Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll take a look at some of the basics of our 3D viewports and how to navigate those viewports. So let's open this up and just take a look at our viewports. So we have four viewports, and if you've used 3D applications at all, you're probably familiar with the 3D views and how they're used, but we'll go over this. If you're new to 3D, hopefully you'll get something out of this. So up here at the top, you can see we have labels on these different views, and these three look a little bit different than this particular view. So up here, you can see that it says Top, here Front, and here Left. These are orthographic views. So basically, we're going to look at a top view of our object, so a straight down view. Here's going to be a straight view from the front, and here is a view from the left side. Now, this is going to be our perspective, so you can see that we're actually just kind of looking at this as we would look at a normal object here. So there's perspective distortion here as it moves back into space. Here, we're just looking at it straight down. Think of it like a blueprint almost. And so, the combination of working with a perspective view and the orthographic views, all three of these at the same time will allow us to see all sides and angles of our model at the same time and help us to work more efficiently. So to change any of these views around, we can select the viewport. You can see as I click on different viewports, the frame changes and is highlighted. And so this is going to be our active viewport, whichever one I select, and whatever action we choose to do will be done in this particular viewport. Now, we'll still be able to see the effect of what we're doing in the other viewports, but they're just for viewing at that point. So we can select our particular viewport. We can go ahead and click the name of the viewport, and you can see the top is checked. We can change these to Perspective, or to Bottom, Front, Left, Back, Right, and so forth. Some of these you can see. So now we have two front views, basically. They'll be the same. Some of these actually have hot keys, so if we were to go ahead and just take this front view here, and just hit B, we can change that to a bottom view, or hit T to change it back to the top. If you'll notice, there's a view cube right here, and this will actually change to reflect that as well. So right now, we're looking at the top. Over here in this viewport, we're looking at the front, and here the left. Now, we can also change viewports by using this cube. Right now, on the top, if we go ahead and click over here, you can see that we can start to change our views. So right here, we're in an orthographic view from this corner. We can change to the right hand side, click on this arrow to change all the way to the next side, which is the back, and just kind of rotate our way around. We can also come in here and use that. If we want to go home, we hit that, and we're back to our perspective view here. We can always go back in, change this. But as you see, as I change it to the left hand view, it's actually looking at it from the left hand side, but we haven't changed to an orthographic view. We're still in a perspective. So if we want to change that back, we can go in and say, I'd like to actually change that back to front, top, or whatever it is that want to do. So those are different ways that we can change how we're actually looking at our objects. So orthographic or perspective views, we can change those views. Now, we have four viewports here. We can also change the configuration of those. So if we had little plus sign over here and go to Configure, there's a little tab for Layout. And right now we have all of the different layouts here, so we can choose to maybe do something a little bit different, and we can choose what we want in each one. We can say OK, and now we've got our left hand view over here, really large, and then top and front. Go back into Configure, go back to Layout, and then we can change this back, change this out. We can change that perspective view and say OK, and now we're back to where we were. So we can change our layout to however we want. We can also click and drag to change the size of those windows as well. So to actually maximize one of our viewports, all we have to do is-- for instance, if we want to make this viewport the entire space here, we just hit Alt W, and now our perspective is our large screen here. Hit Alt W again, we're back to our four layout. This will affect whatever the active viewport is. So if we have our top view active, hit Alt W, that top view is going to come in. Be careful when you're selecting a new viewport. Oftentimes we'll go ahead and select it using the right mouse button. That way any tools you may have selected, or you may have the Transform tool selected, it won't affect the model. Otherwise you may come in and click on a viewport, and you may actually move something slightly or apply a tool that you didn't mean to. So oftentimes, selecting a new viewport, you can just do that with the right mouse button to avoid any issues. Let's talk about navigating the views. So, let's maximize our perspective view. Let's talk about the hot keys first. So if I hold down the middle mouse button, I can pan around. You can see that down here, I have the ability to select the hand. It will pan and [? pan it ?] as well. So we can use our viewport controls down here, or we can use the hot keys. So middle mouse button will pan around. If I hold down Alt and middle mouse button, I can orbit around. If I hold down CTRL and Alt, middle mouse button, I can move in and out, and then back to this. So think of middle mouse button, and then you've got the combination of Control and Alt to actually move around, and orbit, and move in and out. So that's how we can navigate those. Now if you're going back to something like the top view-- I'll go ahead and maximize-- we can pan around. We can move in, and we can sort of orbit, but you can see as I start orbiting, this changes from our top view to now just orthographic view from a different angle. Because in a top view, we can't really orbit, because then we'd be changing the angle. So just keep that in mind. So we'll go back to our perspective here. Now, one thing that we might want to look at is actually zooming in on all these objects. So right now, we just have a simple teapot dropped in our scene, but it's really, really tiny. And so, what we can do here, in our active view, if we want to just hit Zoom Extents, that will zoom up and basically frame that within our viewport. It hasn't done it with any of the other ones. If we'd like to do that, we can go over here to Zoom Extents All, And that will frame up on that. I'll go back to the top here. So we can also hit Z on our keyboard to do that as well. So just keep that in mind, if you're working with an object that you need to bring up and be able to see really closely in all of your different views, and this will give you better idea of these views. Our front view, which in this case looks like the side, because of how it's created, but you can see how it's different from our left hand view, and our top view, and then our perspective view, which is more of a 3D view that we would be used to. Now we also have the ability in here to change some of these things as we go in and take a look at the options in here. So we've got the options for changing the view, and we could also come in here and, for instance, take the grid and make that a grid view. OK.