From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

Using project folders - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

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Using project folders

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- [Instructor] Like many 3D programs, 3ds Max relies on a project folder structure to track the links between various dependent files. When you open up a scene file, it may have links to other files such as textures and sounds and maybe photometric lighting data or lots of other things like dynamic simulation caches and so on. All that different data needs to be stored somewhere consistent so that it can be found by the 3D program. And that's usually done through a project folder. If you have the exercise files that I provided with this course, you'll now want to point 3ds Max at the project folder that you previously downloaded and extracted. If you don't have the exercise files, then you'll want to create your own project folder with the default sub-folder structure. Let's take a look at creating that project folder structure first. We can do that from the menus, go to file, project and there's an item in here, create default, but I actually prefer to use the toolbar instead of the menus. We have the projects toolbar up here, and the reason I like to use it is that it always displays the current project route. We always know where we're located, what is our current home based, and we see that it has the default project folder, which is created whenever a new user launches 3ds Max for the first time, and that'll be in the current user's Windows documents in a folder called 3ds Max 2025. Let's create a new default project folder structure, and that's done from these buttons up here. The one that we want is called Create Default. Click on that and we are taken to the current project we want to navigate. In this case, I'll go to the desktop and we need to create the root of the project manually. I'll right click in this window and choose new folder and let's call it 3ds Max Essential, press enter and we want to navigate into that folder. Double click on that just to make sure that we've really selected the right thing. And then click the button at the bottom of the window labeled select folder. Now we see that our current project has changed to current user desktop 3ds Max Essential. And if we go to the file menu and choose open, we're taken to our current project scenes folder. At the top, we see a path displayed. It's where we might have been at some point in the past. The only way to test where we currently are is by going to this pull down list that's labeled, look in, click on that and it will show you the folder tree to where you are currently. And that is desktop 3ds Max Essential Scenes. Okay, I'm going to cancel out of here 'cause I'm not actually going to open a scene. Alright, that's how to create a new project. If a project already exists, then we can simply point 3ds Max at that project. That is accomplished once again from the project's toolbar. And this one looks like a little gear that is set, active project. Click on that, and then we need to navigate, in this case to desktop exercise files. Select that and click select folder. And once that refreshes, we see that our current project is current user desktop exercise files. And once again, we can go to the file menu file open, and now we see a whole bunch of scene files. Dot max scene files that are included with the exercise files package. All right that's how to create a project folder structure or point to an existing project folder.

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