Creating and transforming objects - 3ds Max Tutorial

- Creating objects, or primitives, can be accomplished from the Menus, under Create, or from the Create panel in the Command panel over here. Let's use the Create panel, and the simplest type of object you can create is a sphere. Click on the button labeled Sphere, and in the Perspective View, click and drag and you'll create several spheres. And you'll notice that each one is a different color. You get random colors by default. When you're done creating spheres, you can right click in the view port, and that will exit out of the sphere tool. And with one of those spheres selected, you can go now to the Modify panel. And here you have the object parameters, or attributes. And you can change these attributes by typing in values, or by clicking and dragging on these spinners, the little arrows that go up and down. So for example, I can click and drag on the radius in order to increase or decrease the radius of the selected sphere. Additionally, we can change the name or the color of the object, and we can just type in another name here like Ball or whatever. We can change the color; click on the color swatch here. And this is the object or wire frame color. And within this dialogue we cannot only change colors of objects, but we can also disable the behavior to assign random colors. I'm going to do that. I'm going to make it so that all objects I create will just be a neutral gray. So I'll turn off Assign Random Colors and click OK. And I've changed the color of that particular sphere to gray, and now all future objects will also be gray. If I want to delete the objects, I can just select them. The default tool on the main toolbar is Select Object. And I can drag a rectangle around all those spheres and select them all, and press the Delete key on my keyboard to delete them all. I can go back to the Create panel and create a different type of primitive, such as a box. So if I click on box, now I've entered the Box Creation Tool and I'll need to click and drag, holding down the mouse in order to set the footprint, or the X and Y length and width of that box. When I release the mouse button then I can move the mouse in order to determine the Z or height parameter and then click to create that box. And when I'm done creating boxes, I can right click and exit out of that. So that's how to create primitives. Let's also talk about how to manipulate, or transform them. Also on the main toolbar, we have the Transform tools. Select and Move, Select and Rotate, and Select and Scale. I'll choose the Move tool and I get the so called Move gizmo. Gizmo is a term meaning a small device. And the gizmo, or manipulator is labeled with X, Y and Z axes. So I can position the box anywhere in my scene using these arrows. Additionally there are some brackets, which will allow me to move in more than one axis at once. As I hover my mouse over the X Z bracket, I can move that box in two dimensions. Or I can go over to the Rotate tool, and likewise click on one of these axes in order to rotate around that axis. If I want to undo, I can click the Undo button. When you perform a transform, such as position or rotation, that transform has to happen relative to some point of reference. And that point of reference is chosen from this pull down list here labeled Reference Coordinate System. For example, we can rotate an object in local coordinates. And at first, that looks the same until we actually rotate the object in a couple of axes, and we can see that the rotation gizmo has rotated with the object. And if we switch the reference coordinate system back over to View, we see that the rotate gizmo has changed. And in a perspective view, such as this one, the view coordinate system actually operates in world space. So there's functionally no difference between view and world here in this perspective view but in these orthographic views such as front, top and left, the view coordinate system will operate differently. I can illustrate a little bit better by going over to the Move tool. And notice that the reference coordinate system changed back to view. That tells me that each one of these transforms remembers the state of its reference coordinate system. If I go back to Select and Move, and then click in the front view port, select the object, we can see that the X axis is pointing to the right, and the Y axis is pointing up. I can go over to the top view, and right click in that view so I don't lose my selection, and in the top view port, again, X is pointing to the right and Y is pointing up. And that is, according to the view coordinates, or the coordinates of the actual view or the viewport itself. So the X axis is left to right in each viewport, and the Y axis is up and down. But that is not the same as the world coordinates. If I right click in the left viewport, we can see that X is pointing to the right, but down in the lower left corner we see the actual coordinates of the world, in which the X axis is actually pointing into the viewport, not to the right. And in this left viewport, Z is pointing up. That's the elevation. But the gizmo itself shows us that the Y axis is pointing up. This is all just to tell us that when we manipulate using the view coordinate system, we are moving the object relative to the selected viewport except in a perspective view. If we go back over to the perspective view and right click, we can see that the move gizmo is oriented to the world coordinate space, or the axes of the scene. So once again, the view coordinate system operates in view space, in these orthographic or 2D views, and the view coordinate system operates in world space, in a perspective or 3D view. That's the basics of how to create and manipulate or transform objects.