Basic Modifiers Autodesk 3ds Max

hello and welcome to control delete tutorials I had a request to create a video talking about 3d Max's 3ds Max's modifiers so that's what this video is going to be I'm gonna do two separate videos so this would be the first of the two which is going to be modifier basics or basic modifiers and then the other video will be advanced modifiers which will be a little bit more in-depth on some of the modifiers so if you don't know the modifier is with anything we have to start with an object so I'm going to start out by just creating a box make this a little bit tall so in order for modifiers to even do something we need our objects that we're using to have segments in them they need to have something to modify essentially so when I create an object this object is you know a box and I've got different length width and height segments for this object now if I go over to the modify panel over here I can currently modify some of these settings so I can change my length my width and my height something that's very important when we're creating objects if we want them to be aligned to our world coordinate system being the XY and Z X being as we can see here the X I go to move you can see it's a little better X is going to be left and right Y is going to be our depth and Z is going to be our vertical axis mac 3ds max is a little bit in the minority as far as this coordinate system most software are going to be X which is correct but y and z would be switched to where Y would be up and Z would be depth so I will say 3ds max has that a little different than other software but whenever I created this object I created it in the perspective view the other way that I would create it is created in the top view so if I create this object and another one in the top view and go back into perspective here we can see that the height changes how tall it is but if I go into the left view and I create a box let's say I try to make a box that looks very similar to the boxes I have here so that looks pretty close right but if I look at the height this is my height that's because I created it in the left view so in this case my length would actually make it taller but notice how the length is changing in two directions well that's because that's what the length does so this object is not oriented to our scene this becomes very important when we're adding modifiers because the modifiers will affect this object based on their axes and the coordinate system so it's really important the other thing you can notice is this object Center Point or its pivot point as along the side whereas the boxes that I've created along the bottom so I'll move this guy out of the way for a minute and we'll look at these I don't don't need two of the same okay so I'm gonna take you down through the modifiers that are what I would consider to be most important for basic use and so we're going to skip over our selection modifiers and our worldspace modifiers we're gonna come down to our object space modifiers and that's going to be this long list here and there's a lot of them no we're not going to go through all these we're going to go through the ones that typically I find to be the most important as far as you know things that I've used over the 15 years that I've been using 3d studio max so we're gonna stall very simply with the first one Bend now as I apply Bend you got to see this orange cage kind of go around my object here and it it fits to the object if I had a cylinder here this might be a little bit easier to see we'll just apply Bend to it okay so here you can really see that orange cage this is called a gizmo and our gizmo is what actually affects our underlying object so here with my box I have my parameters here for bend angle and Bend direction now here's the thing if I start bending this notice how the gizmo is trying its best to bend this object but there's no segments here I don't own any segments so it can't bend so over on the side here this is our modifier stack so our original object is at the bottom of the stack and then every modifier that we add goes on top of that stack and the modifiers affect what's underneath them so if I have a different modifier on top of this this one will not affect the one above it so it kind of has a chain of command' there but I can always go back to box in this case and say let's add some more height segments and notice how it is now bending to this and it's following that so that's really important excuse me now let's go back to this box so notice that this box the bend modifier is aligned to the z-axis it's up axis now if I select this box and you know what I'm gonna say let's give us some segments too but I keep give it height segments like I could this one because its height is not the right direction so in this case I'm going to give it length segments I'm going to apply bend to it and it's Bend is again in the z-direction but it's not in our world's Z direction it's actually in the objects Z direction so if I go to my hierarchy tab here this allows me to show my pivot point and by turning on an effect pivot point only and notice here this is color-coded so red as X Y is green and Z is blue look where my blue is blue is this direction because I made it in the left view so this is why this will be really important I'm going to turn that back off and go back to modify and now if I try to bend notice how it's trying to bend along this objects the z axis not the world z axis so this is why we want to create things in the top in perspective view so I'll just delete that one by pressing delete on my keyboard and I'll come back and talk about these now if I use my Bend here we can see these two are bending the same way I can come back down the cylinder and add height segments if I want this to bend a little more smoothly just like I did with this one now we're gonna come back to bend at the very end so I can show two modifiers working together and it's really nice because it's one of the last ones that I'll cover and it'll show how these modifier stacks work together so under my parameters again I have my angle and I have my direction I changed the direction it changes the direction and degrees of that Bend so notice I've come back around here at almost 360 degrees you can kind of see how that works and both of these settings can be animated so if I turn on AutoKey and I go to 100 frames over and I'll just set this at 90 