Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie you're going to get just a quick overview of the 3ds max 5 user interface. The basic functions of 3ds max 5 have to do with creating objects, changing object attributes like shape or color and animating these objects. Those are the basics of 3D animation. And as we're creating and modifying objects, we can see what's going on in these four view ports in the middle of the screen, which show us the objects and the action from four different points of view. You can create objects, assign various properties to them and modify them through the command panel over here on the right hand side of the screen. All this is the command panel. And just above that, we have the main tool bar which has a number of important tools in it. But the most important three are right in the middle. Select and move, select and rotate and select and scale. These allow us to move, rotate and scale objects. These changes that we make to objects are also called transforms. That's an important piece of terminology, the move, rotate and scale transforms. Now above that we have the tabs panel, which gives you quick access to functions that you use alot, such as functions for creating objects, creating shapes, creating compounds. The tabs panel just gives you more convenient access to functions that you can also get to in other ways such as through the command panel. For example if you look in the upper left on the tabs panel, you have a box object. This is an icon to click, to start the process of creating a box, which we can also do through the box button down in the command panel. In fact, if we click on the box object up here in the tabs panel, watch down there in the command panel on the right. The box object lights up, clicking in the tabs panel actually selects the box button in the command panel. It's just two ways of doing the same thing. Above the tabs panel, we have a menu bar and it has various functions such as file functions, edit functions, tools and so on. And we'll go into more detail on all the menu functions in future movies. At the bottom of the screen, we have a time slider. That's the time slider, the teapot has some animation applied to it, so as we move the time slider, the teapot moves in the view ports. Below the time slider we have a track bar that looks like a ruler. Now all along the bottom of the screen we have animation controls. On the far right here, we have view port controls which allow us to control, how we’re doing things in the view ports. For example, the zoom control which looks like a magnifying glass, left click on that, that allows us to zoom in and zoom out in the view ports. Just to the left of the animation controls, we have time controls which are just like VCR controls. And to the left of that we have key controls. These are the most important animation controls. For example if you click here on the auto key, and it just turned red, it’s like pushing the record button for animation. All the changes that you apply to your objects such as moving them or rotating them or scaling them are now recorded. And become part of your animation. And we click that off now, and finally to the left of that we have the transform type ins. These three boxes here X, Y, and Z. You remember the transforms from up above move, rotate, scale, the transform type ins allow us to control these transforms precisely by typing in numbers. And they also show us what's going on while it's going on in precise numbers. So for example, if I go to the move transform and I start moving, we start to see numbers down there that show me exactly where I am on a 3 dimensional coordinate scale. So, that is a basic introduction to the 3ds max 5 user interface as you see it when you first start the program. We have the view ports, the command panel, the main toolbar, the tabs panel, the menu bar, time slider, track bar and animation controls. And all this allows us to create, modify and animate 3D objects. the main toolbar, the tabs panel, the menu bar, time slider, track bar and animation controls. And all this allows us to create, modify and animate 3D objects.