Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we're going to start talking about the 3ds Max User Interface. I'm going to refer to the User Interface as UI. When you first open Max this is what the Default UI looks like. The most important thing in any 3D software is to understand the UI really well. Let's just start by naming some components inside our UI. On top over here, I have my main Menu bar with my different drop-down menus. Just below that is my Info Center. Now, if your Info Center is not showing up don't worry about it right now. It's just hidden and we will talk about how you can unhide it later. This is my main Toolbar, and depending on what resolution you're working in you may have to scroll this. You can see it goes all the way. These are called Viewports, which are simply displaying my objects right now from different angles. For example, this is the Top Viewport, you can see it's labeled over here, Top view. You can also call it a Top view, a Front view, Perspective view, or Left view, or just Viewports. This area over here is my Command Panel. This is my Time Slider, and my Time Line for my animation purposes. These are some Playback buttons for my animation. And these buttons over here are just some simple buttons for zooming in, rotating around the objects, panning, and so on. So, now that we've named everything, let's just start breaking this down. The Menu Bar has a lot of important drop-downs starting from the File menu and the Edit menu, which are pretty common drop-downs across softwares. The good thing about Max is, it allows you to do a certain task in two or three different ways, most of the time. For example, if I go to the Create drop-down, I can create pretty much everything in Max from here, so if I go to Create Stand Up Primitives, I can make some boxes, cones, spheres, and so on; some simple objects. I can also go and make some lights from here, or some cameras and so on. Now, if I don't want to go from the drop-down menu I also have an option to go to the Command Panel over here, and you can see right now my Lights icon is selected, and I can also make lights from here, or if I go to this one over here, which is my Geometry icon, I can make some standard primitives from here, extended primitives, and so on. The Viewports can be selected just by clicking, and you can see when I select a Viewport it's highlighted yellow around the borders. You can also change the Viewports by right-clicking on any Viewport labels. So, for example, if I don't want this to be the Front view, I can simply right-click on this and go to Views, and I can make this the Back View, or I can right-click again, and I can make this the Top View, or I can right-click and make this, let's say, the Perspective View, and go back and make it the Front View. There are also some Hotkeys associated with this. For example, F is front, T is top, L is left, P is perspective, R is not right in this case, but you can set that hot key to be a Right View. I can also click V, as in Victor, to access this little drop-down, which will allow me to change my views right here. So, I can quickly make this the Bottom View if I want to, or the Left View, or the Right View and so on. This is called the View Cube in Max and this is a new feature in 3ds Max 2009 and for those of you who've used Maya, you might already be familiar with this. This one also allows me to go to different views. For example, I can go to the Back View from here, or I can cycle to the Left View, go to the Top View, and so on. I can also use these arrows to kind of roll around the views, or I can click on the Home button and go to the Perspective View. So, it's a really cool feature that they've added in 3ds Max 2009. The reason that some of my objects right now are displayed slightly differently, for example in the Front view you can see that my objects are looking different, in the Perspective view they're looking slightly different, because right now, in the Perspective view, I'm in the mode called Smooth and Highlight mode, and in the Front view I'm in the mode called Wireframe mode. How can you access this? Well, if you right-click on any Viewport label you can see right now this is on the Wireframe mode, I can go to Smooth Plus Highlights, same thing, I can do on the Perspective view, I can right-click, go to Wireframe mode, basically it just shows me my Wires on the object, the topology on the objects. So, right-click, Smooth and Highlight again, right-click go to Wireframe again. There are some Hotkeys for this as well. F3 will toggle between Smooth and Highlight mode and Wireframe mode, but if you want to see your wires or your wire frame on the Smooth and Highlight objects right now you can either right-click and go to something called Edge Faces, and you can see all my wires are showing on the object, or there's another Hotkey for that, which is called F4, which also allows me to toggle between these two modes, like Edge Faces and No Edge Faces; F3 allows me to go to Wireframe and Smooth and Highlight.