Subtitles of the Movie

Let's start talking about some simple Preferences inside 3ds Max. If I go to Customize, Preferences, the first one is the General tab, and just below that, over here, I have my Scene Undo levels. The Default Scene Undo Levels are at 20. The maximum you can have is up to 500 Undo Levels. Right now you can see I have 50 Undo Levels, and I would highly recommend having a value between 50 or 100, and don't really have a really high value. The reason I'm saying that you should have a value more than 20 is because sometimes you can get so fast, let's say with modeling, or something, and by the time you know you've done like 30 or 40 steps in two minutes so it's good to have a slightly higher value on that. Just to relate back to the Viewport, let's say if I select this object and quickly rotate it. Now, this is my Undo button and this is my Redo button. Now, I can either do Undo, Undo, Undo if I want to get back to where I started from, or I can just doing Control Z. Instead of that, one more cool feature in Max is that I can right-click on this button and it gives me a little list of all my Undo Levels. I can just drag a selection of what I don't need and say Undo. Really, really cool feature in Max. If I go to Customize again, Preferences, something else you might want to, you know, use this all the time; on my scene right now it's disabled, it might be enabled on your scene, so Enable Viewport Tooltips, what it does is, if you are new to Max and if you don't know what a certain button does, just go with your mouse over it and it'll prompt you, you know, what the button is doing, or what's its function. That's a really nice one. Save UI Configuration on Exit is another good one where it pretty much does what it says. It's saving the UI Configuration after you exit. If I go to the Files tab, this is another important one: Autobak. I always have it enabled, but you can see that my Backup Interval right now is at 5, which means it's five minutes. I don't like this to be five minutes right now. I always like to have it turned up to be let's say 45. The reason, because this is turned On, Backup on Save, so every time I save, and I save a lot because things can go wrong, your computer can crash, anything can happen. So, if something unfortunate was to happen this will really save you a lot of time. And these Backup Files go to this Documents folder; there should be a folder called 3ds Max over there, you'll see Autobak Folder over there. Right now, my Autobak files are just three files, and I can name them something else if I want to. But this is a really, really important feature, so always turn this on and say Backup on the Save so that if something goes wrong you can go to that Autobak Folder and recover your file. But just make sure that the Backup Interval is more than 5, let's say 45, because this can be a little annoying if, you know, if you have Backup on Save and every time you save, and if you have a really heavy scene it'll save for a while. Let's go to the Viewports tab over here. Show Vertices as Dots, and the Size. We'll see this when we do polygon modeling where, you know, if I'm trying to work on something and if my vertices are really small I can increase the size from here. What kind of Display Driver you are using; right now I can also choose a Driver so I can say either DirectX 9, 10, and so on. I can say Revert from Direct 3D. Go to Open GL or Software. I would recommend Direct 3D in most cases in 3ds Max, and I can also configure the current driver that I'm using and change some settings over here. So, some important features like Gizmos over here, Transform Gizmos; you can take the size of the Gizmos up and down like the More, Rotate, and the Scale Gizmo, which we pretty much saw. You can also do earlier, in some movies, where you can also just hit plus or minus in your scene. Something else, let's say, if you're working on an architectural project and if you want to work in some specific units, you can go to Customize, and let's go to Unit Setup. By default, Max works on something called Generic Units, but you can quickly change those by going to US Standard, and here's a big list right here: Decimal inches, Fractional Feet, and some other things over here. So, pretty simple. So, try setting some of your own preferences. Go to Customize, Preferences, and once you start working with Max more and more you might want to go and play around with some other things like IK settings and some Radiocity settings, or some Mental Ray, which are really important, and some Animation Preferences and so on. So, try using not only the Preferences but also try Customizing the User Interface according to your needs, slowly, slowly. Get into the habit of using Hotkeys, customizing the User Interface, setting some Preferences, and you know, get into that slowly so that once you really are using Max to its fullest potential, you can really work fast. You can really, really start working fast just because you're using certain Preferences, you're using, you know, you're customizing your User Interface, you're using Hotkeys when needed, and so on.