90 and I go back here and set this to zero you can see now that that can be animated to bend so if I play the animation it's going to bend same thing can happen with my direction here if I type in 360 it's gonna set a key notice how these spinners turn red or highlighted red that's because they're animated so now it bends and changes direction okay I don't need animation for this but just to give you an idea I'm spending more time on this one just because I'm explaining kind of how modifiers work with a very basic one here but just so you get an idea so the bend axis by default spending along the z axis the up axis if I change it to Y it will Bend along the y axis so I turn on Y and I bend and it bends along the Y again this looks a little weird there's also no segments that direction so I'm going to go ahead and I'm just gonna type in 10 then 10 just so I have enough segments here to bend in pretty much any direction so now we can actually see that been taking place that direction and if I come to X then it bends this direction and it will Bend in on itself so that's weird we're gonna go back to the z direction because I want to show us some things so there's this little rollout here until you twirl that open we're gonna get access to the different parts of the gizmo here so we can actually affect the gizmo and move it so if I move the gizmo outside of this notice how the object is bending to the outer amount of this and if I move this this direction it's now bending based on the inner part of here and if I move it left and right nothing really happens because the direction hasn't changed here so I'm gonna reset that and typically you want your objects to be centered in there but you know I could do something like move my gizmo you can see how the bend is trying to follow it's a little bit weird to get used to but then we have the center point so this changes where does it Bend from so I could have it Bend from the top of the object here based on that center point and so now it bends this direction okay so we can affect these there's also a little lightbulb here if I turn that off the modifier stops affecting turn it back on it starts affecting again we also have limits here so there's a limit effect that we can turn on and it gives me an upper amount in the lower amount so I'll show you what that does so if I change this upper amount here what it's doing is it's cutting off where that effect is happening so it's bending only the bottom half but the rest of it staying straight and as I tell this to effect further and further up it'll now Bend all the way up here also if we notice here my height is fifty three point four four nine and my limit effect here fifty three point four forty nine would be the very top of it so it's using those units here so we can tell it you know only been part of the way or only been so far down so that's what our limit effects do and then there's one for the bottom as well but the bottom part the center point of that is already down at the bottom so that's really gonna affect nothing and then we can turn that off so that's Bend very basic modifier really really handy I use it on so many different things it's go ahead I'll leave this one in here I'm gonna remove the modifiers here by hitting a little trash can so going down the list let's see cloth has advanced displace so displace we can use something like a plane and let's say we wanted to make terrain so I could use 100 by 100 segments no this is giving me a lot of segments here but based on how this place works this is kind of ideal so I'm gonna put the displace modifier on here okay so I've got a bunch of settings here but you're not gonna be able to see anything happen until I put an image in here for it to use so let's see here good to thumbnails that'll make a skybox sure so I'm gonna take this I'm gonna drag it into my image here so what it's doing is it's gonna put this image across all of this and as I move my strength up we can now use the thumbnail that I had created here so how to create a skybox in unity so it's from this image what it's doing is its using the luminance value of this image so anything that is light or white will be pushed up and anything that is dark or black will be pushed down if I set it to limit luminous Center it's going to push out in both directions if I don't have that on black actually stays in place or dark values so white out white values will be pushed up and you can use this to create terrain so if you you know went into Photoshop and I painted an area along the edges here kind of white and the areas in the center here kind of dark then as I push this up I could create like hills and terrain and stuff like that and it works similar to the way a height map works and things like unity for a terrain so that's what this place does we can use a bitmap image or we can use a texture map and typically you're going to want this to be planar it really depends on what the object is you're using but that's what displace does so we're just going to delete that and continue on our modifiers so after that let's see here now edit mesh and edit poly typically we don't want to use these as modifiers they do have their place for sure but it's better to convert an object to an editable poly rather than put this modifier on there if we're going to be editing and the reason why is let's say I take parts of my mesh here and I start extruding this okay so I extrude okay so the box is still lying under here but every single polygon that I have if I select one of the polygon faces here I can see it says polygon 427 selected every single polygon is numbered okay they have IDs to them and so by extruding this I basically put a command in the max to extrude you know polygon for 24 polygons for 27 polygons 404 and polygon 407 but the problem is is I can come back to max and I'm gonna get this one back to box and I'm gonna get this warning that says modifier exists in the stack that depends on topology which means the polygons that are here so are you sure you want to continue so I'm gonna say yes but now any changes I make here it's going to affect the number of polygons so if I make this you know 5 by 5 by 500 what happened what's going on right let's say I go a little further over 8x8 trying to get a certain number to show up here let's make this 10 again okay so now it's selecting these and if I go back to edit poly well it's just doing what it's told this