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Forum Index - Resources - Share your 3DS MAx tips

There are 9 replies to this topic

-Altopais
Member

3 years ago

I'm not shure if i'm posting this in a correct subforum, if not please move the topic to a correct subforum

also not shure if topic like this one already exist.

Here's the topic where you can share your modeling / rigging / animating and texturing tips, ill add some of mine i stumbled upon here and there for poly modeling.

Lets say you have a cylinder with 30 sides and you want to chamfer the edges, you can easily select all of the edges (if loop is not working) by going to polygon mode and selecting top or bottom polygon then pressing and holding CTRL and clicking on edges selection tool, that way you poly selection converts to edges with the loop selected, it works on all selections.
[Link to i428.photobucket.com]

Scale tools for lining up verts
Easy and fast way to line up vertexes, instead of pressing make planar along x,y,z axis, or view align , you can select all of your vertexes you want to line up and scale them along one of the axes you need to.
[Link to i428.photobucket.com]

Funny way to make objects transparent, set your animation lenght to only 3 frames and go to material editor, pick a default material and pres auto key, move the slider to frame one and set the opacity to 0, on frame 2 set the opacity to 20 and on frame 3 opacity to 50 or so, put some values that you want, and assign that material to you objects. That way you don't need to press Alt+x every time you want to see trough you model, only move the animation slider to what ever opacity level you want.

Another thing i found extremly usefull is pressing Alt and mouse wheel (3rd mouse button) for orbit object / sub-object, and pressing Alt and scrolling the mouse wheel for zooming in and out.

Can't remember anything else at this point but will add more

The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein
2nd Place: Teapot Challenge

-desade2009
Member

3 years ago

Easy extrude shortcut, while modelling...
Select the subobject (edge, polygon) you want, hold Shift and move in the required direction or axis...
I bet everyone knows that one but i just thought it'd be useful to newer users...
And i think, for them, the following shortcuts will be a gold mine :
W - move transform
E - rotate
R - Scale
hold Middle-mouse-button = Pan viewport
Alt+Middle-mouse-button = Rotate viewport
Scroll mouse wheel = Zoom in/out
Alt+X = makes current selection semi-transparent (very useful!)
Alt+Q = isolates current selection...hides all unselected stuff until you're done working on whatever

and when you're modelling in subobject mode, you'll save loads of time by hitting 1,2,3,4,etc... to access Vertex, Edge, etc
instead of dragging the cursor all the way over to the panel...

Cogito, Ergo Sum

-AVV
Member

3 years ago

nice tips altopais ! and desade! great for the newbies to max also!

-Tyson
Senior Member

3 years ago

Heres a few.

1. Holding ctrl, alt or shift when right clicking will give you different quad options. eg. alt+right click displays coordinate systems.

2. To re-centre the viewport around the mouse press the i key. usefull for drawing spline shapes etc..

3. For quick access to sub-object selections you can store them as named selection sets like you can for objects.

4. To create buttons that perform a common task. turn on macro recorder perform the set of commands select the text in the listener and drag to the toolbar. for example you could record yourself extruding, then beveling then extruding again then perform the same operation on different selections in one click.

5. you can convert controller based animation into keyframes by going to the command panel>motion tab>trajectories>collapse button. increase samples for a smoother animation. usefull for things like converting a path constraint to keyframes.

6. Use the slice plane modifier to animate liquid filling up a volume. simple but adequate for some scenarios.

7. Use the vertex colour map in a displace mod and use vertex paint mod to interactively paint terrain. Also usefull for painting where you want vray fur for grass or characters interactively.

8. two photoshop tips for good measure. to straighten up a scanned image use the measure tool to draw along a known straight edge then then go to image>rotate canvas>arbitrary and the required angle will be there to use.

9. To quickly create a layer mask from a channel. ctrl click the channel to convert channel to a selection. then on the layer go to layer>add layer mask>reveal selection. Using a channel as the basis for a mask is often the fastest way to start.

Thats all I can think of at the moment.

+Steve Martin
Moderator

3 years ago

Cool tips. Number 2 is especially handy.

[Link to www.3dprevis.com]
2nd Place: Absurd Plants Challenge

-Altopais
Member

3 years ago

here's some more from me

1.Right click on undo or redo button pops out a list of recently made changes
2.Selecting a spinner and pressing Ctrl+N gets you a calculator (numeric expression evaluator), fancy name haha
3.Adding a UV modifier to object and applying a map on it, then collapsing the stack will speed up viewport if dealing with large amount of objects and also preserve the mapping.
4.When saving a file "Save as..." and pressing a "+" (one next to the Save button) will add a numeric value next to the file name
5.Press "O" to turn on adaptive degradation when dealing with large scenes
6.Typing "r" in front of a number value in your spinners makes that number a relative to previous values
7.When using a quad menu, last selection will be blue, clicking on quad menu title repeats that last blue command

The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein
2nd Place: Teapot Challenge