From the course: 3ds Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

Drawing splines on an editable poly - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

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Drawing splines on an editable poly

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- [Narrator] Previously in this series we looked at the new Freehand Spline tools for drawing curves interactively. This week I want to look at a similar tool that's been in the Editable Poly Freeform tool set for years now. The Editable Poly tool is quicker and simpler if all you want to do is draw splines on a polygon surface. The object must be an editable poly. I have got a teapot that primitive here that I've converted, go to the modify panel and you'll see its an editable poly. Now open up the ribbon and go the free forum tab. And we have a splines tool here. But before we start drawing we need to choose what we want to draw on. And up here where its labeled grid, that's a pull down list. Click on the down facing arrow and choose draw on selection. And now we will be able to draw on whatever object we currently have selected. And choose the splines tool. And then we can just draw on the object. And we can draw a multiple spline sub-objects within a single editable spline object. As long we have not exited the splines tool we can make some adjustments here. For example, we can delete a spline. Hold on down control and click on one of these. And we are able to remove it. We are also able to transform the spline in screen space. And there is sort of three finger salute keyboard shortcut for that which is control, shift, and alt. Hold all of those three and then click and drag on a spline. And you can move it around. Of course there are limits to this. If I move it over here for example, its trying to keep that spline the same shape in the 2D view here, but that causes some severe distortion in three dimensions. And if we turn it around with the alt key we can see that we got some issues. And these transforms are destructive and cumulative. So if I hold on ,control, shift, alt again, and try to move this back where it was, you can see that we can make some pretty drastic changes that will mess up our spline pretty quickly. And the only way out of that is to undo the movements. Control, z and we can undo those movements. To exit the tool at any time we can use the right mouse button in the viewport or just click the splines button again. And now we've got a single editable spline here with two sub-splines within it. I can select that object, and show you in the modify panel it is an editable spline. If we want to resume drawing, we'll reselect the teapot go back to the splines tool and start drawing. That's how to draw free from splines on an editable poly object.

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