3dsmax Tutorial - Beginners Guide #2 - Creating and Editing Geometry

hello everyone and welcome to the second introduction video to 3ds max today we will be creating and editing some basic geometry using the prefabs edit poly and editable poly I already have 3ds max loaded to get started over on the right we have our command panel we want to go under the create panel which is the little plus icon and right underneath that we'll see a drop down that says standard primitives if we click on this we'll get a whole bunch of other options but for now let's just take the standard primitives creating any object you just click on it click and drag and then let go of your mouse and then when you move your mouse again you'll get a second operation sometimes you'll get two or three I'm going to maximize this viewport by pressing alt W and then over on the right we'll see that we have some parameters that we can mess with if we move these spinners up and down we can see that the box will reflect these changes these values on the right are currently set to generic 3ds max units if you'd like to switch them to feet or metric imperial you can do that under customize units set up and then set your desired metric here since I'm working in source engine a lot 3ds max and source engine units line up if you use generic so that's what I'll end up sticking with now once we right click off even if we select this box again we'll notice that those parameters on the right are missing if we want to edit those again we have to go to the modify tab and here they are again so we can still reconstruct the dimensions of this box and if I turn on edge faces by pressing f4 I can switch the color of the wireframe just black to show you guys here under material color go back to this tab and select the box we currently have one length width and height segment what this means is how much the box is kind of subdivided so if we set this to five on each of these we'll notice that we now have a five by five grid throughout the entire object this will allow us to do other things with the box's geometry when we start sculpting it with edit poly now if we'd like to create another object say we want to create a sphere we can do the same by just clicking and dragging now the sphere is a one operation so we just click and drag and that's it there's a similar set of parameters for the sphere over on the right such as radius and segment well notice that we have the smooth option with the smooth option does is it smooths the sphere it does this by putting all of the phases in what's called a smoothing group which makes the object appear smooth even though it's geometry isn't as smooth as it looks so if I turn smooth on and I lower the amount of segments we can see that the outside of the sphere is rather jagged because there just isn't that much geometry but when we're looking at it due to the shading it appears smooth if I were to turn smooth off we can see just how jagged it really is smoothing groups are very important and they'll come in handy when we do UV unwrapping later on I'll just delete that sphere and I can come over and click on torus so torus is another multiple operation so we click and drag to get the donut shape and then when we let go we'll be getting the width this is pretty much going to be how you create all objects click and drag it let go move the mouse again to get to the next step or you'll be done all objects will have similar parameters over on the right that if you just move up and down on the sliders you'll quickly see what they do now if I want to create an object on top of this box say I want to put a teapot on top of this box no matter how hard I try it won't do it if I turn AutoGrid on we can see that my little XYZ gizmo is following around where my cursor is if I click and drag here on the ground it creates it on the ground but now if I click and drag on top of the box it will create it on top of the box this is what AutoGrid does it allows us to create geometry automatically on top of other geometry the reason that the teapot exists is a part of 3d history you can just look up the 3d teapot model on Wikipedia and you'll get a awesome history about it and we can just take a quick look at some of these other objects here so going back to the sphere again if I create that sphere and we'll notice that it remembered the settings that I had I can just set this back to say 32 and turn smooth on I hit G to toggle the grid and remember 3ds max is very hotkey driven and I've customized my hotkeys I'll put the hotkey name that I'm firing on in overlay so you guys can set the hot keys if you want we have an option for hemisphere which will allow us to essentially chop part of the bottom of the sphere off now you'll notice that it's currently doing this by just removing the bottom if I look underneath we see that it has cap to the bottom with a bunch of triangles and we can change our mode that we're doing hemisphere with right now it's on chopped which is just cutting around the bottom if we turn squash on it's going to keep the same kind of topology by squishing the quads up top so we can see that we have the same amount of segments it's just squashing them as we change the hemisphere I'll turn hemisphere off and if we go to slice we can essentially slice around the sphere this can let us get kind of like a piece of pie shape out of it and with Hemisphere and that on we get you know this little kind of one fourth of a sphere a few other cool objects that we can create maybe got the cone