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3ds Max - Layer Questions

leechdemon
polycounter lvl 11
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leechdemon polycounter lvl 11
Modeling off of blueprints is annoying but necessary. My biggest problem is that planes I'm not interested in often get in my way and obstruct my view. I usually hide them temporarily, but it dawned on me that if they were on a separate layer, I might be able to get rid of them more easily.

I don't really use layers in Max, so I'm not quite sure if they can do what I want. I got the reference images on a separate layer and can manually toggle the visibility on/off for them, but I was thinking it'd be nicer to have a hotkey for this. The options in Customize UI let me Isolate the selected object's layer, which is half of what I want... but this doesn't work like a toggle, meaning i need to unhide it or go back into layers and turn this layer's visibility back on.

Is there a way around this, maybe a script or something? Also, is this a process anybody out there does differently? I just find that blueprints can be annoying sometimes, and I like having before/after keybindings (like how I bound "Show End Result" for Symmetry/Turbosmooth to toggle on/off). Things like that help me out a ton.

Suggestions welcome!
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  • Mark Dygert
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    Mark Dygert mod
    You can use alt-x which toggles on and off see through mode on the selected object.

    You can also animate the materials opacity 100% on frame 0, 0% on frame 1 and then use the "Forward Time One Unit" "Backup Time One Unit" hotkeys.
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  • leechdemon
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    leechdemon polycounter lvl 11
    I use X-Ray mode for some stuff, but the largest problem I have is when I get too close to the backface of the plane; for some reason, if you get too close to the plane it forgets it's backfacing and just shows up black, meaning you literally can't see anything. Sometimes I just switch to Wireframe for times like that, but other times I want to actually see what's going on with the surface.

    Animated opacity, that one's interesting. I'll have to give that a shot. Thanks!

    (btw Vig, I think you've answered every one of my 20+ posts so far. You're like a poly-jedi or something, lol.)
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  • leechdemon
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    leechdemon polycounter lvl 11
    Apparently "Visibility" only refers to whether or not it's renderable. Lame. I was able to animate it's scale to 0.00001% though, so that works. Thanks!
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  • SpeCter
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    SpeCter polycounter lvl 14
    I would try to use Isolation Mode (alt+q i think) if you want to work on specific parts and hide the other ones.
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