From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

Getting familiar with the interface - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

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Getting familiar with the interface

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- [Narrator] Beginning the chapter on the 3ds Max Interface, let's take a quick tour of the interface elements and learn the names of those various elements and their functions. We'll begin with the main menu up here at the top. And it's a standard menu. For example, we can go into the Create menu. We can see that there's a cascading menu structure with different items organized into categories. However, unlike some programs, the 3ds Max main menu is not very complete. There are many items and many commands that are not accessible through the main menus. And a lot of that stuff is going to be found over here in this so-called Command panel on the right hand side of the interface. And the Command panel is divided into six subpanels. We have the Create panel, Modify, Hierarchy, Motion, Display, and Utilities. And these are all very important, but most importantly are the Create and Modify panels. You'll spend a lot of time over here in the Command panel because it's really the heart of 3ds Max. In the center of the screen, we have the viewports, and we have the four viewport layout currently with the top, front, left and perspective view. We can change the viewport layouts in a couple of different ways. One of them is from this tool bar over here on the left side and that's called the Viewport Panel Tab toolbar. We'll look at that a little bit later when we customize the interface. Next to that is an outline view of all of the objects in your scene, and that's called the Scene Explorer. Above the Scene Explorer but below the main toolbar is an area called the Ribbon, and it's minimized by default. We can expand it by clicking on the button that's labeled Show Full Ribbon, and then that will open up. And within here, we have a lot of tools, primarily for modeling. And since we have nothing in our scene yet, we don't have a lot of options on the Ribbon. We can collapse that Ribbon once again just by clicking the button to minimize it. At the bottom of the screen, we have Animation tools. We have the time slider and the timeline. And that allows us to identify what time we are at, or what frame we're on. And currently I'm on frame zero out of 100, and I can drag that time slider to go to a different point in time. There are controls for the transport for animation. Here we have playback, rewind and so on. And we also have some keyframe options here. We can create keys automatically or manually. And then in the far right, the lower right corner, we have some viewport navigation controls we'll look at later. Then also in the middle here of this bottom section of the interface, is a Transform Type-In area where we can enter in coordinate values or angular values in order to position, rotate or scale objects in the scene. So that's a basic overview of the 3ds Max Interface.

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