From the course: 3ds Max and After Effects: Product Visualization

Body Object Viewport Display options

From the course: 3ds Max and After Effects: Product Visualization

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Body Object Viewport Display options

- [Narrator] One of the key advantages of using 3ds Max for visualizing CAD models, is the ability to change the level of detail or surface approximation at any time. That's accomplished through the parameters of the body object, which preserves the procedural nature of the solid model. But because we're using XRefs in this project, that adds a little more complexity to our workflow. We can't access an externally referenced modifier stack. That means we can't open up our master scene and change the parameters of the body objects directly. To make changes to the object parameters, we need to open up the source file, or the scene that's being referenced into the master scene. For the purposes of this demo, I've got an XRef scene open currently, so that I can change the parameters. Let's talk about the display settings for a body object. I've got a standard shaded view here. Let's select the landing legs object. Go over to the modify panel, and we've got two important rollout, rendering approximation and roll outs display settings. I want to talk about these display options here. We have three buttons, curves, mesh and both. And these determine how the object will display in shaded and wire frame views. The default is both. And when both is on, if we're in a shaded view, we'll see a surface. If we switch over to our wire frame view with F3, we'll see the curves. We've got some profile and some path curves here. So that's both. If we switch to curves, then we'll see these curves, whether we're in a wire frame or a shaded view. If I switch back to F3, we're getting a shaded view on everything except for those landing legs, because they're set to display curves. Then we come to mesh. If mesh is enabled then it acts basically like an ordinary polygon mesh. If we switch back to a wire frame view with F3, we can actually see the tesselation of the polygon. So getting close with control, hauls and middle mouse. So in mesh display mode, we're actually seeing the individual triangles or polygons, and that will apply either in a wire frame or in a shaded view, that's displaying edged faces. So I can switch back to a shaded view with F3 and turn on edged faces with F4. And now we can see the edges superimposed on the faces or wire frame unshaded. And I do recommend that you use the mesh display mode, because that will actually show you what the true tesselation of that mesh is. If you switch it to both, then you'll never get to see the tessellation, even if you're in the F4 edged faces mode. So that both mode is kind of deceptive. It's showing us a surface, and some curves, but it's not actually showing us the mesh per say. Okay. So I want to have mesh enabled. Up here we see rendering approximation, and it's got a whole bunch of controls in here that determine how the object will tessellate in the renderer. Well, I actually recommend that you don't use these settings at all, but rather use the viewport display settings to control the render tessellation. That way, what you see in your viewport will directly correspond to what you get when you render. If you're on a very old computer or very slow system, or if you've got an extremely heavy CAD model that just won't update correctly in your viewport, then maybe under one of those conditions, you might want to have a separate setting for rendering and viewport. But with the speed of computers today, really that's kind of a rare situation. So I do recommend that you go up here and turn on the switch labeled, 'use viewport mesh,' and that way none of these settings here will have any effect. And the rendering will use the settings from the viewport display settings only. That's how to change up the basic display settings for body object.

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