which will create you know what looks like to be a flat cylinder and then we extrude it up like a sphere and then bring it in to a point this is exactly like a cylinder where we can just click and drag and bring it up now on the cylinder we have a few other options over on the right we have our cap segments which will allow us to add more information on to the top this can be used again when we're extruding and sculpting later with editable poly and it still has the slice options just like the sphere does I'm not going to run through all of the primitives they're a lot more fun to just kind of play with yourself so I'll go over a few more and then we can get started with some actual modeling the geosphere is a cool one in conjunction with a couple other modifiers so we kind of get this triangle or geosphere and there's a couple different geometries that we can get out of it such as tetra and if we just turn the segment's up you can see different patterns emerging same for octa and the eye cosa again we still get hemisphere but we don't have the same level of control with hemisphere but we are able to emulate that with a modifier over here on the right is called our modifier stack and we can add modifiers to modify our object so if I go to my modifier list and I just searched for slice this will allow me to slice part of my mesh so right now we see that we have this orange kind of plane here and we have our slice right now it's set to refine mesh and you can't really tell what it's doing because all it's doing is cutting a line in the middle of the mesh where there's already a line if I click this little down arrow here I have my slice plane if I have that selected and I go to my move tool I can move this gizmo up and down and we can see that this line is following the object I can turn split mesh on which is going to split it into two objects or remove top so now I can move this up and down and it's going to split the object along wherever this slice plane is and we can rotate the slice plane and do whatever we want with it so as long as we have the slice plane selected and we modify this object it will slice the object however that is and of course if we ever don't like what we've done we can just go back here and delete it now another cool thing about the modifier stack is say slices here I can go down and this only applies with certain modifiers I can go under it in my stack and still edit this geometry so if I need more segments I can still edit that and the object will remain sliced and now if we'd like to put a cap on the end of this here so it's not just a hollow object we can just go to our modifier list and there is a cap holes modifier there's not a lot of options for it but it does what it says it puts a cap on our holes so I'll just go ahead and delete that guy show my grid again and if we click on plane we'll get exactly what it says this is a plane and the plane is very useful or if you're trying to build off another object you can easily apply textures to it and just have reference images inside a 3ds max instead of in like a Windows picture viewer window again we have similar options under the modify tab we can adjust our segments and such but after all it's just a plane nothing really interesting there we can go now to standard primitives and drop this down to extended primitives there are some cooler objects under extended primitives like Hedra which will just kind of put a diamond in the middle of our scene useful for some futuristic stuff Taurus not which is some really trippy looking stuff and again we have all of our parameters on the right which will let you do pretty much whatever you want with this object and once you click off and it's no longer selected remember you have to go back to the modify tab to change these objects now what if you just want to start modeling and extruding objects a lot of people will start with a box so we can just box right here bring that up get fifty by fifty by fifty and now let's Center it in our seams so it's easier to work with down at the bottom we have our coordinates for the object and we can move our object around just by moving these sliders just like if we were to grab it in the 3d view if we right-click on these it will zero it out so now we're at the center of our world if I want to start playing with these faces and edges and vertices I have to do that outside of box mode since the only things that I can change in box mode are length width height and segments there's really not a lot I can do there's two ways that we can gain access to these sub object modes we can add an edit poly modifier or we can right-click on the object and go to convert to editable poly I like to use edit Poly's you're going to get the same feature set out of bolts so if I shift drag clone that over and then I convert this to editable poly instead you see that we do get a similar tool set we have our sub object selection modes attach all of these other settings and they're pretty much the same between the two so using editable poly these are my sub object selection modes we have vertices edges border polygon and element these keys are also mapped to one through five on your keyboard and it's much faster than actually clicking them so when we hit the vertex mode we'll see that we get a whole bunch of little blue dots these are our vertices and we can select them multi select them and then just start playing with the geometry now you'll notice when I pulled this up I grabbed some of the vertices in the back this can be