and you guys can you guys play have plugins installed there's all sorts of different things that you can create under the geometry tab under the shapes tab splines you can create a stand you like a typical if you want to do a corner by corner you can create a standard just spline that has hard-edged vertices you can do smooth which allows you to create a smooth curve stuff like that you guys can play with all of these circle Creek circles right if I want to modify that circle you have very limited options here you can choose to modulate the radius of the circle but if I want to like treat it as a spline and do something else with it I can right click convert to convert to editable a dependable editable spline hard word to say and then I can select the individual vertices and I can you know tweak them I could do it if I want and grab their little corner points there but pretty cool right a bunch of other stuff here I'll let you guys play around with this we'll continue on you know like let's say if you ever you have your lights you have your cameras you have your helpers so maybe we'll cover some of this stuff in a later video well maybe like look at some some ways to to play with the biped character which is like really super fun to play with in another video we might go over animating a biped character using BVH or dot VIP files which are motion capture files which you do all kinds of really fun stuff with with the biped so we'll get rid of this stuff for now let's cover some basic modifiers so let's go to our standard primitives and we'll create a box write some kind of box like that right and under our modifiers list you obviously you have like all of your basic parameters you can you can create a bunch of length segments with segments you can do this if you know exactly you've kind of have an idea of like what you want to do with with the box originally you can set up the segment's in the parameters otherwise you can scroll down here always there's a there's a ton of different modifiers you can do to this box so you can just kind of poke around here you can add all kinds of different modifiers to the stack here a couple that I use all the time are edit poly so we'll take a look at this first right so edit poly is super powerful it allows you to do all kinds of stuff you can select your vertices right second sucked individual vertices and move them around it stretch this do whatever I want I can choose edges and faces so faces is very powerful especially if you're modeling things and if I choose edges I can select all these edges and then there's all kinds of different edge edge edit modifiers or operations you can do to be to the edges of this object so I can do is chamfer which in Max 2018 there's a chamfer modifier which we got on top so we'll do that real quick so here you can chamfer the edges right I can choose the number of segments I want to make kind of smooth let me choose the sorry the radius here and then I can choose to animate this so I can always go back and edit that through this edit poly modifier which is pretty helpful otherwise if I have these edges selected in the modifier list you can add in multiple modifiers to any object that's that's called the modifier stack so the way shapes work in max is that every shape you can have can retain an inherent history of all the operations that you've done to it and the modifier stack right so it's a kind of like a list of operations that you've done which allow the object to be parametric right so that allows you to go back and to change any particular parameter from the individual modifiers that you've added to the object which is super powerful so let's say if I want to and a chamfer modifier right so I could do chant the standard chamfer set the amount she's a bunch of segments and for whatever I want to and it gives you a bunch of different parameters you can play with so I can always go back to my edit poly and then I can let's say if I tweak this pull this out or whatever turn on my edges again have those I just selected and you can see the chamfer modifier still on there still taking over alright so I'll go ahead and delete this from now out of it and you can create multiple edit Poly's this is like one really cool thing say if I select these faces and I connect them because I want to add a few more divisions it's a few more segments there and I want to extrude out some of these faces right okay I could sue this one hen word sure I can add I can leave this edit poly there and let's say if I'm like a good stopping point like in case I mess up the model I can always go back to this right I can go you can create another edit poly and you can continue working right let's go on to create like another edge loop there connect that sure and if I want to select these vertices and pull them out do something else and then be like ah man you know I really I really hate this I want to go back that's easy so you just right click on that edit poly modifier and delete it and go back to the previous modifier of the stack pretty cool so another thing is like another other thing that I use a lot with like modeling organic shapes is if I have I'd say 2 then I can spread these tile you can add a few edge loops will kind of show you what that does to us an edit poly modifier craft sorry am turbo smooth modifier around here so it kind of smoothes it out I can increase the iterations to make that super smooth looks pretty cool and then if I go back to my second turret and the height is with a little eyeball and if I double click on that edge loop I can like drag it up and we turn on turbo smooth I still have that selected so I can like see what that see kind of how that works ii like edit that edge loop and i could scale it i can do whatever i want right so remember when i talked about like modeling a hand how you would like to start with a cube that's kind of what we did here we like started with a cube extruded some pieces out then you can kind of just like model it sort of like geometric clay right so it's not it's not like really like free for modeling you start with the primitive objects like the simplest form of what this is like you can you can tell like your finger might be like a box right you can