Setting preferences and options

- Before we begin, we'll want to setup some key 3ds Max preferences. We'll want to change the interface a little bit to make it easier to read. Also set up our units and our current renderer. So let's begin by just hiding the view cube. We won't be using that. Go into any one of the viewport configuration dialogues. Click on the plus sign and choose configure viewports. Go to view cube tab and disable show the view cube and click okay. We won't be using these two panels over here, at least not right away. We've got the viewport layout tabs. Let's hide that. Right-click on the textured bar at the top and disable viewport layout tabs. We will be using the scene explorer, but I want to be able to open and close that from this button over here. Let's close this global scene explorer. Once again, right-click on its textured bar and turn scene explorer default off, and then we can make it visible with this button and also make it invisible with that button. We won't be using the modeling ribbon, so we can turn that off as well. Turn off show ribbon. Now let's go into the preferences dialogue. Customize preferences. And in the general tabs, set the scene undo levels to 100, just as an insurance policy in case we need to go back more than 20 steps. Then go over to the files tab and enable the switch convert local file paths to relative. That means that any dependent files such as textures or XREFs will be displayed as relative to the current project. Click okay to close that dialogue. Let's also change up the colors of the background and the grid to make them easier to read. Go back into customize. This time go to customize user interface. And then go to the colors tab. The default element from the pull-down list is viewports. Scroll down a bit in the list and choose viewport background and change its color to a value of 80. We can click apply colors now, and we can see that we have a lighter background. We also need to change the grid to make that visible. From the elements pull-down, choose grids and choose set by intensity. Set the intensity numeric value to 70. Once again, click apply colors now. We can close this dialogue, and now we've just changed the default color of the viewport background and the grid. We're seeing a gradient in this perspective view, so let's turn that off. With focus on that perspective view panel, go into the views menu, and set the viewport background to a solid color. Now let's change up our units and grid spacing. Go back to customize. Units set-up. Switch it over it metric with centimeters for the display unit scale. Click okay. We also want to change the grid size and spacing. Right-click on any one of the magnet icons for the grid and snap settings dialogue. Go to the home grid. Set the grid spacing to one centimeter. And we also want to set the perspective view grid extent to 150 centimeters and press enter. Then we can close that dialogue. Finally, we want to set up our current renderer. In this course, we'll be using Arnold, and we'll want to get at the renderer set-up dialogue. It's here on the main toolbar. Render set-up. And the target is production rendering mode. Let's change the renderer for production rendering over to Arnold. And once that refreshes, go to the system tab and enable Legacy 3ds Max map support so that Arnold will be able to render the old-school 3ds Max maps such as noise or cellular. We also want to have a little bit of processor overhead when we're rendering so we don't overload our system. Under threads, turn off auth-detect threads and set the number of threads to negative one. This means that the equivalent of one processor core will be left available for other jobs while a production render is running. We want to change these settings for the active shade interactive production renderer as well. Change the target over to active shade. Set the active shade renderer to Arnold and the system tab, turn on Legacy 3ds Max map support. Turn off auto-detect threads. And for an interactive production rendering in a viewport or a floating window, we'll want to have a little bit more processor overhead available for other commands. So set the number of threads to negative two for an active shade rendering. Now we can close the render set-up dialogue. And to ensure that we have these settings in all new scenes so we can save out a 3ds Max template scene, which is a special scene which has the name Max start. Go to the file menu and choose save. And in the current projects scenes folder, we'll save a file called maxstart.max, M-A-X-S-T-A-R-T and click save. And now if we just reset 3ds Max by choosing file reset and then clicking yes, we get a new blank scene that has all of those settings that we put in, including our grid spacing and our current renderer. That's how to set up the 3ds Max preferences and scene settings for the course.