very frustrating if you don't know what's happening what's happening here is that I'm selecting through the object so you'd think that I would only select these guys right here but I've actually grabbed some in the back this is because back facing is enabled and I've put this on a hotkey of controlled B so now with ignore back-facing checked if i select you know all of these guys here i don't grab any of the ones in the back back face selection is very useful in certain situations but you'll be toggling it quite a bit and I recommend putting it on a hockey so there's tons of ways that we can modify our geometry so if I select these guys of course we can just start grabbing them moving them rotating them and scaling them to get whatever effect we want you'll also notice that up at the top some of these tools are repeated up here then there are on the side so we see that we have extrude chamfer and if I switch to in polygon mode I have extrude in edge mode I have chamfer so we do have a lot of the same tools in two different places some tools are up top that aren't on the side and some tools are on the side that aren't on the top so you will kind of need to know where things are if you find that you aren't using this a lot feel free to collapse it regain some screen space one thing that I like about the edit poly modifier over editable poly is if I don't like these changes that I've made I can just right-click on this and hit delete and all of the changes are contained within the modifier so now I can just add a new edit poly and make changes on that instead so if I add another edit poly on top and then I move this face so the change for this face is contained within this edit poly and the change for this face is contained in the other edit poly so if I click down on this edit poly I can see the state of the object at that point in the modifier stack and if I now delete this object and then go to this edit poly that transformation has still been retained inside the modifier so we can add effects and move them around in our stack to better control our object so let's start extruding some faces here I'll add edit poly I'll select this face here and if I hit the grow option it's going to grow my selection around so now I have these nine faces instead of the one and shrink will do the opposite so if I just keep clicking grow it will keep selecting faces if I want to extrude these all I have to do is click the extrude button and my cursor will change to the extrude icon and I can click and drag to extrude this up and down there's another way to get a more fine control over pretty much every operation we perform if we click this little Settings box next to the button if we're using the options up here we just click the little drop down and then hit extrude you'll get this little option here this is called the Cadi control system and we can move up and down and specify a specific value now if you don't like this little kind of obscure floater caddy control we can go to customize preferences and turn off enable ki D control and now when we click the settings option we get an actual little window I find this one much easier to see when we're working on our scene we have a few different extrusion types here but they're all going to act the same for this current selection now we can click apply or okay if we hit apply it will make that change and allow us to make another extrude so if we just keep clicking apply it will just keep extruding up to the ceiling so I'll undo those and we're left with this now we can perform an inset operation what inset will do is I'll click the option it starts to inset from the border of this polygon now with the dialog window open I can control click to select more faces and we have by group and by polygon right now by group is doing the entire selection so it's looking at all of these faces and it's going to inset them by 2.83 units if I choose by polygon instead it will inset each polygon face independent from each other and now if I want to extrude these outward and kind of point them in like they're a spike I can click bevel level their height up and then level inwards again due to the selection type none of these are going to change what's happening here I click OK and I create a sphere if I add edit poly on to the sphere select these and then perform a bevel operation we can see that bevel is bringing the entire group out to bevel the outside inwards by 1.73 now if i choose local normal it's going by the local normals of the face and if I choose by polygon it's going to do it again by each individual polygon what if we want these to twist and turn we can do this with a modifier so if I just bring these upwards we can add a twist modifier so by adding the twist modifier we have this box around our object I can start to turn the angle up and it's going to start twisting our object and the cool thing about this is since this is a modifier we can go down into edit poly and you'll notice that twist has turned off this is because whatever we have selected that's what we're currently viewing if you click what looks like this little beaker this is show end results I have it bound to spacebar we can see the end results while we're in a lower modifier so I can hear that on and when I select just these guys you'll notice that only they're getting twisted what's happening here is we're passing a selection up the stack so we can see that we're passing a polygon selection up our stack and we can see on twists that we also have a polygon selection up