3ds Max customization tweaks - 3ds Max Tutorial

- [Teacher] In this video, we just want to take a minute or two so as to highlight some of the setup options that have been applied to the scene files for the course. As well, let's take a look at some of the tweaks that I have made to my 3ds Max setup so as to make our modeling workflow just that little bit smoother. And probably the first thing worth pointing out here is the fact that the timeline in our scenes has been set to just use four frames. If I just right click on the Play button down in the timeline, we get the Time Configuration dialogue where you can see that I have set the animation end time option here to a value of four. Now of course, we are interested in modeling here not animation, but if I just close out here, and hit the M key to open up the Material Editor, we can see that we have what I have called a modeling material already set up. Now this is just a 3ds Max physical material with HSV settings of one, 0.92, and 0.37 respectively. We have a roughness value of 0.8, and perhaps most importantly of all, an animated transparency setting that goes from completely opaque at frame zero to 0.25 on frame one, 0.5 on frame two, 0.75 on frame three, and then completely transparent on frame four. What this means is that should we have a need, we can easily adjust the transparency of the level of our model in order to accommodate the type of modeling operation that we are engaged in. Now in reality, I am not going to be making much if any use of this feature at all in this particular course as the modeling scenarios that we will use don't really call for it. As it is, a standard way in which I set up the modeling projects, however, and because it is there should you want or need to take advantage of it, I just wanted to point out to you that it is there. The next tweak that I want to highlight is the fact that over in the Modify tab of the command panel, I have a number of modifier types already set up in an easy to access button set. And these essentially are the modifiers that I find myself typically using quite a lot whilst working on modeling projects. So, edit, poly, symmetry, open sub-div, and so on. Now we can easily set these up for ourselves by clicking on the Configure Modifier Sets button in the stack controls, and then from the popup menu, selecting the list entry of the same name. This brings up a straightforward and easy to use dialogue that really lets us create and name our own modifier button sets. We can choose the number of buttons that we want in the set, and then from the modifiers list on the left, all we need do is drag and drop entries on the modifier's set. Clicking the Save button once we are done. Now it really is as easy as that to create our own modifier sets. Now the last but by no means least piece of setup that I want to highlight here is the hot key or keyboard shortcuts that I have created. If we come to the Customize menu, and choose the Customize User Interface entry, we can use the group dropdown to quickly isolate the shortcuts found in the Edit Poly group. Now from here we can take a look at some of the changes that I have made. So, for instance, the cut tool I have assigned to the ALT and C key combo. Textured mode is set to Shift D, and so it goes. Now of course these are hot key settings that are really tied to my personal preferences, and so if you want to stick with Max's defaults as you work through this course, then that is just fine. Although you will need to transpose at points in the course where I use some of the specific keystrokes that I have set up. So for instance, the cut tool in Max has no default keyboard shortcut assigned to it. If you would like to use the same keyboard shortcuts as me, simply for the sake of ease as you work through the course, then all you need to do is click on the Load button that we see here, and then from in inside the exercise files project structure that we have already looked up, jump into the 3ds Max keyboard folder, and from there, load the modeling_shortcuts.kbdx file. Now I have also provided a straight text file that lists all of the keyboard shortcuts being used, meaning should you want to, you can just take a look at that file and memorize them which nicely wraps up our quick look at the setup tweaks that I have made for this course.