3D Studio Max Essentials for Beginners

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. These are basically just some tips and tricks that I've come across that really help me sort of optimize 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 walk you through every single modifier and how to create all 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 slightly more advanced methods near the tail end. So let's get started. Let's jump into Max. So 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 be scaled to, right? So I typically select US standard from doing architectural visualization in my client, the units on their drawings, the units in their CAD files are in imperial units. So I typically choose decimal inches or fractional feet in inches. Or you can choose metric if your client is using the metric system, of course. Or if you don't care, you can choose generic units. And by default, one unit equals, you know, like whatever you set it to. So in this case, we're going to be doing one unit equals one inch, and we're going to have you use 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 of just the basic, like, layout stuff first. So you have four standard viewports, right, that Max just opens up with, comes as default. You have your three orthographics, you have your top, your front, your left, and just the perspective 3D viewport, right? So in each of these viewports, you see this little plus sign, and I can click on that and I can maximize the viewport, right? But there's also the hotkey, the Alt-W hotkey. So if I click on that, Alt-W, and if I hover over any viewport, Alt-W, I can maximize that particular viewport, right? And then there's also, if I... right click somewhere and some gray space up here. I know I got a lot of toolbars and we'll cover what all this stuff means just real briefly. But if I choose viewport layouts tab there, this little window pops up and this is pretty helpful. You can have this open if you'd like to switch up your layout every once in a while for whatever reason. Some 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 then one big perspective up top or whatever. I just like, I like the three standard viewports and I typically, if I have cameras set up 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 in my scene under cameras, it'll be here and you can choose to see through that camera. So let's jump into our perspective viewport, Alt-W, right? And let's create an object, right? So in this panel here, this is the create panel, right? So I can drag this out and create a second column. And then I have some options here. I have some tabs. So I have a create tab. I got the modify tab. I got a hierarchy tab. I got the motion and display and utilities. So each one of these does different things to create and modify objects. So under your Art Create tab you have your standard geometry, you have shapes like splines and stuff like that, you have lights, you have cameras, helpers, space works which is forces and stuff like that, and some systems that 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. 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 I have a sphere and I want to take the sphere in. Rip a chunk out of the cube, right? So you can like remove, subtract the cube from the sphere, which we can get into that a little bit. 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 those right so we can cover how to create a boolean object shortly but understand the primitives box so if you're really new to 3d studio max some of the primitives the creating some of the primitives can be a little tricky a little confusing so we have multiple operations So in this case, the cube has multiple click operations that you have to do in order to create a cube. So if I click and drag anywhere in the scene, it'll create the base of the cube first. And if I'm holding down my first little clicker button on my mouse, and I click and drag, 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 my mouse around, not clicking anything. And I move up in 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 want to click on any of 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 i can see the front neat right but if you want to be a little more efficient with uh with viewing things and you hold on your um 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 I can orbit by holding down alt and this is assuming 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 look around stuff. You can zoom into stuff You know, you don't have to like, you know play around with these cubes or these stupid buttons down here, right? So once you get used to that, just practice doing that a little bit. And then we'll take a look at our keyboard real quick. Look down at your keyboard. Q, W, E, R are really important keys, right? These are translation keys by default in Max. Those are your translation hotkeys, okay? What I mean by translation is that's your select, your move, your rotate, and your scale, right? So if I click on something and I click on Q, I can... I can't really move this. It's not really doing anything. I see the X, Y, and Z there, but that's just like selecting things. That's just your selector. And if I click on other keys or whatever, and I have Q selected, select object is selected, right? And I can hold down this little guy right here, and that gives me some options for the selector, right? I can choose a circle selector. So if I choose a circle, and I can choose, you know, like a... a fence select. It's like if you ever play with Illustrator or something, there's like a little fence crop tool. So I can like, that's really helpful if you're trying to select a series of faces. You have like a thousand faces on an object, whatever. And you want to like select only certain faces, you can be really precise with that tool. Otherwise, there's like the spray paint tool, which you can like, basically anything that comes in contact with the little spray paint can thing. Select that. So we'll go back to our basic rectangular selector. W moves, you see the little move gizmo, you can move in X Y & Z or like you know along the X & Y. E is your rotate, you can rotate you know similarly on X Y & Z or you can just kind of orbit around if you want to be a little more freeform about it. And R 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 don't have to click up here just makes makes your life a whole lot easier. You don't have to look at it, you know, you just kind of you just kind of intuitively know after a while like where what you can do there. Okay, so this little drop down here, the reference coordinate system is really helpful too. Let's say if I want to, if I move this up and I rotate this like that, whatever, you know. If I drop this down, if I go to screen, and no matter, you have to, you know, depending on what operation you're using, scale, rotate, or move, you have to change the reference coordinate system each time. It'll remember what you used for screen. If I rotate, you can tell that I can move this, and X and Y is flat against the screen that you're... However you're looking at the object, x and y is flat against the screen, right? So if I move the Around the cube, no matter how I move, I can always move this in X and Y relative to how I'm looking at it through the screen. So that can be pretty helpful for certain things. I use local a lot. Local changes the move or rotator scale gizmo based on the relative position of the object itself, the local position of the object. So Now it's relative to the object. 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 want it to come away perfectly up away from the object. You're screwing that face out or just whatever. It can come in really handy for modeling certain things. Control-Z works the same way. It's an undo. You can click 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 I'll clone this as a copy, clone this as a copy, right in the original location of my previous object, right? 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 option's dialog box pops up as well. So you can clone as a copy, clone as an instance and a reference, right? So I've cloned this in as an instance and I can choose, you know, like say three or four or however many. copies I want 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. And if I choose height, I can change the height. But you see that being that these three cubes were cloned as an instance from the original cube. The instance properties allow me to change all of them simultaneously. 