From the course: 3ds Max 2021 Essential Training

Using project folders - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2021 Essential Training

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Using project folders

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- [Man] Like many 3D programs, Max relies on a project folder structure to track the links, between various dependent files. When you open up a Scene File, that Scene File will have links to other files, such as textures, and sounds, and maybe photometric data or lots of other things like dynamic simulation caches and so on. All that different data needs to be stored, somewhere that the program can find it and that's usually done through a project folder. If you have the exercise files that I've provided with this course, you'll now want to point 3ds Max, at that project folder. If you don't have the exercise files, then you'll want to create your own project folder. Let's look at creating a project first. We want to create the root folder, from the windows interface. So I'm going to minimize 3ds Max, and in Windows, I'm going to create a folder on my desktop. Right-click and choose new folder, and I'll call it 3ds Max Essential, and press Enter. So, I've got that folder created, it's currently empty. I've got 3ds Max minimized, so I'll bring that back up again and create a new default project and that can be done from the menus. If we go to file, project, we'll see a bunch of options here, but there's a toolbar that makes things even easier, because it tells us what our current project is. And that toolbar is displayed on the far right of the main toolbar by default. In my case, the width of my desktop, is such that it won't fit on the screen, so I'm just going to drag this toolbar out and put it directly below the main toolbar. Here's the project's toolbar, and if you're not seeing that, you can make it visible by right-clicking on the textured bar on any other toolbar and just enable projects. So the projects toolbar shows you, the current project at all times. Using the buttons on the project toolbar, we can set to an existing project or create a new one. The button we want in this case is create default. Click on that, and you'll create a new project with a default structure and I'll just navigate to my desktop, slightly empty folder I created 3ds Max Essential and click select folder. And now that folder is the root, of our current project and all of those subfolders have been created automatically. Let's investigate on minimize Max again, go into that 3ds Max Essential folder, and now we've got all of the default subfolders for Scenes and Scene assets and so on. If you do have the exercise files, then you will want to set Max, to the exercise files folder. So, I'll bring Max back up again, and to set to an existing project, we'll click the button to set active project. And once again, just navigate to the proper location here on my desktop, I'll select the exercise files folder, click select folder, and now that folder is the new project folder root. And we can now go to the file menu, and choose open, and we should be taken directly to the exercise files Scenes folder. And if for any reason that doesn't happen, you can just reset Max. Use file reset and say yes, and from that point onward, you should have no problem accessing the exercise files. That's how to create, or set a project folder.

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