extrude a box out here extruding started a few times and then you know add some subdivisions kind of like what we did here and then you can to clean up you know to like have more control of like where the the smoothing will smooth around the edges and then toss to smooth turbosmooth on there and you know it's pretty pretty simple to model organic shapes very simple another thing we can add here is like a know if i so let's let's create like a sphere show you what this does real quick and we'll keep the way keep keep parameters where they're at and noise modifier is something I use a lot just I kind of use it all the time it's it's super simple to get something like weird looking if you want like I had like a modulating like you or sphere or whatever you want it's it's really to like just be able to do that so and you can animate the animate the noise over time so if you scrub your timeline down here so the noise modifier is really powerful for creating surface variation let's say for instance if you want to create something that's part of a simulation let's say if I want to have particles like run and like stick to this and make them look like they're sort of flocking or like morphing or something then I'd use something like that otherwise I mean I'm sure you guys can come up with the kathandol Eyck things that you would use the noise modifier for super-powerful so let's go ahead and we'll just clear out our scene get rid of everything and it will create another air just box real quick and we'll cover what's underneath the hierarchy tab there's all kinds of cool stuff here you can adjust the pivot let's say this is really helpful I use this all the time let's say if I if I do put like an edit poly modifier on here or something drag out this face just real quick the pivot for this object stays in the original location of where there was where it was created when the object was created so in this case it was like in the center of the box and then I extruded this face out but the pivot is still over there you know so if I rotate this it's rotating it based around the pivot of you know the original location like what if I want to modify that but if I wanted to rotate around the center of this box now it's created under the hierarchy tab you can affect pivot only and then you can Center to object or you can move the pivot wherever you want to let's say if I want to put it out here right and I want to rotate it around that particular location cool effect pedal and you send it to object and then you can rotate it you can do whatever you want with the pivot but let's say if I want to keep it there but you guys are like you have to unclick that remember all right and then now you can pivot around the center super helpful you can edit the working pivot which we won't go into any more of this stuff you guys can put her on this but that's just super easy just one thing that you're gonna have to use eventually so just remember it's under the hierarchy tab so under the motion tab well cover some of this stuff that's in here with the controllers and emotion once we jump into some basic animation so we'll do that in a second here display tab if you have a bunch of stuff displayed so if I have a bunch of geometry you got some got some lights probably got it's very light sure whatever you know and cameras got some cameras lights and all kinds of stuff in my scene if I want to see just geometry I can uncheck all and just choose geometry or whatever and then I can check none if I don't want to see the cameras like cameras right so this is super helpful especially when you're dealing with characters that have bones and at render time you don't want to render the bones and it's kind of a pain in the ass to like select the bones and then you know right click and make them not renderable or whatever easiest way to do that is just under the display tab you could just like uncheck bone objects right or you can check check the bone objects and it won't appear in your scene super easy okay and that also helps like if you're cruising to your scene and you're like modeling stuff and you just like don't you have a bunch of cameras everywhere and you just like don't want to see cameras or lights or anything at the car moment you can just like hide that stuff and you just like focus up on your on your on your objects right or whatever you want another way to do it is if you're really organized and you like set up your scene with layers you can assign lights to layers you decide yeah or you layer you like whatever till they in particular layers and then you can like turn those layers off and on you can work like that just kind of depends on your preference again there's like a hundred ways of doing things in 3d studio max but hey you know it's it's up to you to work okay and then so in under utilities there are all kinds of utilities you can add a bunch of you know like quick little tools to like help you do certain things you know you can like camera match stuff there's a camera tracker built-in if you have a bunch of different objects you can collapse them into one object right but you didn't really cover that if you want to make like real quick you know a couple ways of doing this if I want to make this one object right it's a couple ways of doing it I can collapse it with a collapse utility collapse select it and that's just going to create one object so like no matter what I do it's going to retain its gonna if I have multiple materials it's going to ask me if I want to merge materials into a multi/sub-object material which we'll cover later but you can choose to like just collapse into a single object multiply for whatever you want pretty helpful little the utility another way of doing it is if you have multiple objects created in your scene instead if I don't want a boolean these together if I want to like let's say use them in a simulation or something I can select one I can add an edit poly modifier onto it and then I can attach elements right I can attach Allen's by a list or I could just like attach that so now it's part of that object and I can you know now I can like select multiple faces and drag them out I can do whatever I want with this you know so pretty helpful okay so