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 and it will change the properties for all of them. Pretty helpful. Alternatively, I can... clone this as a reference, a bunch of references, right? So the original object just stays the same, right? In the reference objects you can tell that there's a little space above these, right? There's a little, there's this little blue bar above them, right? And if I click down into the box I can still modify the box same as an instance, but if I go above the blue box and I add a modifier to this one particular object, right, this one cube, let's say I put an edit poly modifier or something. and I drag this up. None of the other boxes change. 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. The referenced clone will change too, which is really helpful if you just want to modify one thing in an array of objects. I can go back here and I can modify this one, move this out. screw around with that if I want 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 retained from the original object click on this box and right-click and I can convert to editable poly and that I'll just completely erase all of the original source info so I think 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 these are still changing, right? But if I want to just make this one unique, I can click this little Make Unique button. So that way, if I click on any one of these, they all change besides this one. Oh, and this one too because I did the 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. All right. Okay, so let's say 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 if I turn that off and I turn on, let's say, vertex, so that'll snap to the vertices of a particular object. So I click on this cube, and you can tell, like, the little... move icon shows up and I can move this to that to the to this vertex perfectly like I can hold ctrl and click multiple objects and select multiple and then hover over the this vertex and I can move that perfectly so that works really well that is super helpful for being really precise with modeling I say you're modeling it you know a table or a piece of furniture 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 3D steel maps which is really helpful and then Really quick if I turn that off and I turn on this angle snaps I can you know if you hit E, you know your little select and 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 of the object. So right now it's at a five degree snap. This is super helpful like let's say if I rotate this and I go on working on some other stuff in my scene and ah shit that's rotated. So I can easily come back and you know like one of the ortho, you can easily 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 the snap the angle snap i have it do the percent snap there's a spinner snap which we're going to skip those for now um 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 i click a mirror and it's just going to mirror it or i can mirror it as a clone or a copy or a reference copy uh an instance or a reference i'm sorry and then i can offset it offset the clone however much i want okay Click OK and then that's just a reference to... So that's pretty helpful. So you can mirror stuff, you can align stuff... Oops. So let's say if I have this teapot selected and I want to align it. Let's see if I want to 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. 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 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 this stuff. You can do like the clay model, you can override it and choose wireframe, and then Okay, so if you have edge 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, 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 align X, Y, and Z. I can choose to rotate it based on the position, X, Y, and Z position of the box. And then I can match the scale too. but I didn't really scale the objects so we'll go ahead and hit apply okay so that's it's basically aligned 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 let's say create another teapot right and I want to create it on top of 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 so I click on that button now I can create a teapot relative to the face of wherever I'm wherever wherever I'm choosing on the particular object right so it'll it'll create a new teapot based on wherever I click so that's super helpful if you want to just make stuff pretty right cool so move move along down the the 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 let's basically just like one teapot and then you can create new layers with this little button here so if I want to sign this teapot to a new layer I can click on it and create a layer and it automatically assigns it to that layer you can double click teapots 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, whatever the previous object was on, selected on. If 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 layer. So that's pretty handy. So it uses layers all the time, just basic scene organization, right? You just got to use it. you have your material editor which we'll get to later all your render settings and stuff like that and i got a few plugins here so let's jump back into our create panel all right so we covered some standard primitives uh maybe we'll do like a real quick uh you know let's say uh i mentioned booleans earlier so um maybe we'll create a simple little boolean object here so i'll move this uh sphere into the uh cube there like this Something and I want to remove the sphere from the cube right so if I click on the cube and go to extended primitives Sorry compound objects with the cube selected. I have this This list these are no longer grayed out if I have this selected So I can go to pro boolean or boolean pro boolean is used if you want to subtract multiple objects From or if you want to sub 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, I can choose my sphere, and then it'll subtract it. Now let's say if I want to subtract it as a copy or something. Compound, I can do ProBoolean, which gives you a little bit more options. It's not only for subtracting or unioning or Boolean, Boolean-ing. Multiple objects you can also, yeah, it has a few 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, whatever operand I'm adding, so I can 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. And this stuff is animation. You can animate the Boolean operations happening, which we can cover that if you guys are interested in that. Let's see if I wanted to have this sphere pass through, and then it kind of just like subtracts it as it's 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 animating. Yeah, that covers some basic compound objects. In your extended primitives you got an oil tank, all kinds of different stuff in here. You got hedrons, hedronal shapes, all kinds of stuff. You guys can 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, you want to start with the simplest version of whatever you're trying to model. And that's just again... general philosophy of using 3D Studio Max of using polygon modeling right or sub D modeling so let's say if you wanted to model something like relatively complex like your hand right modeling your hand you wouldn't just like create an outline or anything like that or whatever you wouldn't create multiple objects you'd start with like a 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 then 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 we'll kind of like practice with that a little bit so maybe we'll just delete this stuff and we'll start with a brand new scene um and so we'll create a standard part of it and like so this list has a ton of different features you guys can If you guys 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 typical, if you want to do corner by corner, you can create a standard spline that has hard edge 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. Create 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 treat it as a spline and do something else with it, I can right-click, Convert to Editable Spline. Hard word to say. And then I can select the individual vertices and I can, you know, Tweak them, I can do whatever I want and grab the little corner points there. But pretty cool, right? Bunch of other stuff here. I'll let you guys play around with this. We'll continue on. You know, like let's say 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. We'll maybe like look at some ways 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 can 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 right and a box like that and Under our modifiers list you obviously 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 kind of have an idea of like what you want to do with with the box originally you can set up the segments in the parameters. Otherwise you can scroll down here. 