3dsmax Tutorial - Beginners Guide #1 - Introduction to max

hello everyone and welcome to this quick introduction to 3ds max I'm going to be using 3ds max version 2017 if you just load that up after an install you'll be asked if you want to choose the classic or design experience just choose classic and let the program load once the program loads there's a few startup templates let's just choose the original startup and we should be presented with four viewports our object selection on the left and some toolbars on the top and right viewports are very similar from hammer editor if you're coming from there we have our top front left and perspective viewport when a viewports selected it you'll see that there's a yellow outline you can make a viewport active by either left clicking or right-clicking in it and if you'd like to fullscreen it you can press alt W on your keyboard you may also not like this default layout the good thing for you is there are plenty of different layouts available you should have this viewport window over on the left but if that's not there you can right-click on this empty space and enable the viewport layout tab once that's enabled you can click the little plus and choose any viewport layout that you like my favorite is actually the one main with three smaller ones underneath it I'll switch the smaller one to be top just by clicking on the perspective word and I'll make this one be my perspective and then the perspective viewport usually has a viewport background of the gradient color and we can just set that by clicking on wireframe and going to viewport background and I'll just take that away from this viewport here now you'll notice that we have four selections up here a plus perspective standard and wireframe the other three down here should show wireframe this one shows default shading I'm gonna set that one to wireframe and change my perspective to default shading I'll maximize my primary just by hitting alt W and over on the right we have our tabs to create and modify objects this first one with the plus is referred to as the create tab and you can hover on anything in 3ds Max and it's going to tell you what it so if we select box over on the right we can click and drag anywhere to create the bottom plane of a box and then once we let go of mouse one we can extrude the rest of the box up or down and then click again to finish creating it you can right click off of it to get out of box creation mode if you hit f4 this will turn on what's called edge phases it's a little difficult to see here because the box is green if we go over to what's called the display tab we're able to change this box's color and View mode if I just change the wireframe to material color quickly the edge faces will become black so now we can see these black lines kind of on the outline of the box this is essentially our wireframe view we can quickly switch to wireframe view by pressing f3 or selecting our view mode up here and just hitting wireframe override we can also enable edged faces here you'll be turning edged faces on and off quite frequently so it's good to know the hotkey for that is F 4 we have a few different options for our viewport mode and we'll be changing these later on for now we're just going to keep this on standard and this is a preset that has a few things like default shading and shadowing for our scene if I create another box will notice that the boxes get shadowed on the sides as we rotate our camera if we hold down just middle mouse button we're able to pan in our scene if we hold alt and middle mouse button will rotate one thing to note is that by default we're just kind of rotating around the center of our camera and if we click on something that you'd kind of want to rotate around it but that's not exactly how it works one of the new features in 3ds max 2017 is called point of interest rotation and it saves you a lot of headaches over on the bottom right if we click and hold on what is orbit sub-object we want to change this to the little circle with the dot in the middle this will be point of interest rotation which means now when we hold alt and middle click we get a little ball this is our point of interest it allows us to rotate around this central point instead of just some arbitrary spot in the middle of our scene we create all objects in 3ds max the same way if we click to create a sphere we just click and drag and move our mouse in some direction and something will happen on the screen and then when we let go it will either commit creating that object or take us to the next step of creating that object I've turned edged faces on and we can see the wireframe around this sphere has a lot of rings around it these are controlled by our segments over on the right we can click down and up on this to change this for our object another object that requires two mouse strokes is the torus so we click and drag to create the initial circle and then when we let go it will allow us to create the thickness and then if we for some reason don't want that we can just ctrl Z to get rid of it and we'll be good so we have our default selection tool which just allows us to select objects by clicking on them and that default hotkey is Q if we hit W this will give us the select and move tool this will allow us to grab objects and move them around in our scene when that's active and an object is selected we have our x y&z axis gizmo in the middle we can click and drag on one of these axis to move along that axis or if we put our cursor in the middle we can move along all three axis at the same time or if you're clever enough you can do x and y or x and z whichever one you need to move your object on if we hit a this will give us our rotation gizmo which is also right here this is exactly the same way which we can rotate objects along any axis that we need we can also down at the bottom middle this is the rotation and positional information for whatever object we have selected if I go back to my select and move tool and I click on this this object's world coordinates are negative 58 1 4 we can move the object by moving these spinners as well or if you want to zero it out you can right click on these to set it to the center of the scene this is very useful later on when we're trying to do some modeling with reference images this also works for a rotation if I were I click on all these it will reset this object's rotation if we at R this will give us