polygon for 27 this is polygon for 24 so these keep the same ID numbers they're just located somewhere else because of the number of polygons so ideally we don't want to use this okay so I'm going to delete that so it's better to convert to editable poly it's a right click convert now box is no longer an object really it's no longer a primitive object that's now been converted to something that can be edited and everything before this is basically gone it's all been kind of baked into the object okay so moving down the ffd this stamps for freeform deformation we have a 2 by 2 3 by 3 4 by 4 box and cylinder so I'm just gonna show these I'm just going to use the 4 by 4 1 so it puts this lattice cage around our object and if I go to my drop down here to the sub sub components or sub object modes of FFT I go to control points I can now select these control points and allows me to modify this object based on changing these control points and all of these control points they can be selected I can scale them and it will affect kind of like if you're using in Photoshop if you use in free transform to change an object or to scale a picture it kind of works the same way in two dimensions this one just works in three dimensions so allows me to go in here and modify this object and it's pretty cool on some of the stuff that you can do you can also move this entire cage and see how it updates so it only up changes what's in the actual modifier or what has actually been whatever takes place inside of this lattice okay so that's at fifty two by two by two and three by three by three just means how many control points there are and then the box one is like the other ones but I can set the number of points and the cylinder one is the same idea it's just a cylindrical cage or lattice flex we'll leave that one for another one let's move on down the list Mel melts kind of a cheesy one I don't know how handy it is I just know that my students that I have like kind of messing around with it and animating this melting happening it's kind of a gimmicky modifier let's see here moving on down noise noise is a really good modifier so noise allows us to apply irregularity to whatever object we have based on a strength so if I type in 10 by 10 by 10 which should be 10 units by 10 units not a whole lot really happens here but as I change this higher and see that this changes the objects very drastically and it just kind of warps it but what we can do is if I go back to ten by ten I have options here for fractal which gives me more irregularity so if I wanted to make something like a piece of like warped wood or something like that or if I want to take a section of a car that I made and make it look like it's getting kind of mangled and I could do that the scale here changes how how much this noise is affecting from basically point A to point B it's allowing this to happen more and more along each direction so the higher this number is it actually will smooth out and the lower kind of the more drastic it's going to affect the seed value here this is basically creating a random displacement I can duplicate this object and use exactly the same settings but I can change that random number generator that is kind of affecting my object here so I can have two objects that are very very similar in style as far as like what's going on with them but the seed will allow me to change them up slightly well it's not slate it's it's a lot but what I'm saying is like it's not changing the strength so that it's so far different it's using exactly the same settings it's just altering how those settings are kind of working just not the amount they're working so under fractal I also have the roughness so I can exaggerate that I have iterations so the lower of my iterations the smoother this gets and the more the iterations then noisier it gets and I can also animate this noise so I turn on animate noise it's gonna set keys at the beginning and end of my timeline and you'll see the animation take place thing let me just turn that back off so this works really nice for a bunch of things you can do terrain with this as well that works really nicely but that's something that I like to do with it so just remove noise from there we'll go back down through let's see after noise normal is always good normals gonna be hard to see because we have back faces turned on so I'm gonna go in here and say object properties so I'm right click object properties back face call which means don't draw back face and now we can see what normal is actually doing so it's flipping our polygons inside out so it's flipping the direction the face is pointing so we have our normal direction which is this which means it's pointing outward and we have our back face direction which is the other side but now we're actually showing the back face and not the normal face so we've essentially flipped this object inside out and that can be handy there are times where you accidentally flip things and have to change that okay going down through push-push is really nice so it push allows us to do is it pushes all of these polygons out in their normal direction so as I go a positive number here it's pushing everything out and you'll see it expanding the ones here that are shared between these sides a good way to actually see this work is if I take something like the teapot oops just gonna add some more segments here so if i take this and i put a push modifier on it and i push this out so it kind of fattens everything up how this is really handy is if we have something like a human hand that we've modeled and maybe we use that for multiple characters and if I wanted to use it for maybe a female character I could take this negative direction and make the fingers a little thinner on it easily or if I made a female hand I need to make it a little bit bigger and let's say I'm making it for the Hulk I could then push all of it out in every direction to thicken it up so that's what push does alright moving on down through relax is another really good tool so to show what relax does I'm going to apply noise again so okay so there's my noise so normally if I have let's say I've been modeling and I have you know polygons that I need to smooth out or I have an area that just you know it's actually just effect I'm going to cut this off of here and then convert this to editable poly and just select the portion of this there we go okay I'm gonna paste this back