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. So Edit Poly is super powerful. It allows you to do all kinds of stuff. You can select your vertices. I can select individual vertices and move them around. I can 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 edit modifiers or operations you can do to the edges of this object. So I could do is Jamfer, which in Max 2018 there's a chamfer modifier which we can add 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 and choose the sorry the radius here and then I can choose to animate this so I can always go back and edit that through the zedipali modifier which is pretty helpful otherwise if I have these edges selected In the modifier list, you can add multiple modifiers to any object, right? 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 in the modifier stack, right? So it's 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 item, which is super powerful. So, let's say if I want to add a chamfer modifier, right? So, I can do a standard chamfer, I can set the amount, a bunch of segments, whatever I want to, and it gives you a bunch of different parameters you can play with. So, and 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 edges selected and you can see the chamfer modifier still on Still taking over, right? So we'll go ahead and delete this from now. And you can create multiple edit polys. 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, a few more segments there. And I want to extrude out some of these faces, right? Okay. I can just do this one inward, 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? You can create another edit poly, and you can continue working, right? So if I want to create like another edge loop there, connect that, sure. And then if I want to... Select these vertices and pull them out do something else And then be like, oh 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 in the stack pretty cool So another thing is like another thing that I use a lot with like modeling organic shapes is if I have let's say two Then I can spread these out You can add a few edge loops. We'll kind of show you what that does Put us an edit poly modifier. I'm sorry a turbo smooth modifier on here So it kind of smooths it out and I can increase the iterations to make that super smooth. Looks pretty cool. And then if I go back to my, I can hide this with a little eyeball. And if I double click on the edge loop, I can like drag it up. And if I turn on turbo smooth, I still have that selected. So I can like see what that, see kind of how that works. So I can like edit that edge loop. And I can scale it. I can do whatever I want, right? So remember when I talked about modeling a hand, how you would start with a cube? That's kind of what we did here. We started with a cube, we extruded some pieces out, and then you can kind of just model it, sort of like geometric clay. So it's not really free- modeling you start with primitive objects like the simplest form of what this is like you can you could tell like your finger might be like a box right you can extrude a box out here extrude it a few times and then you know you know, add some subdivisions, kind of like what we did here. And then you can, to clean up, you know, to have more control of, like, where the smoothing will smooth around the edges. And then toss a smooth, a turbo smooth on there. And, you know, it's pretty simple to model organic shapes. Very simple. Another thing we can add here is like a noise modifier. So let's create like a sphere. Show you what this does real quick. And we'll keep the 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 super. Simple to get something like weird looking if you want like a modulating like hue or sphere or whatever You want it's it's really helpful 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 whoa, 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 like a thousand other like things that you would use uh the noise modifier for super powerful so let's go ahead and we'll just clear out our scene get rid of everything and we'll create another 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 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 it was created when the object was created. So in this case it was in the center of the box, and then I extruded this face out, but the pivot is still over there. So if I rotate this, it's rotating it based around the... pivot of the original location. What if I want to modify that? What if I wanted to rotate around the center of this box now that 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, and I want to rotate it around that particular location. Cool. Effect pivot only, center 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, you have to unclick that, remember, 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 play around with this. But that's just super easy. Just one thing that you're going to have to use eventually. So just remember that it's under the Hierarchy tab. So under the Motion tab, we'll cover some of the stuff that's in here with the controllers and motion 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 you have a bunch of geometry, you got some lights, right? You got a target 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, I click 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 And that also helps like if you're cruising through 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 current moment You could just like hide that stuff and you just like focus up 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 assign geometry to layers Like whatever to the 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 3ds Max, but hey, you know It's a it's up to you like however you want to work Okay, and then so in under utilities 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, a couple ways of doing this. If I want to make this one object, there's a couple ways of doing it. I can collapse it with a collapse utility, collapse selected, and that's just going to create one object. So no matter what I do, it's going to retain. If I have multiple materials, it's going to ask me if I want to merge materials into a multi-subobject material, which we'll cover later. But you can choose to just collapse into a... single object, multiple object, whatever you want. Pretty helpful little utility. Another way of doing it is if you have multiple objects created in your scene. Instead, if I don't want to Boolean these together, if I want to like let's say use them in the simulation or something, I can select one, I can add an Edit Poly modifier onto it, and then I can attach. elements right you can attach elements by a list 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 could do whatever I want with those 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, we scrub this little timeline here. There's nothing that happens, right? So, first things first, like typically when you create an animation, you want to go under your time configuration settings here, which is this little clock down there, this little button. I don't know why the button's 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 in post, whatever you want to do. You can choose your playback speed. I typically choose to 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 say I want to make a 10-second animation, right? at 30 frames per second that's 300 frames so i set my frame count to 300 you know um 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 um let's uh so let's animate this sphere moving uh or something if i click on auto key there's a couple ways of doing this right i can click on auto key and then i can click i can drag somewhere in my timeline and like just keep it in your head like you know you'll get used to it after a while like animating stuff but 30 30 frames is