From the course: 3ds Max 2018 Essential Training

Getting familiar with the interface - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2018 Essential Training

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Getting familiar with the interface

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- [Instructor] Chapter two is all about getting familiar with the 3ds Max interface. We'll start by identifying the main components of the interface, and we'll also take the opportunity to strip the interface down a little bit. We'll minimize the clutter and make it easier to focus on our work. At the top of the 3ds Max interface is a traditional application menu. There are a lot of menus. If you're on a laptop or a screen with limited resolution then all of the menus may not fit on the screen horizontally. If that's the case you'll see a double right-facing arrow. That's a button, when you click on that you have access to the other menus, such as the 3ds Max Help menu. Unlike in many programs, 3ds Max does not rely heavily on the menus. There are a lot of commands in 3ds Max that are found elsewhere that aren't in the menus at all. Most significantly over here on the right we have an area called the Command Panel, and it really is the heart of 3ds Max. It's where you will spend a lot of your time. And it's divided into six panels, Create, Modify, Hierarchy, Motion, Display, and Utilities. The most important of the Command Panels are Create, which of course allows you to build new objects, and Modify, which will allow you to stack effects on a selected object in order to change it. In the center of the screen is the 3ds Max viewport area, and that's where you interact with objects in your 3D scene. And to navigate in these viewports there are some buttons down here in the lower right. And those are known as the viewport navigation icons. As we'll see later in the course we can accomplish almost all of these functions from the keyboard shortcuts, or hotkeys, and that will actually be a much faster and more efficient way to navigate. Next to the viewport navigation icons are some keyframe creation tools for animation, transport tools for playing back the animation in the timeline here, we also have a transform type-in area for plugging in values for a position, rotation, scale. There's a help line down here that gives us some hints. And there's also a way to type in script commands through this field here known as the MAXScript Mini Listener. Directly below the main menu is an area called the main toolbar. And that's where you'll find the most common commands, such as Select Object or Move, Rotate, and Scale, render an image and so on. Once again, if you're on a laptop or a screen with limited resolution then the entire main toolbar may not fit on your screen. If that's the case you may see some icons getting cut off over here. Simply hover your mouse over an empty spot on the main toolbar and you'll get a hand cursor. Click and drag and you can slide the main toolbar left and right to expose the remaining icons. Directly below the main toolbar is an area known as the ribbon. And it's primarily for modeling. The ribbon is minimized by default. We can expand it by clicking on this button to Show the Full Ribbon. And then we see some icons here. If we go over to the Object Paint tab in the ribbon we see there a bunch of cool tools there. If you're not modeling you may want to hide the ribbon, so that it's not taking up space on the screen. And that's easily accomplished from a button on the main toolbar, Toggle Ribbon. Just click that and the ribbon will be hidden. On the left is a panel known as the Scene Explorer. It's an outline view of all of the objects in your scene. And at this time the Scene Explorer is empty, because I have no objects in the scene currently. The Scene Explorer is one of those panels that I want to see when I want to see it, and I don't want it to be visible all the time. Let's hide the Scene Explorer. There are multiple ways to do that. I'll use the method that will also illustrate how to show and hide other interface elements, and that's the through the context sensitive right-click menu. On every panel you will see a textured bar, right-click on any one of those textured bars and you'll get a pop-up or a context sensitive menu. And from here you can show or hide various interface elements. I'll just click on Scene Explorer Default to hide it and now it's been hidden and I can just move this over and reclaim that space. If you want to get the Scene Explorer back there are various ways to do that. We can go to the Tools menu and choose Scene Explorer, close that. Or there's also a button on the main toolbar, Toggle Scene Explorer, and that will also launch it. As I drag the Scene Explorer around you can see that 3ds Max is allowing me to dock to various parts of the interface. If I don't want that to happen then I can lock the user interface layout. That's done from the Customize menu. Click on Customize and choose Lock UI Layout. And now we can drag that around anywhere we want and we won't be prompted to dock. OK, I'll turn that back off again, turn off Lock UI Layout and close the Scene Explorer once again. Finally, in the viewports we have something called the ViewCube and it's a method of navigation in the scene. And that's an alternative to the viewport navigation controls down here. The ViewCube is actually kind of problematic and I recommend that you disable it. It's very easy to accidentally click it and it's really just more trouble than it's worth. So to permanently hide the ViewCube we need to go into the viewport configuration dialog. And one way to do that is from any one of the viewports click on the plus sign and then go to Configure Viewports, go to the ViewCube tab, and disable the ViewCube, just turn off Show the ViewCube, and click OK. And now it's hidden permanently. There is a menu item for the ViewCube, but it doesn't always work, and the ViewCube may come back the next time you launch 3ds Max. Having done it through the Viewport Configuration dialog I'm certain that the ViewCube is permanently hidden. That's an overview of the main elements of the 3ds Max interface.

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