moving from Maya to Max.
mod
Hey all. So i started my 3d career in Maya, and now im trying to learn Max. from what i hear, its a much better modelling program, and seems to be the more common of the two. But anyone thats used both knows they are fairly different. I was wondering if anyone had any tutorials or anything to help me pick it up faster.
two of th things ive noticed so far in max.
-when spinning the camera in perspective, it always seems to be off center. in maya, i could just press F, and it would center my object.
in perspective, if i grab a vertex, i cant just move it in one axis. do i have to go to the front/side/top views to do that?
Im sure theres way more, but i havent gotten to far into the program just yet. any help would be appreciated.
two of th things ive noticed so far in max.
-when spinning the camera in perspective, it always seems to be off center. in maya, i could just press F, and it would center my object.
in perspective, if i grab a vertex, i cant just move it in one axis. do i have to go to the front/side/top views to do that?
Im sure theres way more, but i havent gotten to far into the program just yet. any help would be appreciated.
Replies
You grab a certain axis on the gizmo. Click the box between two axis to move it along both of those directions.
Oooo smoothing groups, they'll bake your noodle too.
Good luck keep pluggin away you're over most of the main hurdles already and it sounds like your forehead and keyboard are still intact.
To make the camera rotate around your current selection, hold down on the tiny button, 2nd over from the right hand bottom corner, and change it to Orbit Subobject. It will behave like when you F focus in maya, but automatically treats it as your rotation axis (dont have to keep F-ing it)
ALWAYS model in Edit Polygons, not Edit Mesh. Imported OBJs will come in as Edit Mesh by default fyi. To change it, right click on "Edit Mesh" in the little window in the right and bar, and change it to Edit Poly. Once in there, you can press 1,2,3,4 and 5 to cycle between vert, edge, open edgeloop, face, and element. 6 takes you to top object level.
I've used both for work, and as a modeler, you'll really appreciate Max once you get over it's quirks.
Play with Edge constraints and soft selection. They're my fav Max vs Maya features.
yes, MoP, work flow is DEFINITELY differnet. and the tools, it seems are way different as well. Slowly workin away at it. Ive had a picture of a weapon ive wanted to do for a while now, so i figured id learn with that.
a question about edge loops. specifically adding them. Whats the best way to do that? I set up a hot key to insert edge loop, as i did with maya, but all it does is add a loop in the middle. And then i cant slide it to where i want, unless im missing something. Is the best way to add an edge loop the connect tool? or is there a better way? with the connect tool, i had to highlight all of the edges i want, which can really slow my down in certain cases.
what about deleting edge loops? i tried that and it deleted the entire geometry around it?
thanks for the help guys. i really appreciate it.
connect is the best way to add edge loops - if you want to put them into a ring just select one edge from the edge ring, then select the edge ring, then do Connect.
you can move the edge loop around afterwards by turning on "constrain to edges", or you can use the options box to the right of Connect to tweak the insertion point (and number of edges to connect).
I would hotkey all these things - I can model super-fast in Max by having mainly these hotkeys:
C = connect
X = collapse
CTRL+E = remove
R = select edge ring
F = select edge loop
ALT+C = cut
That gives you pretty much everything you need for basic poly modelling.
also, whats connect even do? lol. or cut, for that matter?
ive noticed extrude works differently as well. can only go up and down it seems. say, for a cylinder, in maya, i could select faces in the middle, and extrude, then it would go out from the cylinder. max, it seems i cant? unless i pressed something i shouldnt have. which, ive done a few times already. lol
You can also click the box next to the connect button and insert more than one edge and pinch it to the outer edges.
Connect just makes new edges between any contiguous selected edges (if they share a face, they will be "connected" by a new edge across the face). Connect also works on vertices - select 2 vertices that share a face and Connect will make an edge between the 2 verts. A fast use for this is to select a bunch of verts somewhere and just hit Connect - it's basically the same as doing "Triangulate" in Maya - it will create edges across all faces shared by the selected verts.
Simply use them a bit and figure out what they do.
I don't know about Maya but you might find the ; key useful. It repeats your previous actions, so if you extruded a face, and clicked ; it would extrude the face again with the same settings.
EDIT: fixed the problem. was just cause i hadnt filled in the back of it. as soon as i did that, it worked.
There are two ways I know of to check the normals.
1) Apply a Edit Normals Modifier to your mesh. It draws lines from each vert showing which way.
2) If you're just checking to see if a poly is flipped or not, with the object selected you can right click the viewport, go object properties and turn on backface culling. It will make the back faces transparent.
Leaving backface culling on for a lot of objects can impact viewport performance, but it really depends on the scene, the system and the version of 3dsmax.
after about 8-10 hours of playing around with it, this is what ive done. http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=65246
just one more question, for now. Besides going into the object properties, is there a way to find out poly counts? object properties only seems to work with 1 object at a time, so with floating geo, doesnt help too much.
Poly/tri count comes up as text in the viewport. Press 7 or right click the viewport label in the upper left corner and turn on "show statistics".
To configure the stats (show verts/polys, selected, all ect) Right click the viewport label go > configure > statistics tab.
It's almost inevitable that I'll have an obvious, yet very real, problem and end up posting it in here. Some very helpful tips so far!
http://draster.com/videos/downloadable/NEXv1-part1.mov
Is there partial loop/ring in max? Couldn't find it yet.
Also I notice when I activate cut tool, click on some edges, and when I rotate the viewport using alt+mmb, it's disabled, is that normal?
There should be a square # chart of buttons stating (1,2,3,4-30) at the near bottom.
Not quite sure myself what they all do. But if you have a component part(s) selected, and press one of the #'s. It will smooth it out.
It's really odd I know, but that's the way it works. Unless if you're like me and have "polyboost" installed. Well, then it's the standard maya approach with only 3 buttons (Smooth, Hard, 30)