one second right so it's like one one thousand right uh 60 frames is two seconds right so if i move this it's going to take two seconds to get up there right so if i if i have auto key 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 going to 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 key frame there So and then I can always like select that keyframe and delete it if I don't want it And I can always drag these keyframes around let's say if I instead of 60 frames I want to happen in 30 frames. They take a second. I get up cool Let's see So that's like some basic, that's like how you basically animate something, right? So then I can like drag it here, drag it here, right? Drag 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 a path, right? something pretty simple. I can go ahead and delete all these keyframes, we don't need them. And then let's just go up 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 race track here for our smear. And then if I click on the first vertex here, it asks me to close spline. Yes, sure. Go back to perspective. And so we can do whatever you want with the spline. But if I have the sphere selected, let's maybe make this a little smaller, just so you can see it. Under the motion tab, under this first little drop down here, assign controller. There's a couple ways of doing this, but this is just kind of the longer way to do it. But it's like showing you guys step by step like how you would do it and have full control over this thing, right? The point is having full control over this, right? There's a 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. I can choose Position, right? And if I click on this little checkbox that says Assign Controller, I can choose a path constraint. Choose path constraint and then it gives a little dialogue here. I can choose add path and then I can choose the path. And it's automatically going to snap to the path. And then if I scrub my timeline, you can see there's two keyframes set up. One all at the beginning, one all at the end. If I scrub my timeline, it's going to go 100% all the way depending on the length of my timeline. So it's going to take just 300 frames. It'll take 10 seconds to get from the starting position, which kind of just randomly chose where the starting position was, all the way to the end. Now, if I want to have that, I can always drag this, and I can always change it to 120 frames. And then, whoa, cool, it got all the way there. Or I could change this if I want to have it three revolutions all the way around the track. I think this 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 It's 120 it stops And I say if I wanted to go backwards after 120 or something, you know, I can always go Along the path I can go negative So that way it's going to go it's gonna go do two 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, let's say we still have full control over this, right? Let's get rid of that. Change this back to 100. And I'll show you what this other option is doing here. So let's say there's some curves in our path, right? You can always smooth this out if you want to on your Modify tab. You've got Interpolation. You can increase the step size. You can kind of tell that the more I increase that step size, the smoother the spline gets. I don't know if you can really see that in the Monitor button. You can play with that. Click back on our little disk here. Now that we have that back in our Motion tab. With our path constraints still enabled, I can choose follow. It's going to follow. You kind of can't really tell what it's doing there, but you can tell when it goes around. a corner, it moves. It's a little bit more obvious when I click on bank. It goes around a corner, it banks around the corners. Which is really cool if you want to do stuff like animate a fighter jet or a bird or something that follows a path but it also wants to bank around stuff because that's what it naturally does. A bird doesn't fly like this. I could bank around stuff. I could choose to loop it forever. So there's a bunch of stuff you could do with the path constraint. So that's just like one method of animating stuff. 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 i want to like but after a certain amount of time if i click on our if i right click there's a couple ways you can bring this up but the easiest way is if you take any object select have any objects selected right click and you can bring up the dope sheet right um And let's see here. Objects in your sphere. You got 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 this object. And you can drag this down. You can see the transform. You can do all kinds of stuff here. But we're going to add a visibility track, right? So with this. object selected if you go to view sorry edit visibility track you can add to the sphere right so if i drop down you see the transform track you have visibility track too now add it right 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 okay so we can animate this by adding a couple keys right so let's say at um frame zero right click so it's framed okay sorry add or remove key you can click on this button right there you 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 at a value of zero. So that'll make it completely invisible. And we're going to keep our in and out here as curves because we want it to kind of like gradually pop in. Otherwise you can, I don't know, you can play around with these and see like however you want the visibility to animate in. Those are really helpful. Curves are really helpful in the curve editor, which you can look at in a different video or later or whatever. Curves are really helpful to animate the smoothness of things happening. Do you remember when we animated the sphere moving and we positioned it this way and this way? So if you wanted to have it jagged, it stops here and then moves here. You can have that, or you can use 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 zero it'll be invisible and at frame 30, let's see, we can drag this to frame 30, or you can even do it here, doesn't matter. At frame 30, you can tell it's already invisible, right, but we'll take a look at that again in a second. Click back on our little add key tool there and click on frame 30. We'll click another, make another keyframe there, right click on the keyframe, and we'll set this That's it. There's all kinds of different settings you can play with. So that's basically it. So our object animates from 0 to 1, visible to invisible, invisible to visible. So we're done with the dope, so you can close that. So now if I turn off edge faces, right, so you can't see the model anymore, you know, now it appears. Boom. So that affects the visibility of the shader of the sphere. So that's it for basically getting you guys started with modeling stuff, adding modifiers to the modifier stack for particular objects, basic animation using the hierarchy of particular objects, like changing the pivot in the hierarchy. We've covered some of the stuff in the motion tab, any path constraints and stuff like that. We covered the display tab, covered a couple basic utilities that you can use, and a bunch of the tools up here. 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 we'll probably stick with one render engine for now. Maybe we'll do 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've probably heard different rendering engines before and like what do they do and why are they different. So we'll cover some of that stuff. Again, this was just a basic crash course on like getting into 3ds Max and like the basic tools that we have. We've done a couple relatively complex exercises like animating things along a path. and how to use different modifiers and stuff like that. But ultimately, the goal of this video was to just get you up to speed on how to make stuff, how to just generally just make stuff in Max and how to use the interface. So if there's anything else that you guys are confused about, if there's anything that you want to dive deeper into, want to learn a little bit more about the different modifiers or something, let me know in the comments section below, and I can create a... maybe a separate tutorial or series of tutorials to 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. I 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 gods. Great. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you soon.