let's cover some basic animation stuff real quick so just to get you guys started down here is your animation timeline obviously there's no keyframes there's nothing happening so there's let me scrub this a little timeline here there's nothing that happens right so first things first like typically when you create an animation you want to go out on your time configuration settings here which is this little clock down there this little button I don't know why the button so small whatever you could choose your frames per second FPS which is like typically standard film is like 24 or 30 frames per second all the animations I make are typically 30 if you want to do something crazy you want to do 60 frames per second or 120 frames per second or whatever you can do that as well and you can do some slow-mo stuff and post whatever you want to do you can choose your just your playback speed I typically choose just have real-time selected and frame count we can set our frame count to 300 and you can do some simple math on that like so you want to make a 10-second animation right at 30 frames per second that's 300 frames so I set my spring card to 300 you know yeah so if I click on the play button it's automatically going to play the animation and I can grab it and you can scrub it let's uh so let's animate this uh sphere moving or something if I click on AutoKey there's a couple ways of doing this right I can click on AutoKey and then I can click seconds drag somewhere in my timeline and like just keep it in your head like you know you get used to it after a while like animating stuff but 30 for 30 frames is one second right so it's like 1 1000 right 60 frames is 2 seconds right so if I move this it's gonna take 2 seconds to get up there right so if I have Auto keys selected you can see the this bar above the timeline is red and from 0 to 60 there's two keyframes that are automatically generated so it's gonna move up there right let's say like halfway like one second I want it to like kind of like move up that way right I could like just move it there and it's gonna automatically create keyframe there so and then I can always like select that keyframe and delete it if I don't want it and I could always drag these keyframes around let's say fo instead of 60 frames I wanted to happen in 30 frames they take a second to get out there cool so that's like some basic that's like how you basically animate something right so that I can like check it here and you drag it here all right check this around cool that's how you do that now let's say I want to let's say I want to animate this along the path right something pretty simple I can go ahead and delete all these keyframes we'll meet them and then let's just go to our top orthographic view here and then under our shapes let's create a line smooth smooth and we'll go ahead and like create a loopy racetrack here for our first mirror and then if I can click on the first first vertex here it asked me to close blind yes sure go back to perspective and so okay we do whatever you want with the spline but I have the sphere selected that's maybe make this a little smaller just you can see it I'd have a motion tab under this first little drop-down here a sign controller there's a couple ways of doing this but this is just the kind of a longer way to do it but it's it's like showing you guys step by step like how you how you would do it have full control over this thing right so that the point is having full control over that's right there's a there's million ways to do certain things but this is probably the most like you know comprehensive way so under the assign controller drop down here if I choose you can choose whatever I want here you choose position alright and if I click on this little checkbox that says assign controller I can choose a path constraint right choose path constraint and then it gives a little dialog here I can choose add path and then I can choose the path and it's automatically gonna snap to the path and then if I scrub my time I can see there's two key frames set of 100 at the beginning while at the end but scrub my timeline it's gonna go 100% all the way depending on the of my timeline so it's gonna take just 300 frames it's gonna take ten seconds to get from the starting position which kind of just randomly chose where the starting position was holy to the end now if I want to have that I can always like drag this I can always like you know change its like 120 frames and then well cool god I'll be there or I could change this if I want to have it like three revolutions all the way around the track right I think it is pretty self-explanatory but if I choose Auto key and percentage along path I can always animate that let's say I want it to be 200 so it's going to do two revolutions around the path right so you see what that does there get someone 20 it stops let's say if I wanted to go backwards after 120 or something you know I can always go along the path I can go negative 100 so that way it's going to go it's gonna go to revolutions around the path right and then once it gets to the starting point at 120 it's gonna go backwards really fast apparently so that's one thing that's pretty cool another thing we could do is say we just have full control over this right let's get rid of that changes back to 100 I'll show you what this alert options to here so let's say there's some curves in our path right you can always like smooth this out if you want to on your modify tab you got an interpolation you increase the step size and you can see you can kind of tell that the more I increase that step size the smoother the spine gets and one if you can really see that monitor button you can play with that click back on our little disc here we have that back in a motion tab with our pet path constraints still enabled all right I could choose to follow it's gonna follow you kind of can't really tell what it's doing there but you could tell when it goes around a corner it moves it's a little bit more obvious when I click on Bank right goes around the corner at banks around the corners which is really cool if you want to do stuff like you know if you want to animate a fighter jet or you know a bird or something that