the scale gizmo which again we can scale along two accesses at a time one axis or all three and then once again we have our spinners which will allow us to scale it down here as well but when you right-click on it it sets it to zero which essentially gives it zero scale so you usually don't right-click to zero out on scale there's a few other ways that we can select objects in 3ds max when we hit Q a bunch of times you'll notice that our selection mode changes up here by default it's the regular square marquee but if we hit it again we can get a circle or a polygon kind of lasso mode free draw and then a weird kind of spray-paint type deal that'll let you pretty much select any kind of way that you'll want but they took it a step further and we also have our window crossing mode what this means is when it's in this mode where the dotted line kind of goes through the box your selection marquee only has to clip the object to select it so if I just kind of make a little tiny box right here it'll select all three objects but now if I switch this where that boxes in the center I have to make a selection over the entire object to select it since the sphere is the only object that's fully inside my selection that's the only one that's going to be selected unlike other programs 3ds max does not have a copy function in fact if you hit control C by default it's going to place a physics camera in your scene which will not do what you want and when you do that and you eventually will it will change your view mode to the physics camera and you can click on it up here to change back to perspective and that's what it ends up making in your scene we can see it in our object selection on the left and we're just going to go delete those instead when you want to copy or duplicate objects you need to hit control V and this opens the clone dialog if we just select copy here and hit OK we can drag that second copy out but you usually don't just hit control V you can select an object hold shift and drag it out this will also open up the clone options and give us an option for a number of copies if we tick this up a bunch of times it's going to create nine copies evenly spaced out from the distance that I dragged from the original object so that's an easy way to get a bunch of objects at the same time these objects are all copies of each other and if we head over to this second tab here this is the modify tab if you want to modify an object that's already been created you have to do it here you cannot be in the create window if I turn the segments on this up or down we get more or less detail but the rest of the objects remain the same this is where an instance can come in handy if I shift copy this again tick this up a bunch of times and choose instance now if I select any of these and turn the segments up they all go up at the same time these objects are instants of each other which means that any changes we make to one will be made to the others as well this is very good if you're going to have the same asset in your scene a whole bunch of times so if you need to make changes to one for some reason it happens to all of them at the same time I've selected these objects that I've just kind of shuffled around and now I want to align them back up to this original sphere if I click a line and then click on my target object this will open up the align dialogue this will allow me to align the objects on any axis that I want if I tick all three of these at the same time and choose center it's going to stack them all on top of each other we also have our current object and target object options with Y is selected we're aligning the center of our current objects to the center of our target object along the y axis we can choose other radio buttons here to affect how we're aligning these objects to each other for instance if we choose minimum of our current object we're aligning the minimum of our current objects to the center of our target objects which means the minimum which is this kind of edge that's facing the camera to the center of my target object we can do this to achieve any kinds of alignment to objects that we want I'll just put them back in line right there the last thing that I want to go over is the reference coordinate system and pivot options by default were set to view if I select this object here and this is kind of aligned to the view the perspective view if I change this to screen we'll notice that every time I rotate the screen this gizmo is adjusted to whatever view the screen is at which means I can move this along whatever axis the screen is facing on if I change this to world it's going to align to the world which we can see the world coordinates in the lower left here by the little XY and Z lines going into parent mode nothing really changes until we drop into what is called a sub object selection mode to get into the sub object selection mode we have to first convert this object into an editable poly this will allow us to select vertex as edge loop polygons and so forth for now I'll just click on vertex and we'll go into this modifier later now if I select this vertex and choose parent we are aligned to the parent object which is the box itself if I choose world we're then moving this vertex along the world AXI if we choose local this will be the local alignment for the object this isn't actually super useful when were in vertex mode because you can see that the local alignment is a little strange but if we select our object and choose local this will allow us to rotate it or move it along the local axis if I select all of these objects here and use the rotation mode they're rotating along the center of the selection we can see this by the plus sign on the two boxes for a use selection Center if I change this to be the multi pluses on each box this will end up rotating each of these objects along their local pivot point if I end up moving these objects off the center of the world and then choose the two boxes with the plus that's not on either of them and then select world when you change between rotation and movement you'll have to reset this for each one so if I go to rotation I'll need to choose world again and now my rotation point is at the center of the world which will allow me to rotate these objects along 0 0 0 the world origin another great option here is if we choose this pick button this will allow us to pick an object and put our rotation point along there