If you're just getting started with 3D Studio Max, that's perfectly fine. There's plenty of really great tutorials out there that walk you through every single modifier and how to create all 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 slightly more advanced methods near the tail end.

So let's get started. Let's jump into Max. So 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 be scaled to, right? So I typically select US standard from doing architectural visualization in my client, the units on their drawings, the units in their CAD files are in imperial units. So I typically choose decimal inches or fractional feet in inches.

Or you can choose metric if your client is using the metric system, of course. Or if you don't care, you can choose generic units. And by default, one unit equals, you know, like whatever you set it to. So in this case, we're going to be doing one unit equals one inch, and we're going to have you use 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 of just the basic, like, layout stuff first. So you have four standard viewports, right, that Max just opens up with, comes as default. You have your three orthographics, you have your top, your front, your left, and just the perspective 3D viewport, right? So in each of these viewports, you see this little plus sign, and I can click on that and I can maximize the viewport, right? But there's also the hotkey, the Alt-W hotkey.

So if I click on that, Alt-W, and if I hover over any viewport, Alt-W, I can maximize that particular viewport, right? And then there's also, if I... right click somewhere and some gray space up here. I know I got a lot of toolbars and we'll cover what all this stuff means just real briefly.

But if I choose viewport layouts tab there, this little window pops up and this is pretty helpful. You can have this open if you'd like to switch up your layout every once in a while for whatever reason. Some 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 then one big perspective up top or whatever. I just like, I like the three standard viewports and I typically, if I have cameras set up 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 in my scene under cameras, it'll be here and you can choose to see through that camera.

So let's jump into our perspective viewport, Alt-W, right? And let's create an object, right? So in this panel here, this is the create panel, right?

So I can drag this out and create a second column. And then I have some options here. I have some tabs.

So I have a create tab. I got the modify tab. I got a hierarchy tab. I got the motion and display and utilities. So each one of these does different things to create and modify objects.

So under your Art Create tab you have your standard geometry, you have shapes like splines and stuff like that, you have lights, you have cameras, helpers, space works which is forces and stuff like that, and some systems that 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. 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 I have a sphere and I want to take the sphere in. Rip a chunk out of the cube, right? So you can like remove, subtract the cube from the sphere, which we can get into that a little bit.

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 those right so we can cover how to create a boolean object shortly but understand the primitives box so if you're really new to 3d studio max some of the primitives the creating some of the primitives can be a little tricky a little confusing so we have multiple operations So in this case, the cube has multiple click operations that you have to do in order to create a cube. So if I click and drag anywhere in the scene, it'll create the base of the cube first. And if I'm holding down my first little clicker button on my mouse, and I click and drag, 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 my mouse around, not clicking anything. And I move up in 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 want to click on any of 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 i can see the front neat right but if you want to be a little more efficient with uh with viewing things and you hold on your um 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 I can orbit by holding down alt and this is assuming 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 look around stuff.

You can zoom into stuff You know, you don't have to like, you know play around with these cubes or these stupid buttons down here, right? So once you get used to that, just practice doing that a little bit. And then we'll take a look at our keyboard real quick.

Look down at your keyboard. Q, W, E, R are really important keys, right? These are translation keys by default in Max.

Those are your translation hotkeys, okay? What I mean by translation is that's your select, your move, your rotate, and your scale, right? So if I click on something and I click on Q, I can...

I can't really move this. It's not really doing anything. I see the X, Y, and Z there, but that's just like selecting things. That's just your selector.

And if I click on other keys or whatever, and I have Q selected, select object is selected, right? And I can hold down this little guy right here, and that gives me some options for the selector, right? I can choose a circle selector.

So if I choose a circle, and I can choose, you know, like a... a fence select. It's like if you ever play with Illustrator or something, there's like a little fence crop tool.

So I can like, that's really helpful if you're trying to select a series of faces. You have like a thousand faces on an object, whatever. And you want to like select only certain faces, you can be really precise with that tool.

Otherwise, there's like the spray paint tool, which you can like, basically anything that comes in contact with the little spray paint can thing. Select that. So we'll go back to our basic rectangular selector. W moves, you see the little move gizmo, you can move in X Y & Z or like you know along the X & Y. E is your rotate, you can rotate you know similarly on X Y & Z or you can just kind of orbit around if you want to be a little more freeform about it.

And R 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 don't have to click up here just makes makes your life a whole lot easier. You don't have to look at it, you know, you just kind of you just kind of intuitively know after a while like where what you can do there. Okay, so this little drop down here, the reference coordinate system is really helpful too. Let's say if I want to, if I move this up and I rotate this like that, whatever, you know.

If I drop this down, if I go to screen, and no matter, you have to, you know, depending on what operation you're using, scale, rotate, or move, you have to change the reference coordinate system each time. It'll remember what you used for screen. If I rotate, you can tell that I can move this, and X and Y is flat against the screen that you're... However you're looking at the object, x and y is flat against the screen, right?

So if I move the Around the cube, no matter how I move, I can always move this in X and Y relative to how I'm looking at it through the screen. So that can be pretty helpful for certain things. I use local a lot.

Local changes the move or rotator scale gizmo based on the relative position of the object itself, the local position of the object. So Now it's relative to the object. 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 want it to come away perfectly up away from the object. You're screwing that face out or just whatever.

It can come in really handy for modeling certain things. Control-Z works the same way. It's an undo.

You can click 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 I'll clone this as a copy, clone this as a copy, right in the original location of my previous object, right?

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 option's dialog box pops up as well. So you can clone as a copy, clone as an instance and a reference, right? So I've cloned this in as an instance and I can choose, you know, like say three or four or however many.

copies I want 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.

