3dsmax, how to best organize hierarchys

jocose

Okay, coming from Maya I used to work like this:

Set up a hierarchy that consisted of a series of parent child relationships. Then I would hit a toggle button that would auto select the top most node in the hierarchy. I would turn this on and off as I worked.

If I wanted to move a piece that was a child of another I turned off auto select parent.

This work flow was simple, intuitive, and fast to set up.

Now that I am working in 3Dsmax I see there are quite a few options for organizing hierarchies. It looks like groups might be similar to what I was doing in Maya? Or is that basic functionality in Max somewhere and I'm just missing it?

If anyone could offer their work flow and the best way to organize a complex scene I would really appreciate it.

Eric Chadwick

I don't recall there being an auto-select parent feature in Max, but it could still be there. I do know you can "walk" the selection up/down the hierarchy using Page Up and Page Down. You can also select a parent and all its children by double-clicking the parent in the viewport.

Groups in Max change the hierarchy by adding an invisible parent node, so then selecting any of the children will select all the children. You can "open" a group so then selection works as it does normally. But in general Groups are not good, especially with animation, since IIRC the position of the group node's pivot will change dynamically whenever the group's bounding box changes shape.

The Schematic view and the Layers palette are both great ways to organize complex scenes, with less of the headaches of hierarchies. Layers especially are great for selecting, toggling visibility, toggling frozen state, etc.

cman2k

You can also select a child and use ctrl+page down to select all the children below that child.

It's pretty common for me to select a bone or something, spam page up key until I hit the point in the hierarchy I want, and control+pagedown to select the entire hierarchy beneath it (like selecting all the bones in a hand, or in an arm, for example).

This can be cumbersome but it's the best solution I've found so far.

Mark Dygert

I use Outliner and nested folders. Clicking on a folder in Outliner selects all of the things in that folder. Nesting the folders allows you to create hierarchies and groups without having to hassle with groups or parenting things together.