Subtitles of the Movie

This series of chapters could be called how to get modifiers to do what you want them to. I am going to focus on the bend modifier that the principles apply very broadly. Here we have a box, go down to the box level, we can see it's a 100 feet high. Go back up to that, it's got a bend angle of 90 degrees. But the box is not actually bending, it's tilting, but the faces and edges are not curving. What is curving is the bend gizmo, shown in this orange outline. That always bends and the object will bend as much as possible to conform to the bend gizmo. Now, why won’t the box bend to conform to the gizmo? The answer is here on the box level. This box has just one segment in each direction, height, width and length. That means there is just one polygon in each direction. One polygon here, one polygon here, one polygon here, and individual polygons can't bend. So the way to correct this problem of not bending is to add polygons in the direction we want to bend. So let's try adding some height polygons. Instead of just one height segment, let's give it 15. Go back up to the bend and you can see now, it's bending quite nicely. In general, more polygons mean smoother results and more control. It also takes longer to render, when it comes time to produce your final output. So you do want to keep polygon counts as low as possible, while still achieving the results you want. Now we're going to take a look at the limits parameter. This allows us to define limits within which the effect is applied. There are two limits, an upper limit and a lower limit. For instance, if you tell Max you want a 90 degree bend angle which is what we've got here, and you limit the effect, Max will get the whole 90 degree bend in between the lower and the upper limit. Let's see how this works. This box is a 100 feet high, that's this direction and we've got an upper limit of 50 feet here. Now what happens when we put that into effect? This is the limit point right here and you can see that Max has put the whole 90 degree bend into just this area here. Now if I move that, you can see, moving that upper limit up, now moving it down, so Max just fits that bend in between the 0 point here and whatever I define as the upper limit. And what happens if I put a lower limit in here? Let's try minus 25. This represents the lower limit, it's actually outside the area of the box. This box measured from its pivot point here, which is the point around which you can rotate the box, goes up 100 feet in the positive direction. But it starts at 0 and it doesn't go in the negative direction at all. So we've told Max to start bending at minus 25, but there is no box there. So it effectively starts applying the bend in mid air and that leaves less of the bend to apply to the object. So for example, if I start taking this down and down and down, you'll see that less and less of that bend is being applied to the object. Max is applying more and more bend to thin air. Now the upper limit is always a positive number. The lower limit it always a negative number. And with boxes and other objects, that by default have their pivot point at one end of the object. You will usually set 1 limit to 0. In the case of an object with the positive height which is the case here. You’ll usually set the lower limit to 0 and then we'll vary that upper limit from 100, which is the height of the box, down to 0. I am going to pan over and here is another box. This box happens to have a negative height, negative 100 and 90 degree bend angle. And we are ready to go with the lower limit of minus 50 and an upper limit of 0. This box doesn't go in the positive direction. So normally, we would limit it by setting the upper limit to zero and varying the lower limit between minus 100, the height of the box, and 0. the positive direction. So normally, we would limit it by setting the upper limit to zero and varying the lower limit between minus 100, the height of the box, and 0.