And if I choose height, I can change the height. But you see that being that these three cubes were cloned as an instance from the original cube. The instance properties allow me to change all of them simultaneously. 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 and it will change the properties for all of them. Pretty helpful. Alternatively, I can...

clone this as a reference, a bunch of references, right? So the original object just stays the same, right? In the reference objects you can tell that there's a little space above these, right?

There's a little, there's this little blue bar above them, right? And if I click down into the box I can still modify the box same as an instance, but if I go above the blue box and I add a modifier to this one particular object, right, this one cube, let's say I put an edit poly modifier or something. and I drag this up. None of the other boxes change.

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. The referenced clone will change too, which is really helpful if you just want to modify one thing in an array of objects. I can go back here and I can modify this one, move this out. screw around with that if I want 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 retained from the original object click on this box and right-click and I can convert to editable poly and that I'll just completely erase all of the original source info so I think 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 these are still changing, right?

But if I want to just make this one unique, I can click this little Make Unique button. So that way, if I click on any one of these, they all change besides this one. Oh, and this one too because I did the 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.

All right. Okay, so let's say 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 if I turn that off and I turn on, let's say, vertex, so that'll snap to the vertices of a particular object. So I click on this cube, and you can tell, like, the little...

move icon shows up and I can move this to that to the to this vertex perfectly like I can hold ctrl and click multiple objects and select multiple and then hover over the this vertex and I can move that perfectly so that works really well that is super helpful for being really precise with modeling I say you're modeling it you know a table or a piece of furniture 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 3D steel maps which is really helpful and then Really quick if I turn that off and I turn on this angle snaps I can you know if you hit E, you know your little select and 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 of the object. So right now it's at a five degree snap. This is super helpful like let's say if I rotate this and I go on working on some other stuff in my scene and ah shit that's rotated. So I can easily come back and you know like one of the ortho, you can easily 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 the snap the angle snap i have it do the percent snap there's a spinner snap which we're going to skip those for now um 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 i click a mirror and it's just going to mirror it or i can mirror it as a clone or a copy or a reference copy uh an instance or a reference i'm sorry and then i can offset it offset the clone however much i want okay Click OK and then that's just a reference to... So that's pretty helpful.

So you can mirror stuff, you can align stuff... Oops. So let's say if I have this teapot selected and I want to align it.

Let's see if I want to 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. 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 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 this stuff. You can do like the clay model, you can override it and choose wireframe, and then Okay, so if you have edge 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, 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 align X, Y, and Z. I can choose to rotate it based on the position, X, Y, and Z position of the box. And then I can match the scale too. but I didn't really scale the objects so we'll go ahead and hit apply okay so that's it's basically aligned 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 let's say create another teapot right and I want to create it on top of 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 so I click on that button now I can create a teapot relative to the face of wherever I'm wherever wherever I'm choosing on the particular object right so it'll it'll create a new teapot based on wherever I click so that's super helpful if you want to just make stuff pretty right cool so move move along down the the 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 let's basically just like one teapot and then you can create new layers with this little button here so if I want to sign this teapot to a new layer I can click on it and create a layer and it automatically assigns it to that layer you can double click teapots 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, whatever the previous object was on, selected on. If 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 layer.

So that's pretty handy. So it uses layers all the time, just basic scene organization, right? You just got to use it.

you have your material editor which we'll get to later all your render settings and stuff like that and i got a few plugins here so let's jump back into our create panel all right so we covered some standard primitives uh maybe we'll do like a real quick uh you know let's say uh i mentioned booleans earlier so um maybe we'll create a simple little boolean object here so i'll move this uh sphere into the uh cube there like this Something and I want to remove the sphere from the cube right so if I click on the cube and go to extended primitives Sorry compound objects with the cube selected. I have this This list these are no longer grayed out if I have this selected So I can go to pro boolean or boolean pro boolean is used if you want to subtract multiple objects From or if you want to sub 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, I can choose my sphere, and then it'll subtract it.

Now let's say if I want to subtract it as a copy or something. Compound, I can do ProBoolean, which gives you a little bit more options. It's not only for subtracting or unioning or Boolean, Boolean-ing.

Multiple objects you can also, yeah, it has a few 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, whatever operand I'm adding, so I can 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. And this stuff is animation. You can animate the Boolean operations happening, which we can cover that if you guys are interested in that.

Let's see if I wanted to have this sphere pass through, and then it kind of just like subtracts it as it's 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 animating. Yeah, that covers some basic compound objects. In your extended primitives you got an oil tank, all kinds of different stuff in here.

You got hedrons, hedronal shapes, all kinds of stuff. You guys can 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, you want to start with the simplest version of whatever you're trying to model.

And that's just again... general philosophy of using 3D Studio Max of using polygon modeling right or sub D modeling so let's say if you wanted to model something like relatively complex like your hand right modeling your hand you wouldn't just like create an outline or anything like that or whatever you wouldn't create multiple objects you'd start with like a 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 then 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 we'll kind of like practice with that a little bit so maybe we'll just delete this stuff and we'll start with a brand new scene um and so we'll create a standard part of it and like so this list has a ton of different features you guys can If you guys 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 typical, if you want to do corner by corner, you can create a standard spline that has hard edge 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. Create 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 treat it as a spline and do something else with it, I can right-click, Convert to Editable Spline. Hard word to say. And then I can select the individual vertices and I can, you know, Tweak them, I can do whatever I want and grab the little corner points there.

But pretty cool, right? Bunch of other stuff here. I'll let you guys play around with this.

