From the course: Animating in 3ds Max: Constraints, Controllers, and Wire Parameters

The 3ds Max project structure - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: Animating in 3ds Max: Constraints, Controllers, and Wire Parameters

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The 3ds Max project structure

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- [Narrator] The scene files that we will be using in this course have been setup using 3DS Max's built-in project management tools. Meaning we have made use of a very specific project folder in order to gain quick, easy and trouble free access to the provided files from inside the 3DS Max application. To ensure that you were setup and ready to take advantage of this file management system, we're going to quickly walk through both setting up and then making use of a project folder for this course. Before doing that however, we will also want to perform a quick check on our 3DS Max preference settings. To do that we can open up the customize menu and from the drop down list that appears choose the preferences option. Once the preferences dialogue appears we want to jump into the files tab and from inside there make certain that we have put a check in the convert local file paths to relative option. This just ensures that should we decide to add any files to the project folder as we move forward from this point. They will always receive a file path that is relative to the project. As oppose that is to receiving a hard coded local path which ca cause all sorts of problems should we want to move or pass our project folder to another machine or maybe even another artist. Do keep in mind though, that this step will only help if we make certain that any files we do add from this point forward are placed inside the exercise files project's structure itself. With that done we can now step through the process of setting up our 3DS Max project folder for this course. To do that, all we need to do with our cursor over the max view ports is hit the X key. Type PROJ and then choose the set project folder option that appears in the sorted list. This opens up a dialogue that lets us select any folder available on our storage drives and set that as the root for our project. In this instance I will of course want to locate the downloaded exercise files folder which as noted, has been placed on my desktop and then click to select it. Once done we can hit the OK button and our exercise files folder has been setup to serve as our project folder. What we will find now is that whenever we use application functions. Such as open, import, export or even setup a render output path we will find ourselves automatically taken straight to the appropriate folder in our project route. Whenever we want to open up a start scene for instance. All we need to do is use the open command which takes us straight to the project scenes folder and then from there select the appropriate chapter folder and then the appropriate start scene file.

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