our stack if we add another edit poly we can see that that selection is no longer being passed and we can edit our geometry freely since this isn't the effect to that I want I can delete that edit poly and will notice that the orange box is now just around the selected objects now the reason these aren't twisting how I want is because there isn't enough geometry I'll turn off show end results and I need to add more geometry here so these can actually twist how I want we can do this by using connect to add more geometry I'm going to go into edge mode and then I'll select the vertical edges here we can use the connect operation and with one segment we can see that we have one edge here not exactly what I want so I can just start bumping up the segments and we have Pynchon slides so what pinch and slide will do is pinch will bring it closer together or further apart of the connecting edges and slide will move them along the edges so I'll set these to zero and I'll turn this to four so if I turn show end results on now we can kind of see what's going to happen I can keep turning this up up up up up and then just hit okay I want to reselect just these polygons so an easy way to do this would to be going into the side view selecting those guys so now I just need to fix this issue down at the bottom and we can do this with Limit Effect a limit effect is going to appear on a couple different modifiers we can do this with upper limit as I start to turn the upper limit up we can see that the box is starting to turn at this little plane here and as I move it up up up up we can see that the effect is limited by wherever this plane is and we can limit the bottom effect as well and you may be wondering where that is I have to care it is so if we kind of hunt for it by just moving it up and down you can see it right there we can adjust the bias a little bit and so now just these guys are turning how I want and you may be noticing that they're looking a little rough this is because smoothing groups are not set for these if I add another edit poly with these selected if I just go down to the polygon smoothing groups we have Auto smooth which will smooth all of the selections that are this many degrees within each other if we just hit Auto smooth for this it should smooth these out just fine if we end up turning Auto smooth up a lot we're gonna get a much different effect so now it's trying to smooth these and make them look round even though they're square this is because it smoothes any faces that meet at a hundred and sixty degrees or less and that's not what we wanted so if we set this to 80 we should get a much better result so we still have some issues here because that angle is 80 degrees or less so if we just go back to 45 hit Auto smooth now just these sides are smooth and that looks pretty accurate what if we don't want to constantly be using extrude we can shift drag and open edge to create more geometry now shift drag is clone so if we were to shift drag this entire object we would be able to clone it now if we were to shift drag these polygons it's going to ask if we want to clone them to an element or to their own object this isn't what we want so if we select these guys and then hit delete we now have an open edge or border so if I go to edge mode I can select these three edges here shift-drag I'm going to start creating more geometry just from this open edge this will also work for border mode since this is an open border if I use border select mode and click on this border it will select the whole open area and I can either cap it to create a polygon here or I can start shift dragging this as well to create additional geometry and then once I'm done I can hit cap there's a lot of great selection tools to help make your life easier if we selected this edge here and then we click ring it's going to make a ring selection all the way around the object so now I could convert that selection to polygons and then scale those outwards or if I select this polygon and when I hold shift and go on an edge or a neighboring polygon you'll notice that they get shaded I change the color of this object you'll be able to see it better so we can see that that dark shade and all I'm doing is holding shift right now this will let me select an entire loop another option is if I select this edge here and then hit loop it's going to loop the selection so we have loop and ring and those are two very powerful tools to help edit your geometry we have element mode an element mode is going to select elements within our object if I were to create a few spheres now if I go under modify and hit attach I can attach these objects to the box so we'll see over on the Left we still only have one box whereas before we had thus three spheres so I'll right click to get out of attach mode and now when I use element selection I can select these independently of each other but if I'm not in any of these modes I select this as a single object if for some reason I want to move these back to their own object I can just select them and hit detach and now they're their own object over here now that I've detached these you'll notice that the movement gizmo was in the center of this box this is because that's where this objects pivot point is we can change an object's pivot point by going to the hierarchy tab hitting affect pivot only well notice we have these 3d arrows around our move object and the objects aren't moving anymore so let's say I wanted to move the pivot to the center of this object so I can turn