We'll continue on. You know, like let's say 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. We'll maybe like look at some ways 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 can 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 right and a box like that and Under our modifiers list you obviously 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 kind of have an idea of like what you want to do with with the box originally you can set up the segments in the parameters. Otherwise you can scroll down here. 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. So Edit Poly is super powerful.

It allows you to do all kinds of stuff. You can select your vertices. I can select individual vertices and move them around. I can 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 edit modifiers or operations you can do to the edges of this object.

So I could do is Jamfer, which in Max 2018 there's a chamfer modifier which we can add 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 and choose the sorry the radius here and then I can choose to animate this so I can always go back and edit that through the zedipali modifier which is pretty helpful otherwise if I have these edges selected In the modifier list, you can add multiple modifiers to any object, right? 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 in the modifier stack, right?

So it's 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 item, which is super powerful. So, let's say if I want to add a chamfer modifier, right? So, I can do a standard chamfer, I can set the amount, a bunch of segments, whatever I want to, and it gives you a bunch of different parameters you can play with.

So, and 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 edges selected and you can see the chamfer modifier still on Still taking over, right? So we'll go ahead and delete this from now. And you can create multiple edit polys. 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, a few more segments there. And I want to extrude out some of these faces, right? Okay. I can just do this one inward, 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?

You can create another edit poly, and you can continue working, right? So if I want to create like another edge loop there, connect that, sure. And then if I want to... Select these vertices and pull them out do something else And then be like, oh 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 in the stack pretty cool So another thing is like another thing that I use a lot with like modeling organic shapes is if I have let's say two Then I can spread these out You can add a few edge loops. We'll kind of show you what that does Put us an edit poly modifier. I'm sorry a turbo smooth modifier on here So it kind of smooths it out and I can increase the iterations to make that super smooth.

Looks pretty cool. And then if I go back to my, I can hide this with a little eyeball. And if I double click on the edge loop, I can like drag it up. And if I turn on turbo smooth, I still have that selected. So I can like see what that, see kind of how that works.

So I can like edit that edge loop. And I can scale it. I can do whatever I want, right?

So remember when I talked about modeling a hand, how you would start with a cube? That's kind of what we did here. We started with a cube, we extruded some pieces out, and then you can kind of just model it, sort of like geometric clay.

So it's not really free- modeling you start with primitive objects like the simplest form of what this is like you can you could tell like your finger might be like a box right you can extrude a box out here extrude it a few times and then you know you know, add some subdivisions, kind of like what we did here. And then you can, to clean up, you know, to have more control of, like, where the smoothing will smooth around the edges. And then toss a smooth, a turbo smooth on there. And, you know, it's pretty simple to model organic shapes. Very simple.

Another thing we can add here is like a noise modifier. So let's create like a sphere. Show you what this does real quick. And we'll keep the 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 super. Simple to get something like weird looking if you want like a modulating like hue or sphere or whatever You want it's it's really helpful 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 whoa, 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 like a thousand other like things that you would use uh the noise modifier for super powerful so let's go ahead and we'll just clear out our scene get rid of everything and we'll create another 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 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 it was created when the object was created.

So in this case it was in the center of the box, and then I extruded this face out, but the pivot is still over there. So if I rotate this, it's rotating it based around the... pivot of the original location.

What if I want to modify that? What if I wanted to rotate around the center of this box now that 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, and I want to rotate it around that particular location. Cool. Effect pivot only, center 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, you have to unclick that, remember, 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 play around with this. But that's just super easy.

Just one thing that you're going to have to use eventually. So just remember that it's under the Hierarchy tab. So under the Motion tab, we'll cover some of the stuff that's in here with the controllers and motion 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 you have a bunch of geometry, you got some lights, right?

You got a target 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, I click 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 And that also helps like if you're cruising through 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 current moment You could just like hide that stuff and you just like focus up 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 assign geometry to layers Like whatever to the 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 3ds Max, but hey, you know It's a it's up to you like however you want to work Okay, and then so in under utilities 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, a couple ways of doing this. If I want to make this one object, there's a couple ways of doing it. I can collapse it with a collapse utility, collapse selected, and that's just going to create one object.

So no matter what I do, it's going to retain. If I have multiple materials, it's going to ask me if I want to merge materials into a multi-subobject material, which we'll cover later. But you can choose to just collapse into a...

single object, multiple object, whatever you want. Pretty helpful little utility. Another way of doing it is if you have multiple objects created in your scene.

Instead, if I don't want to Boolean these together, if I want to like let's say use them in the simulation or something, I can select one, I can add an Edit Poly modifier onto it, and then I can attach. elements right you can attach elements by a list 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 could do whatever I want with those 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, we scrub this little timeline here. There's nothing that happens, right? So, first things first, like typically when you create an animation, you want to go under your time configuration settings here, which is this little clock down there, this little button.

I don't know why the button's 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 in post, whatever you want to do. You can choose your playback speed.

I typically choose to 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 say I want to make a 10-second animation, right? at 30 frames per second that's 300 frames so i set my frame count to 300 you know um 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 um let's uh so let's animate this sphere moving uh or something if i click on auto key there's a couple ways of doing this right i can click on auto key and then i can click i can drag somewhere in my timeline and like just keep it in your head like you know you'll get used to it after a while like animating stuff but 30 30 frames is one second right so it's like one one thousand right uh 60 frames is two seconds right so if i move this it's going to take two seconds to get up there right so if i if i have auto key 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 going to 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 key frame there So and then I can always like select that keyframe and delete it if I don't want it And I can always drag these keyframes around let's say if I instead of 60 frames I want to happen in 30 frames. They take a second.

