3D Studio Max

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3D Interface

3D Interface

 Menu Bar

The entire top menu bar is relevant except for schematic view.
Note that there are alternative ways of doing exactly the same thing, using either the top menu bar of the right hand menu. This may prove beneficial depending on you respond to the controls work best. Either using graphical means or textual.

 Create
--  Geometry
----  Standard Primitives

Here you will find the basic geometry e.g. Box, Sphere, Cylinder. These are often the best starting point for creating very complicated geometry.

 Extended Primitives

Additional more complex geometry is found here. Some of the geometry is similar to that found in the Standard Primitives menu, only having an extra parameter (usually a ‘fillet’ controller to chamfer the edges)

 Compound Objects

Morph - Is animation based so there is no need to consider it here.
Scatter - scatters a selected source object over the surface of a distribution object.
Conform - Is projects the vertices of one object, called the Wrapper, onto the surface of another object, called the Wrap-To.
Connect - Lets you connect two or more objects between "holes" in their surfaces.
ShapeMerge - Creates a compound object consisting of a mesh object and one or more shapes.
Boolean - Is a way of combining objects with a variety of results including removing intersecting parts of objects or removing parts that don’t intersect.
Terrain - Generates terrain objects from contour line data.
Loft - Loft objects are two-dimensional shapes extruded along a third axis.
Mesher - Is animation and particle based so there is no need to consider it here.






 Shapes
--  Splines

Here there are a series of tools for creating 2D line drawings. These are important part of the overall 3D creation. The 2D lines can be used in conjunction with a variety of other tools and menus within the software package, to achieve a diverse range of effects.
Splines will be important if you wish to create a path for an object to follow. This is also where you will find the Text tool, which is very important for this project.

 Nurb Curves

NURBS - Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines

Nurb Curves are used in the same way as you use splines

Point Curves - Are NURBS curves whose points are constrained to lie on the curve.
CV Curves - Are NURBS curves controlled by control vertices.



 Lights
--  Standard

The lights menu contains a series of different light types. Animating these will be covered in detail later in the module.

 Cameras
--  Standard

As with the lights this menu offers a variety of cameras the animation of which will be outlined in the later module sessions.

 Modify

The modify tab holds a great many tool menus, all of which are concerned with manipulating the standard objects you may have created. Alternatively this area offers preset ways of handling certain modeling techniques. Many of the modifiers are animatable, meaning that the modifiers effect on the object in the scene can change ove time.

 Display

Display is concerned with exactly what is seen and how it should be seen in the projections window layout. Here you can hide objects in your scene and freeze (lock) objects so that they are no longer selectable.

 Utilities

There is only the collapse tool that is of great importance here for what we might need to do. The Collapse utility lets you collapse selected objects into a single Editable Mesh.


 Bottom menu bar

Here there are a series of icon, which help you to achieve precise changes to the objects in the scene or being created, e.g. Angle snap and Spinner snap. Also you will find tools for manipulating the 3D views e.g. Zoom and Pan.