on my snaps by hitting s and if I right-click on it I can choose what kind of snap someone use right now I'll just use vertex and I can move this and we now get a line drawn from where I selected and I'm able to snap to vertex on this object so I can snap it to right there and then bring it to the center point and now we've aligned it to the center of that object so now I'll turn effect pivot off and when I select these my pivot is in the center of this sphere here and that's what I can rotate around as long as I'm in the Meuse pivot point center mode now multiple objects are able to share modifiers if I were to create a box and then I applied in edit poly and then I beveled these if I decided that I wanted to clone these and then bend them in a ring I can turn my snaps on you'll notice that with snaps on I get a little crosshair I want to get close to something that my snaps are enabled for and then my cursor will turn into the four arrow selection which will let me move it around by whatever I'm snapping to so right now I only want to have vertex snap on and I'll set my constraints to just be X this will make it so I can only move an object on the X or Y and you'll notice when I click the Z up here toggles to Z if you don't have this option up here you can just right click up here and enable the axis constraints and that's what this object is so I'll select X so now I'm constrained X I can just grab this object and shift drag it over snap it right there now I will make a bunch of instance copies now I can grab all of these and apply a bend modifier so now we have this bend modifier spanning across multiple objects and you'll notice that when I select an individual object we have this gray bar this means that this is an instance to modifier across all of the objects it's also italicized so if I select all these we'll get an italicized modifier I can start turning the angle up I'll set it to 360 because I want to create a circle I get this really weird effect so I just need to set the right axis so now we're going around in a ring if I want this to be horizontal I can change that with the direction here so if I set this to negative 90 we now have a horizontal ring now when I click off you'll see that we have the wireframe from these other objects here if I select these again and then I right-click on them and hit convert to editable poly this is going to essentially collapse the stack and we can do this another way by right-clicking and hit collapse to or collapse all so if we select all of these and hit convert to editable poly these are now all editable poly objects but I can no longer modify that Bend so it's lost all parametric value so if I undo that let's say I only want it to bend 180 degrees so if I had already converted it to editable poly making this change would be very difficult so now I'll convert it to editable poly and now I have all of these objects individual but they were sharing a modifier if I'd like to make all of these objects one I can either use attach or if I go to the utilities rollout I can select all these guys and hit collapse collapse select it now it's made them an editable mesh which we usually don't want to model in so if you're on editable mesh just right-click on the object and hit convert to editable poly and you'll be good to go a few other fun tools that we can use is if we select these faces here and we hit relax we're able to start relaxing this face which will just kind of smooth it out so we can bring it down a little bit and that we can turn the iterations up and we can see that it just gets much smoother as we relax it so relax can be useful if you're just trying to smooth out some jagged edges if I want to select all these faces here I can add an editable poly and then selection by angle becomes available so if I turn this on its going to select all faces that are within 45 degrees so if I just left click right here I get all of these faces now with all of these selected I can use make planner which what that will do is it's going to automatically try to make these a planner face we also have make planner XYZ which is going to make them planner on the x-axis y-axis and z-axis I have these bound to a hotkey because these are a very useful tool to have while you're modeling so if I hit planner on Y kind of bring that out soft select that guy planner on X that one on X and now I have kind of this weird little barrier shape that could be against the wall if we're looking to quickly edit geometry we can use the Swift loop tool so much like Kinect I could select all of these edges here and then use the Kinect tool or if I turn swift loop on it will allow me to add edges or more likely loops around my object now you need to have good topology for this to work and that usually means keeping your mesh in quads now what a quad is is it's a four-sided polygon you want to try to stay in quads for best modeling but that will increase your poly count so now I can have swift loop I can just start clicking to quickly insert edges Swift loop has a ton of useful features like I can hold alt and now I can drag an edge along the abutting edges if we just hover our mouse here it's going to give us all of the options a really fun one is if we hold shift which is going to put the loop in between two edges so it's going to put it in between this edge and this edge and it's going to perform set flow which will end up smoothing out the geometry so if I hold shift we can see that it snapped to where it's going to put it and we'll notice that