on now my modifier is only going to affect the polygons see how polygons is the wood up here still it's only affecting that portion of this which is also really handy but let's say I wanted to I'm gonna convert this here to edit poly so that bakes in that modifier to it I can't go back and change it now that that's happened but let's say I had this area and I wanted this to be smoothed out so I'm just gonna select these edges and I'm gonna apply relax and so what I can do is if I turn this value up I can start smoothing this out and reorganizing the topology to be a little more easy to manage little smoother now it does round out my corners which you know I have to decide you know what I want to deal with here but let's say I was making a car and I was working on the car hood and I was trying to get it nice and smooth but you know my topology was in such a way that it was just kind of bumpy looking relaxed would work really good for just smoothing those areas out and that's what it's really good for so that's relax undo before I broke my mesh here we go and we'll go back down through let's see shell is another one that's really good I'm gonna apply that to the teapot just so we can see how that works so if we look at the teapot I'm going to convert this terrible poly and I'm going to take off the lid and I'm going to convert oops sorry object properties backface cull okay so see if we can see through the teapot because it doesn't have any drawn faces here these are just back faces and they're now not showing up because I told it not to draw back faces if I put a shell modifier on here and we're gonna go the inner amount so I'm just gonna right-click and set that to zero so what show allows us to do is I can actually give a certain amount of thickness based on this number so if we look at before-and-after we get this small amount of thickness here so it's essentially doubling what our polygons and giving us you know it's shelling the the object so that's what that's good for get rid of that it's important to note that you have to have an object selected to get down through any of these modifiers let's see here smooth you show it smooth does smooth allows us to smooth out hard edges and our polygons based on smoothing groups so this is a little bit advanced but I'll just kind of show how this can kind of work so you can see right here I have a 90 degree angle and it's creating this hard edge well right now my box is set up so that it's creating that hard edge I can actually tell max to ignore the fact that it's a 90 degree angle and override that by smoothing so if I it'll be tricky to show but I'll show it after so if I change this threshold to above 90 degrees so if I said it at 91 notice that change that just happened there okay I'm gonna turn this off back on okay so now if I look at this what's happening is it's told us to try to look like a smooth edge so notice how it's trying to round that edge out and it's not actually rounding it out it's still a hard edge but max is shading is set up in a way that it's telling it hey you know shade this so it looks rounded so this is something that we can do in order to make objects you know look smoother than they actually are so that's what smooth is good for if you watch them the modeling tutorials I talk about smoothing groups which actually goes a little further into detail but that's the simplest way I can show that spherify is a great tutorial or two to modifier so it takes any object and tries to make it a sphere now if we look at the actual sphere to migrate back on here the actual sphere it's not too bad as far as spheres go but it has a pole vertex up at the top here which means we have a bunch of vertices come in to one spot and this can cause some ugly stuff to happen with our topology depending on what we're modeling so in order to not have this especially for going to be going into a program like Mudbox we don't want to have that because Mudbox is not going to like it for sculpting so a better way to create a sphere is to start with a box and I know that sounds silly but just go with me on this so I'm gonna create a length width and height segment here box so I'm just going to type in all the same numbers and I'm gonna give it the same segments here okay so ten by ten by ten and I'm going to apply spherify and it creates this box now this box is a little bit weird the turn is two different colors so we can actually see what I'm talking about so since that box has smoothing groups to separate the fronts and sides of this it keeps those hard edges are the smoothing between those hard edges so something else I'm going to do turn that off and I'm going to set this to being one by one by one I'm going to use another modifier that you guys should become somewhat familiar with which is turbo smooth and I set this to have higher iterations so the more iterations I add the smoother this will become so it's basically subdividing every polygon so we start off we have one by one by one by one if I said it to one and now subdivides each one by four and I'll do it again and again and again so you want to be careful don't type in a really high number like 10 or else your pride crash here 3ds max and lose some work but as soon as I apply this one thing we'll notice is that smoothing goes away but once I apply this if I add spherify to this you'll notice that this object was not actually a perfect sphere so you can see here as I turn it on it actually rounds it out more and this is actually a really nice sphere because of the way light will react with these polygons there's no polled vertices really anywhere which is really handy so that's what spherify is good for it's also good for if I have a box give myself a lot of height segments here let's say I don't want this give myself segments around here sorry so let's say I I want to create a round set of edge loops here so I'm going to convert this data at poly and if I double click on these edge loops that go all the way around I can actually say spherify just those edge loops and it ends up making that perfectly round now becomes tedious to do so but if we've modeled in a way that we've extruded a character's arm and when we smooth there's something like that it becomes very boxy I can sit here and go through select the edges plus verify and fix this problem now it takes a little bit of time to do that but it's a way to fix that problem you can see now that these