Did You Know? Tips & Tricks in 3DS Max
polycounter lvl 11
A co-worker of mine enlightened me about tagging non-bone objects as bones via bone tools in 3DS Max, which got me thinking about other cool tricks in Max that people may not know.
Off the top of my head, here's one I've picked up:
-Being able to hide elements of your Editable Poly mesh while skinning: really comes in handy when trying to skin a mesh with multiple layered pieces. It's important to know that hiding elements is different than separating/detaching elements. If you detach an element, this trick won't work since you changed your mesh's vertex data.
-Making an non-bone object an actual bone. Select the object (helper object, geometry, etc) go into Animation > Bone Tools. Under the dropdown "Object Properties", there's a check box called "Bone On", which by default is off. Turn it on and now your object is interpreted as a bone.
What tricks have you learned in 3DS Max?
Off the top of my head, here's one I've picked up:
-Being able to hide elements of your Editable Poly mesh while skinning: really comes in handy when trying to skin a mesh with multiple layered pieces. It's important to know that hiding elements is different than separating/detaching elements. If you detach an element, this trick won't work since you changed your mesh's vertex data.
-Making an non-bone object an actual bone. Select the object (helper object, geometry, etc) go into Animation > Bone Tools. Under the dropdown "Object Properties", there's a check box called "Bone On", which by default is off. Turn it on and now your object is interpreted as a bone.
What tricks have you learned in 3DS Max?
Replies
In edit poly, Alt+H hides your current selection, Alt+U unhides everything and Alt+I hides what's not selected. Alt+I is very useful.
I suppose they're less tricks... more keyboard shortcuts.
Editable mesh is far more stable than editable poly mode. In larger scenes especially, try to keep meshes in edit mesh mode whenever you aren't currently working on them. Collapse stacks often when working on any object to avoid corrupt scenes, too.
Also whatever tools you use most, as well as the slightly strange ones that are a pain to get to (for me an example would be the tape measure CTRL+T) hotkey as much as possible. 3ds max menus are hardly the most organised/intuitive in the world.
Convert selection is a pretty underused functionality, though essential for a quicker workflow.
some shameless self promotion, but hopefully it might be of use:
http://artisaverb.info/Selection.html