From the course: 3ds Max: Substance to V-Ray

Working with a 3ds Max project folder - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max: Substance to V-Ray

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Working with a 3ds Max project folder

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- [Instructor] The scene files that we will be using for this course have been set up using 3ds Max's built-in project management tools, meaning we have made use of a very specific project folder so as to gain quick, easy, and trouble free access to the provided scene files from inside the 3ds Max application. To ensure that you are set up and ready to take advantage of this file management system, we're going to quickly walk through both setting up and making use of a project folder for this course. Before doing that however, we will also want to perform a quick check on our 3ds Max preference settings. To do that, we can open up the Customize menu and from the drop down list that appears, choose the Preferences option. Once the Preferences dialog appears, we want to jump into the file tab and from inside there make certain that we have a check in the Convert local file paths to Relative option. This just ensures that should we decide to add any files to the project folder as we move forward, they will always receive a file path that is relative to the project itself as opposed that is to receiving a hard coded local path, which can cause all sorts of problems should we want to move or pass our project folder to another machine or artist. Do keep in mind though, that this step will only help so long as we make certain that any files we do add to the project are placed inside the exercise files project structure itself. With that done, we can now step through the process of setting up our 3ds Max project folder for the course. To do so, all we need to do with our cursor over the Max view port is hit the x key, type p, r, o, j for project and then choose the Set Project Folder option that appears in the list. This will open up a dialog that lets us add any folder on available storage drives and then set that as the root for our project. In this instance I will of course want to locate the downloaded exercise files folder, which is noted has been placed on my Desktop and then click to select it. Once done, we can hit the Okay button and our exercise files folder has now been set up to serve as our project root. What we will find now is that whenever we use application functions such as Open, Import, Export, or even set up a Render Output Path, we will find ourselves automatically taken straight to the appropriate folder in our project. Whenever we want to open up our starter scene, for instance, all we need to do is use the open command, which will take us straight to the project scenes folder and then from there select the appropriate chapter folder and then the appropriate start scene file.

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