like you know follows a path but it also wants to Bank around stuff cuz that's what naturally ducks write it the bird doesn't fly like this you know I could Bank around stuff I could choose to loop it forever you know so there's a bunch of stuff you could do with the path country so that's just like one one method of animating stuffers and again there's a million other methods let's choose like one other thing to animate it's just like one tip that was sort of hard to meet for me to grasp was animating visibility like how do you make something just disappear for a certain amount of time and then come back or like let's say if I want to have something like the scale to like pop into existence right on it like but after certain amount of time if I click on are if I right-click there's a couple ways you bring something it's the easiest ways take any object select any how much except selected right click and you can bring up the dope sheet and it's see objects and your sphere you get to drag this up a little bit so you can see there you go so I have my object here selected in the dope sheet for the for this object and you can drag this down you can see the transform you can do all kinds of stuff here but we're gonna add a visibility traffic right so with this object selected if you go to view sorry edit visibility track you can add to the sphere somebody dropped down you see the transform track you have a visibility track to not add anyone and by default the visibility is set to one right so anything between zero and one is visible or not visible right zero is completely invisible one is visible so we can animate this by adding a couple keys right so let's say at frame 0 right click so it's framed okay sorry add or remove key get click on this button right there he can like click on it on the little timeline that's represented here in the dope sheet anywhere you want and you can right click and add a value of zero all right so that'll make it completely invisible and we're going to keep our in and out here as curves because if one is kind of like gradually by popping otherwise you can know you can play around with these and see like however you want the visibility to animate in right those are really helpful curves are really helpful in the curve editor which you look at a different video or later or whatever kurz are really helpful to animate like the smoothness of things having like you remember when we animated the sphere moving and we like position it this way in this way right so like if you wanted to have it like jagged like it stops here and then moves here right you could have that or you can use a Kurt the curve editor you can have it nice and smoothly gradually animate you know from one position to the next so that's what's really helpful so for our visibility settings click that it will set this to zero right so at frame 0 it'll be invisible and at frame 30 let's say you know drag this to frame 30 but you can even do it here doesn't matter at frame 30 you could tell it's already invisible rebels we'll take a look at that again in a second click back on our little add key tool and click on on frame 30 we'll cook another make another keyframe there right click on the keyframe and we'll set this is 1 that's it there's all kinds of different settings you can you play with since that's basically it so our object animates from 0 to 1 visible to invisible invisible to visible so we're done with the dopes you can close that so now if I turn off edge faces right so we can't see the mob reward you know now it appears boom so that affects the visibility of the shader of the sphere so that's it for like basically getting you guys started with modeling stuff adding modifiers to the modifier stack for particular objects right animating like basic animation using the hierarchy a particular object like changing and changing the pivot in the hierarchy we covered some of the stuff in the motion tab path constraints and stuff like that we come in the display tab covered a couple basic utilities that you can use and a bunch of and a bunch of the tools up here right so in the next video we're going to cover some rendering settings and setting up cameras and lights and stuff like that and maybe covering I think will probably stick with one renderer and gin for now maybe we'll do a another one I have a couple engines that we can cover like v-ray and F storm and octane I'm sure if you're in the community you probably heard those words before you prefer different rendering engines before and the like what do they do and why do you why are there different so we'll cover some of that stuff again this was just a basic crash course I'm like getting into 3ds max and like the basic tools that we have we've done a couple relatively complex exercises like you know adding anything admitting things along a path and how do you know how to use different modifiers and stuff like that but ultimately the goal of this video is to just get you up to speed on like how to make stuff right how to just generally just make stuff into Max and how to use the interface right so if there's anything else that you guys are confused about there's anything that you want to like dive deeper into want to learn a little bit more about the different modifiers or something let me know in the comment section below and we can I can create a media separate tutorial total or series of tutorials that cover some of those things as always if you guys like this video if you find it useful or helpful please like and subscribe to the channel have a bunch of other tutorials that I've made and I'm going to continue to make more so if you guys find it helpful or useful again please feel free to like the video and leave a comment in the section below for the algorithm got great thank you so much for watching and we'll see you soon

Channel: Simulation Lab

Views: 198,755

Keywords: 3ds max, 3d studio max, tutorial, diy, 3d modeling, how to, 3d art, digital art, basics, beginner, step by step, animation, animating, path constraint, course, autodesk, guide, getting started, motion graphics, set up, 3d model, how to use

Id: YM9spHSNPpM

Length: 53min 22sec (3202 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 19 2019