From the course: 3ds Max 2024 Essential Training

Getting familiar with the interface - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Getting familiar with the interface

“

Let's take a tour of the 3ds Max interface and learn the names and functions of the primary user interface elements. Like almost every desktop program, 3ds Max has a menu at the top. And this is known as the main menu. And that's because there are lots of menus. This is just the primary menu in the main window. Unlike some programs, the 3ds Max main menu is not really complete. there's lots of things that are not found in that main menu. And if it's not in the main menu it's probably going to be over here in this panel on the far right which is called the command panel. And it's really the heart of 3ds Max. The command panel is divided into six sub-panels. The default one is the create panel. We've also got modify, hierarchy, motion, Display and Utilities. The most important ones are Create and Modify. As the name indicates the Modify panel allows you to make changes to selected objects by applying program modules called modifiers. In the center of the 3ds Max interface are the viewports. These are the windows into your 3D scene. and there are three 2D or orthographic viewports by default. We've got the front view, top view, and left view. There's also a default perspective or 3D viewport. You can customize the layout. We'll look at how to set that up later in the course. Over on the left, we'll see something called the Scene Explorer. This is an outline view that lists all the objects in your scene. Currently there's nothing in my scene, so the Scene Explorer is blank. Above the viewports we have an area called the Ribbon. And this primarily gives us access to modeling tools. The Ribbon is collapsed right now. I can open that up by clicking this down-facing arrow, Show Full Ribbon. And when that loads up we can see that some of these tabs are actually blank and we won't see any tools there unless we have a certain type of object selected which is called an editable poly. There are some other ones that don't rely on editable poly. So that's the ribbon. I'll collapse that once again. Above the ribbon and below the main menu is a strip of icons called the main toolbar. And these are icons that give access to tools that you'll need most commonly. So they're there all the time because you'll need access to those pretty much always. There are a couple other toolbars here and they're kind of squished on my screen because of my current capture area. But we've got the Project toolbar and there's also an Auto Backup and a Brush Presets toolbar. We'll look at how to customize all this in a little bit, but for now we just want to get familiar with all the different user interface elements. Now at the bottom we have something called the Time Slider. And this shows us the current time that we're on if we're doing animation. We've also got some transport controls down here to play, rewind, and so on. We've got some keyframing controls here in order to create animation keyframes. And in the extreme lower right we have navigation tools which allow us to change our viewpoint in the 3D scene. Also here in the center we've got a section called the transform type-in area That allows us to see and enter numerical values for position, rotation, and scale data for a selected object. And finally over here we've got the MaxScript Mini Listener, I'll expand that. This will allow us to enter in commands in the 3ds Max scripting languages MaxScript and Python. OK, that's the basic overview of the 3ds Max user interface.

Contents