I get up cool Let's see So that's like some basic, that's like how you basically animate something, right? So then I can like drag it here, drag it here, right? Drag 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 a path, right? something pretty simple. I can go ahead and delete all these keyframes, we don't need them.

And then let's just go up 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 race track here for our smear. And then if I click on the first vertex here, it asks me to close spline. Yes, sure. Go back to perspective.

And so we can do whatever you want with the spline. But if I have the sphere selected, let's maybe make this a little smaller, just so you can see it. Under the motion tab, under this first little drop down here, assign controller. There's a couple ways of doing this, but this is just kind of the longer way to do it. But it's like showing you guys step by step like how you would do it and have full control over this thing, right?

The point is having full control over this, right? There's a 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. I can choose Position, right?

And if I click on this little checkbox that says Assign Controller, I can choose a path constraint. Choose path constraint and then it gives a little dialogue here. I can choose add path and then I can choose the path. And it's automatically going to snap to the path. And then if I scrub my timeline, you can see there's two keyframes set up.

One all at the beginning, one all at the end. If I scrub my timeline, it's going to go 100% all the way depending on the length of my timeline. So it's going to take just 300 frames. It'll take 10 seconds to get from the starting position, which kind of just randomly chose where the starting position was, all the way to the end. Now, if I want to have that, I can always drag this, and I can always change it to 120 frames.

And then, whoa, cool, it got all the way there. Or I could change this if I want to have it three revolutions all the way around the track. I think this 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 It's 120 it stops And I say if I wanted to go backwards after 120 or something, you know, I can always go Along the path I can go negative So that way it's going to go it's gonna go do two 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, let's say we still have full control over this, right?

Let's get rid of that. Change this back to 100. And I'll show you what this other option is doing here. So let's say there's some curves in our path, right? You can always smooth this out if you want to on your Modify tab. You've got Interpolation.

You can increase the step size. You can kind of tell that the more I increase that step size, the smoother the spline gets. I don't know if you can really see that in the Monitor button. You can play with that.

Click back on our little disk here. Now that we have that back in our Motion tab. With our path constraints still enabled, I can choose follow.

It's going to follow. You kind of can't really tell what it's doing there, but you can tell when it goes around. a corner, it moves.

It's a little bit more obvious when I click on bank. It goes around a corner, it banks around the corners. Which is really cool if you want to do stuff like animate a fighter jet or a bird or something that follows a path but it also wants to bank around stuff because that's what it naturally does. A bird doesn't fly like this. I could bank around stuff.

I could choose to loop it forever. So there's a bunch of stuff you could do with the path constraint. So that's just like one method of animating stuff.

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 i want to like but after a certain amount of time if i click on our if i right click there's a couple ways you can bring this up but the easiest way is if you take any object select have any objects selected right click and you can bring up the dope sheet right um And let's see here.

Objects in your sphere. You got 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 this object. And you can drag this down. You can see the transform. You can do all kinds of stuff here. But we're going to add a visibility track, right?

So with this. object selected if you go to view sorry edit visibility track you can add to the sphere right so if i drop down you see the transform track you have visibility track too now add it right 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 okay so we can animate this by adding a couple keys right so let's say at um frame zero right click so it's framed okay sorry add or remove key you can click on this button right there you 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 at a value of zero. So that'll make it completely invisible.

And we're going to keep our in and out here as curves because we want it to kind of like gradually pop in. Otherwise you can, I don't know, you can play around with these and see like however you want the visibility to animate in. Those are really helpful. Curves are really helpful in the curve editor, which you can look at in a different video or later or whatever.

Curves are really helpful to animate the smoothness of things happening. Do you remember when we animated the sphere moving and we positioned it this way and this way? So if you wanted to have it jagged, it stops here and then moves here. You can have that, or you can use 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 zero it'll be invisible and at frame 30, let's see, we can drag this to frame 30, or you can even do it here, doesn't matter. At frame 30, you can tell it's already invisible, right, but we'll take a look at that again in a second. Click back on our little add key tool there and click on frame 30. We'll click another, make another keyframe there, right click on the keyframe, and we'll set this That's it. There's all kinds of different settings you can play with. So that's basically it.

So our object animates from 0 to 1, visible to invisible, invisible to visible. So we're done with the dope, so you can close that. So now if I turn off edge faces, right, so you can't see the model anymore, you know, now it appears.

Boom. So that affects the visibility of the shader of the sphere. So that's it for basically getting you guys started with modeling stuff, adding modifiers to the modifier stack for particular objects, basic animation using the hierarchy of particular objects, like changing the pivot in the hierarchy. We've covered some of the stuff in the motion tab, any path constraints and stuff like that.

We covered the display tab, covered a couple basic utilities that you can use, and a bunch of the tools up here. 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 we'll probably stick with one render engine for now. Maybe we'll do 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've probably heard different rendering engines before and like what do they do and why are they different. So we'll cover some of that stuff.

Again, this was just a basic crash course on like getting into 3ds Max and like the basic tools that we have. We've done a couple relatively complex exercises like animating things along a path. and how to use different modifiers and stuff like that. But ultimately, the goal of this video was to just get you up to speed on how to make stuff, how to just generally just make stuff in Max and how to use the interface.

So if there's anything else that you guys are confused about, if there's anything that you want to dive deeper into, want to learn a little bit more about the different modifiers or something, let me know in the comments section below, and I can create a... maybe a separate tutorial or series of tutorials to 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.

I 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 gods.

Great. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you soon.

Transcript for:3D Studio Max Essentials for Beginners

Transcript for:
3D Studio Max Essentials for Beginners