From the course: 3ds Max 2017 Essential Training

Correcting topology with QuickSlice - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2017 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Correcting topology with QuickSlice

- [Voiceover] We use the cut tool to chop through all these corners, to make quadrilateral polygons everywhere on the surface. But we're still not quite ready to do a boolean because on both the North and South walls of the apartment there are three windows. And if I just use the Boolean tool to chop three holes on this wall face over here, it would probably fail. And that's because there's not enough detail on the model currently to support those cuts. This is just the sort of thing you learn over experience, when you'll model something and then try to do a boolean, and it'll fail, and your object vanishes and you're scratching your head, why did the booleans fail? It's not that there's really a problem with booleans, it's just that we have to have a model that's structured well for them to work. And in this case what I need are a couple of extra edges running through the entire model on both the North and South walls. And I need to place those edges between the windows, right now I can't see the windows, so I need to actually make my image plane visible again. I'll go ahead and open up the Scene Explorer, and make the image plane visible, and I can't really see the image plane terribly well here, I can't really tell precisely where the windows are, and I want to see through the model. Well I could turn off the shading in order to see through the model. I can do that with F3 to go into wireframe mode. But if I do that then I can't see the material on that image plane object. So I'll hit F3 again, go back to shaded mode, and what we wanna do is actually just temporarily make this object transparent. There's an easy way to do that, just select the object, and then right click, and in the quad menu go to the Object Properties, and enable the See Through display property, and then click OK. And now where in a kind of x-ray mode where we can see through the model and also see the edges, and the shading and the materials. Cool. So we wanna chop a straight line right through this wall, vertically here, and also here, likewise on the back wall. Ok, we can use the Quick Slice tool to do that. Quick Slice only operates on selected polygons. We need to be in Polygon Sub-Object mode. We could activate that mode from the command panel here. We could also activate it from the ribbon itself, we've got our sub-object types here. Let's click on Polygon Sub-Object, and select all the polygons on the North and South walls. Just drag a selection rectangle around all those. That looks good. And we can use Quick Slice in any window, but it's best to use Quick Slice in an orthographic view, in this case the top view port. I'll go Alt + W out to the top view, Alt + W again, and to make it a clean cut I want to snap to the grid. Quick Slice does not have snapping built into it. So let's turn the grid back on with the G key. And let's turn snapping on, we can use the keyboard shortcut for that, which is S. And now I'm able to snap to grid points. The modeling ribbon has collapsed some of the tools here, because I don't have enough space on my main toolbar, or on the ribbon itself. But, if it's hidden, you can go into this edit section here and access the Quick Slice tool. Just click on that. And now it's active. And we want to chop through, get in real close here, here's the wall between those two windows, so we want to chop straight through between those two windows. Click once and don't hold the mouse down, and then use the middle mouse to navigate down to the bottom, and then go down here. And we don't actually need to be outside the model for it to work. In other words, if I clicked here it would still work, it would chop through in a plane, through all the selected polygons. But it's just conceptually easier for me to grasp when I actually place the cursor here, so that that green line is chopping through all of the selected polygons. So I'll just click a second time and now I've got a new set of edges there. Let's check that in the Perspective view with Alt + W, and then orbit around, we can deselect our polygons if we want, I'll right click to exit out of that Quick Slice tool and deselect the polygons, and we can see pretty clearly we've got a new edge there. Ok, we gotta do another one here as well, so we'll go back into Polygon Sub-Object, and we're still in the Quick Slice tool, we can right click a couple times to exit out of it, let's select those polygons, there they are. And then go back to Quick Slice, it's now active, I can go back to my top view port, Alt + W, right click in the top view to activate it, Alt + W again, and then do another Quick Slice. And as I said, since these polygons are selected up here, we don't really need to drag that Quick Slice all the way up there. You can actually just click once here, click once again here, and it's chopped through all of the selected polygons based upon a plane defined by the line that we drew in this top view. So let's exit out of Quick Slice, we can click on the button again to disable it. And then examine our work, go back out to the Perspective View with Alt + W. And now we've got two new edge loops chopped through, very cool. So this is now prepped so that when we do a boolean operation, we should hopefully see no failure states. I'll exit out of Sub-Object, with that object still selected right click, go back to its Object Properties and disable the See Through property. Alright, that's how to use the Quick Slice tool to add new edges by chopping through selected polygons.

Contents