so if I were to unselect this box I can now rotate these boxes along at the center of that box a very helpful tool when you're working inside a 3ds max is these snaps there's four different kinds of snaps when working in 3ds max the movement angular percent which is essentially just scaling and then our spinner snaps most of these tools up top you can right click on them to get expanded dialogue which will give you more control over whatever option that is the same works for our rotation and movement dialogues as well if I hit s to turn on snaps you'll see that I now have a little crosshair that kind of appears over all of the grid points if I right click on my snaps this is because grid Snap is on let's turn on vertex snap and I can just move this right here if I selected this box I can now snap to any one of these vertex points you can see that by the little plus sign that's appearing over any of the vertex points I can then click and drag and then just snap that to a vertex on any of these other objects and Sene if you're working in a 2d view this is a little less good so if I grab this vertex here and then snap it here one thing that you'll want to notice is that this box is behind this other box here so if I grab this vertex point in my 2d view now remember this is 2d from the front so it's only the Z and x axis when I snap it here this is using a 3d snap there are three types of snaps 3d is useful when you're in perspective 2.5 D snap is very useful if you're in a 2d view so if I set that to 2.5 D and I grab this box now when I snap it to this vertex it's not going to bring this object forward in that third dimension we're only essentially working in two dimensions here the hotkey to turn snaps on by default is s and you'll probably end up turning it on and off quite frequently we have angular snaps again this is the same thing except for rotation and we can set our angle here so if I set this to 15 and then went to rotate we're rotating this object 15 degrees at a time I can set it to 5 and now we go 5 at a time if you'd like to customize your grid you can do so by doing it right here by just scaling this up and down I actually keep mine the default for most times it's usually situational depending on what I'm working on but this is where you would adjust the size of your grid the last snap type that I'll go over is percent snap and this is used for when you scale an object up or down I actually don't use this one that often but you can turn the percent up or down here so we can snap to 50% increases if we'd like I personally find it easier when I'm trying to scale if I right-click on the scale dialog and I can just give it the scale percent here so if I want 300% I can just type that in and hit Enter I find that much easier than kind of guessing for the angle the last thing I want to go over is a few little frustrations that I had when I first started using 3ds max that if someone told me these things it would have made my life a lot easier for starters if we go to the customize drop down and select customize user interface this will give us a list of all of the hotkeys in 3ds max and there are a million and a half of these if we click on any one of these and then under hotkey hit control-c it's gonna tell us what this hotkey is currently assigned to so if I wanted ctrl C to do nothing instead of create a physical camera I can just find this create physical camera and then hit remove you'll end up rebinding a lot of hotkeys for your own personal use in 3ds max this will lead to you not having the same hotkeys as me as I've already heavily customized my own install of 3ds max with my own hotkeys a few hotkeys that I would suggest unbinding right away would be the selection lock toggle the selection lock toggle is spacebar and if you have a fat thumb like me you're gonna hit it by accident and if you just hit any other hotkeys that do something or lock something you can just come in here and like I said just see what it's bound to by putting anything in this hotkey selection now if I close that out now when I hit control C nothing happens if you want to customize your 3ds max user interface for instance if I let's say I save this file as test and I reload 3ds max let's say I'm coming back tomorrow to work on that same scene when 3ds max finally loads up again represented with this I'll just uncheck this because I actually don't care of seeing this again and we can open our scene from right here but before we do that you may notice that I set a viewport to be the one big one with three small ones underneath it 3ds max will not automatically remember your viewport layout and if you try to save a custom UI scheme that's actually not it the way to customize your 3ds Max's viewport layout is completely backwards from any other program that you would expect so let's reload this scene and when I reload it you'll notice that the viewports have stuck this is because your viewport configuration is saved inside of the scene file which means if we want to have this same viewport layout every time we start 3ds max for a new project we need to create what's called a max start file so if I set my camera like this if I go to file and then save as inside of scenes if I just save this file as max start if I close 3ds max now and reload it 3dsmax will load the default layout quickly and then it loads our max start file so if you're looking to customize something in 3ds max and you can't quite figure it out you may need to look for a max start so that's the keyword that you need to look for when you're googling on how to do something in 3ds max when it first loads that's gonna actually wrap up the first look at 3ds max I hope you enjoyed it thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe and check out the description for more information below

Channel: TopHATTwaffle

Views: 505,817

Keywords: Source, engine, game, design, level, 3dsmax, 3d studio max, max, tutorial, learn, 3d, modeling, creative, introduction, noob, model

Id: 9i8xbaIcU9w

Length: 20min 24sec (1224 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Revoker]

Blender is next right? ^jk

but really cool man.

[u/Pm_Me_Dumb_Quotes]

Hell yeah. glad you are starting with this!11

[u/fancreeper2]

Did you ever try using MODO and is it good for making models for source engine games? Is it even possible to import models in CS:GO from MODO?

[u/bjackson2016]

You're not making content on vacation, right?