areas are becoming perfectly round so that's another way we can use this and it works really nicely I wish they would make one that called like Solyndra fie that would allow us to do exactly what I'm trying to do here or just make it to where this spherify because if I have multiple edges selected mine do this it tries to turn these into a sphere which is not what I want so I'll show you what I mean this is why you have to do one at a time so to see how it's trying to round that whole thing out it's not really handy so that's why if they do one right I'm sorry I'm sure that sounds really great alright so continuing on to go down through after spherify see stretch works really nicely for doing squash and stretch animation so that's just what it's set up to do so if you're gonna do a ball bounce animation or something and you want to add a bit of impact to it you're gonna have a kind of squish down and stretch up same idea with the axes here and same idea with the amplifi so I can make it a lot more or a lot less stretchy looking that's a nice tool to use see here symmetry is a nice modifier put that on the teapot just because it's easier to show there turn our segment's down here so if I apply spherify our symmetry it will take whatever is on one half and make it symmetrical with the other half you can also tell it to flip the other direction so in case I want two handles I can do that and we can see how that looks I could also change my direction so if I did my Z direction well my pivot point for that object was at the bottom so I can't flip that way but I can flip that direction and we won't actually see anything happen in the y-direction because it's already symmetrical in the Y value or the y axis this works really nice if you've modeled one half of a character you want to make the other half so that is symmetry taper so taper allows us to taper and have a curve this works really nicely if you've kind of modeled like some cartoon style buildings and let's say you model them nice and straight but you wanted to kind of give the effect of them being larger or smaller at the top works really nice for that sort of thing you can change the axes here to do different things and it has the limit effects as well taper turbosmooth have already kind of talked about last one we're going to talk about is twist so what twists will allow us to do is allows us to twist our object and we can see what that looks like so we have our bias which allows us to change whether or not it's twisted more at the top or bottom we can change our axis we have a limit effect but the last thing I want to show is how these modifiers work together in this modifier stack because so far I've really only shown one modifier at a time so I'm gonna say this object is twisting 90 degrees I'm gonna go into my box here make this object a lot taller and I'm gonna give myself a lot more height segments so that way my twist is nice and smooth let's go ahead and twist this 360 degrees so it's doing a full it's a bit much let's go on Pete okay so it's twisted up 180 degrees now if I apply a bend I can now affect this and have it Bend 360 degrees and now we make this mind-bending thing where the one side comes up and around and back through which is pretty cool the more we twist it the weirder it gets so every 90 degrees gets a little weirder it's kind of cool-looking though but let me change this back to you just 90 the important thing is is how these modifiers are put together so first we twist then we Bend if I do the opposite so I'm just gonna drag this down below we get a very different object so in this case I've bent it to 360 degrees and then I've started twisting this so you see that's very different compared to what we had and that's really how the basic modifiers work and you can use them together in many different ways there's a bunch of other ones so I'm going to do I may end up doing different tutorials for some of these other ones some of the other ones that I do want to cover in another video is going to be path deform which is really good I have two videos that talk about cloth so go check those out if you want to know about how cloth works it works together with where is it hmm oh it's with garment maker I just don't see that here some of the other ones that we can talk about is flex so we can do some stuff with flex see more fur you didn't might have a video already on blend shapes and morph targets using more fur but we have to check back on that I think I have one if not I can do one on that let's see skinning I mean there's a whole thing on skinning that I can do so those will be some later videos coming up if you haven't seen already I've started on my channel a I'll just go here and show you so if we go to my subscriptions not my subscriptions but this takes many YouTube easy and I'm going to go to my videos here so if started this quickies for commenters and this is just the serious introduction but if you have a comment or there's something that you specifically want to see created go ahead and leave me a comment here you can comment on any of my videos I'll be able to get back to it but you can comment here and say hey I'd really like to see a video on let's see let me go back here so somebody had commented on this welcome video which is why I'm making this video can you make a tutorial about some of the most useful modifiers in 3ds Max so as you can see I do read and reply as much as I can if I haven't like replied to yours video then you know give me some time should be able to get around to that some of them don't let me reply some of them don't show up on here because they're flagged as spam so as long as I see them and as long as it's something I can reply to I try to do that but leave me a comment and let me know what it is you want to see and I'll try to do a video on it if it's something that's in my you know ability but anyway thanks for watching please subscribe if you found this video entertain me or if you found it useful please give me a like definitely use that and share it with anybody you think might find this interesting so thanks a lot

Channel: CtrlAultDelTutorials

Views: 31,825

Keywords: 3ds, max, 3d, autodesk, tutorial, tutorials, teaching, learning, modeling, texturing, animation, video, games, art, modifiers, basic, beginner, object space modifiers

Id: vwPNlhY7Wio

Length: 44min 33sec (2673 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2016