From the course: 3ds Max 2018 Essential Training

Choosing shading modes - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2018 Essential Training

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Choosing shading modes

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- [Instructor] We can control how a viewport displays so that we can see our objects in Wireframe or in a shaded view. We could, for example, superimpose Wireframes over shading and we could choose to view with lighting and shadows or not. Let's look at how to control the shading modes. So that we can see this a little bit more clearly let's create a ground plane here underneath that plant. I'll go over to the Create panel and back up to Standard Primitives and I've got a plane. I can just click and drag here in the perspective view to create that plane and then right click to exit. Maybe change it's color. If we go over to the Modified Panel and just change it to a different color. I've got a swatch here and set that to a neutral gray. We can also turn the grid off here to make it a little bit easier to see. That's the "g" key on the keyboard. Now let's look at our shading modes First and foremost, this is a shaded view here and we can control whether we want that to be a high quality or standard quality. We've got a standard quality now currently. I could switch that out to High Quality display and what that's going to do is actually give us the ability to see shadows and also just to, as the name implies, have a higher quality. Let's zoom in on that and make that window larger with alt + w. Get a bit closer with control alt middle mouse. And there you can see we've got shadows. We can choose to show a standard shaded view and then optionally turn shadows on and off that way. And the way to do that is to go up to this menu. Click on it and then switch it over to Standard and back in that menu we've got a Lighting and Shadows sub menu and we can choose to Illuminate with Default Lights and that's what we've got right now. Or we can choose Scene Lights but if we do that then we won't see any change right now because we haven't created any light objects in the scene. We'll look at this later when we get into lighting. I'll go back in there - Lighting and Shadows - Illuminate with Default. Lighting and Shadows - turn on the shadows. And now we've got our cast shadows on the ground. This is actually a pretty good mode I think because it's not incurring the performance hit from the High Quality mode but yet we're still able to see shadows which is helpful because let's say I grab my plane and move it up and down. The shadows are helpful because they tell us how far objects are from one another. So that's how we can control the quality of a shaded view. We can also just put our shaded view into a Wireframe mode and that's done from this rightmost menu in each viewport. We can go in here and choose, for example, Wireframe Override and now the viewport is displayed in Wireframe. There's a keyboard shortcut for that that you will want to memorize. It's F3 or Function 3. We'll toggle you back and forth between a shaded mode and a Wireframe mode. You can also view Wireframes on top of shaded objects and 3ds max calls that Edged Faces. We can do that from the menu here. We can choose edged faces and now we've got our wires superimposed. And that's actually a really good mode to be in when you're modeling because you can see objects as solid but you can also see their wires so you can determine their level of detail or their spatial accuracy. We can toggle edged faces back on and off using a keyboard shortcut as well. You'll want to memorize this one too. It's F4 or Function 4 to toggle it edged faces on and off. Alright so I'll go back to my four viewport layout with alt "w" and I can perform those commands in any view. I can go over to my top view, for example click there and then press F3 and now we can see shading. I can press F4 and now we're seeing edged faces. I can restore it back to what I had by pressing F4 and F3 once again. So that's how we set up our shading modes.

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