it's tried to smooth that out it will be more easily seen if I grab some geometry here turn off by angle I go back to Swift Luke shift now we can see that the line isn't at the edges so now when I click kind of pulled that in a little bit to make it a smoother curve so if I just click here again I wasn't holding shift there it performs this set flow operation which does that exact same thing so set flow is another way that you can kind of smooth out edges now I'll delete this object here that I just extruded and I'll camp this let's say I wanted to now extrude this line here now you'll notice that I've got this big face here which does not flow with the rest of the object so I need to add a topology back in to essentially connect these two I can use P connector paint connect when I'm in P connect mode I can connect from vertice to vertice by holding ctrl and then just dragging between them so now I've restored that topology and if I exit pconnect mode I can select all of these guys and bevel them if I want so if we go back into pconnect mode if I just left click it's going to allow me to connect just in freeform I just undo all that if I hold shift it will end up connecting in the middle of objects and if I hold shift and alt it's going to double connect again we can see what it's going to do if we just hover on it for a moment and there's actually a cute little video that shows you what's going on just remember that you can hover on any of these tools to figure out what they do and the 3ds max help pages on Autodesk are fantastic they're very well documented just in case you forget what one of these things does we can go ahead and round some of these edges off if I select this edge here this edge here this edge here in this edge here we can do a chamfer that's going to do is it's going to cut the edges off so I can increase the segments which will make it more round I can do quad chamfer or a standard chamfer so standard chamfer is going to be rounded there if I end up adding another selection here I can show you the difference between quad and standard so a standard chamfer is going to end up with a kind of weird effect here and quad chamfer will end up fixing that and then if we change the chamfer amount we change the tension we're able to get that roundness out of it so if we run our segments up change the tension we now have a rounded edge and that's opposed to a standard chamfer which I feel quad chamfer in certain situations gives you a better result if I delete these objects here and I end up extruding just by shift dragon if I want to bridge the gap between these two I can select these two edges and then just hit bridge and we see that it's created another polygon right there if I bring up the bridge dialog I can start control clicking edges and then it will bridge them automatically for me if I do a non-continuous bridge we'll see that it kind of freaks out so I have to bridge these two faces over here hit apply and then select these two and then that I can bridge that let's say I have this small little extrusion here and I want to make these into a point there's two ways that I could do this I can either use target weld which will allow me to weld vertices together I can just click on target web click on my source vertice to my destination and it's going to weld it to my target I can select all of these hit the weld settings and as I turn the weld threshold up eventually I'll get to a point where they're within each other and we'll see them snap and that will weld them together now if we've added an extra loop so if I add a loop here with Swift loop and I want to remove it I can just double click it with the edge tool and hit remove now the hidden downside to that is that now I'm in Swift loop again and over here I can insert a loop because this topology is still good but over here it's not so what's happening is that when I click to remove it did not remove the vertices that that edge was on so if I bring that edge back now if I hit control and remove those vertices are gone you can also hit backspace and ctrl backspace ctrl backspace will remove the edge and the associated verts the last thing that I'd like to go over is soft selection and soft selection is useful if you're doing a little bit more organic stuff so if I add a bunch of edges here I can select these three right here or these four and if I expand soft selection I can hit use soft selection and once I turn that on we can see that there's a rainbow of affected selections so as I start to move these it will move the selected objects and the associated objects with a fall-off so if I turn my fall-off down we can see that we're kind of bringing that selection in some and I can pinch it the more red a color is the more it's going to be affected and we get a little kind of preview of what that's going to look like so that will allow us to kind of move things around without it mean as destructive or harsh to the geometry and then of course if we do want to start bringing things down we can select these and then if we start to relax it a little bit it'll kind of start to soften that out and that's going to wrap up this video on creating and editing some basic geometry I hope you guys enjoyed it and don't forget to support me on patreon if you're able to thanks for watching guys and have a good one

Channel: TopHATTwaffle

Views: 155,621

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

Id: 57wNALKKkBk

Length: 36min 20sec (2180 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 01 2017