Autodesk 3ds Max 2013 Tutorials
The Interface / The View Cube
Subtitles of the Movie (Autodesk 3ds Max 2013 / The Interface / The View Cube)
This widget that we're looking at is called the View Cube. It's a great alternative for those of you who don't want to necessarily rely on using keyboard commands or mouse clicks, for example middle mouse button and all that kinds of fun stuff. If you want to change the size or the parameters of the View Cube, all you have to do is go to the Views Menu and you could choose Viewport Configuration and then you'll see that we have a View Cube Tab. And here we can change the size of the cube, I'll go ahead and make it large, I'll move this over and hit Apply. And now we have a ginormous View Cube. You can also change the inactive opacity so when you're not using it, you can go ahead and make it much less visible. And this is really handy of course so it's not distracting but it never really bothers me. So I'm going to go ahead and put this back, hit Apply hit OK. So as you see I go to, down quite a bit but I'm going to go ahead and maximize this viewport by hitting Alt W. And imagine we have our model here, so I'm going to go ahead and create a quick box. I'll go ahead and right-click to deselect that. So typically what I would do if I wanted to you know tumble around this model is I would hold down the Alt key on my keyboard and my middle mouse. And now you can go ahead and do that or I could rotate and if I want to change my view temporarily I could once again just go to a Front View or whatever view I want to go to. But the View Cube gives you that in a much more easy way to use. For example, I want to go to top, I go and hover my mouse over the word Top, click one time and now I'm in the Top View. I can always go back to a different view by clicking on the arrows. So now I'm in front, right bottom and so on. I'll go ahead and click these guys here, these are orthographic arrows and they don't appear in the Perspective View. So we can go ahead and flip it in different directions. So right now we're moving in the west, the east and that kind of thing. So you can see the ring in here. So once again west, east and if I want to go back to a Perspective View, I can hit the Home icon and now I'm back home. Now this home serves an even more important role because you're when modeling sometimes things get out of hand like this. And you're trying to figure out, alright, how do I get this house back into order? Well I can click on the House, how appropriate and now it zooms back in. Or I've lost my model completely, where's my model? Click on the House. So it brings things back into view so you don't have to get confused. Now I'm going to go back to the other views, once again I'll hit Alt W. I can turn any of these views into the Perspective View. So I go and right-click in this viewport which is currently set to left, click on the House and now I have a different perspective view. So I can look at my model in different ways. So I can model from here and look at what the changes are here. If I change my mind I can go and I can either click on the name or I can click and drag the View Cube manually until I get to what I want. Click on the name and now I'm back in my front view. To rotate around I go to the ring, I can click and drag the ring and now I'm rotating my model and I can see which way I'm going by the way. So I'm going to west, I'm going south and so forth. So as you could see you can do quite a bit of stuff. You could either click on the word, you can click and drag on the View Cube, you can always go Home and you can change the size by simply going to the Views Menu once again and choosing Viewport Configuration and you can change the way you view the View Cube.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Autodesk 3ds Max 2013 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 34400 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-084-8 |
| Release Date: | 2013-01-08 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 91 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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