From the course: 3ds Max 2020 Essential Training

Duplicating objects with Array - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2020 Essential Training

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Duplicating objects with Array

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- [Instructor] We can begin the layout of our scene by blocking out the locations of these columns, which are evenly spaced in the image plane of the floor plan. So we can go ahead and create a column and then duplicate it multiple times, using the Array tool. Let's create a cylinder. In the Create panel, Geometry, Standard Primitives, click on Cylinder. Click and drag anywhere in the Perspective view to set the cylinder radius. Release the mouse, and drag upward to set its height. Click to complete that cylinder, and right-click to exit the tool. Before we make duplicates of it, let's set its parameters. Go into the Modify panel, and rename it. Instead of Cylinder 001, let's call it Column 001. And change its color, too. We'll make it a little darker. Click on the Object Color. And when you have the Object Color dialog, and there aren't really good options for gray here. We have black, white, and we have a bright gray. Let's add a custom color. Click on the Add Custom Colors button, and we get the Color Selector. Then we can choose one of these custom color swatches. And the current color is displayed, and we can change that. Let's set the value to 50, and then click Add Color. Now the darker color, go to the next one, bring that down even more. Let's give it 40, and Add Color. And then one more, we'll do the next one in the row here. We'll select it, and we'll set its value to 30. And click Add Color again. Then we can close the Color Selector. Now we have a few shades of gray we can play with. Be aware that because of gamma correction, the colors that you see here in these swatches will not match the actual colors in the viewport. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about that. So you're just kind of flying blind when you're making these colors. So let's choose that dark gray. And click OK, and it's assigned to that object. You can see it looks even darker than the color swatch. All right, let's change its parameters. Select it. Give it a radius of 15 centimeters. Press Tab. Give it a height of 400 centimeters. Press Tab. The height segments and cap segments, we can't see unless we get in closer here. So, with that object selected, right-click in the viewport so that you exit out of input mode over here. And then press the Z key to zoom in. And then press the F4 key to show edged faces. And the height segments are set to five, which means we have five lines of longitude running around. And that's probably fine, but I want a little bit more detail in the other direction. I want more lines of latitude running north-south. I'll set the number of sides over here to 36. All right, now that's got enough detail that it will look fine in a proper rendering. And we can dolly out, Control + Alt and middle mouse. Maybe go to the top view now, Alt + W. Go over to the top view, right-click in that view, and Alt + W to maximize it. Grab the Move tool, and position that cylinder or column on top of the column at the upper left. And once we've positioned it there, we can see a readout of the current world coordinates, and it looks like it should be 900 units in X and Y. So let's set the X to negative 900, press Tab, and Y to 900. And we can zoom in here to verify the position. Once again, right-click in the viewport to exit out of data entry mode. And then press the Z key to zoom in. We can switch to wireframe with F3, and notice that the Achilles' heel or the big weakness of using an image plane on a geometric plane is that when we go into wireframe mode, we can't see our image any longer. And there is no way in 3ds Max to selectively choose some objects to be shaded and others to be displayed in wireframe. You can create a wireframe material if you need to. All right, I'll hit F3 again, so we can go back to shaded mode. And it doesn't line up exactly perfectly, but I don't expect it to. This image is only 2,048 pixels on a side, and it's spread across a distance of 20 meters. So each pixel is quite large. We can't expect it to be very accurate, and that's why I put in the values numerically down here. Now we are ready to create the array. Go back to the four-viewport layout, with Alt + W, back to Perspective over here, and create the array. With the object selected, go into the Tools menu, and choose Array. And here we can determine the distances we want and the number of copies for this array. So I know that I need a total of four columns going east to west and a total of three columns going north-south. And that's going to be three times four, or 12 columns. So here we have X, Y, and Z, position, rotation, and scale. And I don't know how much I want to move that over, but I know that I'm going to need a total of four columns running east and west. So here I'll put in, for the count in one dimension, a value of four. Press the Tab key. And then go down here, and click on the big Preview button. And now you're going to get a live update if you change any of these parameters. I'm going to increase the X position value. In the upper left here, just click and drag on that spinner, and now we have four columns. And I can roughly adjust that and then release the mouse, and it looks like it wants to be 600 centimeters. So that's what I'll type in here, 600. And press Tab. So that's in one dimension. We also want copies in the other dimension here. So under Array Dimensions, we'll choose 2D, and the total number we want is going to be three. So increase the count to a value of three. And then click and drag on the Y axis, and drag that down because we want to move in negative Y. And as I drag that down, notice that my cursor will wrap from the bottom to the top of the screen, so that's very handy. So I can position that roughly, and it, too, looks like it wants to be 600 centimeters. It's going to be negative 600. Type that in, and press Enter. And now it looks like we've got the situation we want, with those columns precisely positioned, each six meters away from the other. And if we like what we see, we can go ahead and click the OK button. And now we have all these different columns. Now notice that when we select the column, its name is actually in bold up here. And that's because, by default, when you create an array, you create instances. So I can go back in there real quick, just to show you, if I select something and go back to Tools, Array, the default type of object is Instance, and that means all the objects are going to be identical. If you make changes to one, you change them all. So I'll cancel out of there. So if I select any one of these and change it's parameters, they will all be affected because they're instances. So change the height, and they all grow. All right, I'll undo that with Control + Z. That's how to use the Array tool to make duplicates in a spatial pattern.

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