Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

Now let's take a little bit of a deeper look into the command panel itself. So over here we kind of went through real quickly what some of these panels were and then kind of some of the functionality located inside of each panel. But let's take a little bit of a closer look. So again, the first panel going from left to right is going to be the Create panel. This is where we're going to be creating any of our pieces of geometry, our lights, our helpers, any of those things. So we're gonna be doing that here in our Create panel. OK. So as we look at the Create panel, we move down. You'll see that we can create geometry, which is gonna be 3D objects. We take a look down here under our dropdown. This is gonna define what type of geometry we can create. We can create standard primitives, which we have this selected. You can see that we have these to choose from. We can choose extended primitives, which will have a little bit more complexity and a little bit different as you can see here. We have compound objects which are combinations of multiple objects here. We can create particle system, patch grids, NURBS surfaces, doors, windows, stairs, objects like that. So under our Geometry, we have a number of different types of primitives-- objects rather-- and each one of these is gonna change what you see in the rollout underneath as far as what you can actually create. If we move across to Shapes, this is gonna be 2D objects like splines. So you can see here in our menu it's changed now to splines. And then we have a number of different types of splines that we can create. So just think of these as lines, shapes, things that don't really render but you can create other objects from. Underneath here, we can change. And there's only three options here. Now for splines, NURBS curves, which will give us these options, and then extend splines. OK. So moving from Geometry to Splines, now we can jump over to Lights. And now you can see that there are a number of different types of lights that we can select here. And so again, selecting your category here, and then finding the specific types of lights that you can actually create right underneath it in the rollout. Next to Lights, we'll come to Cameras. You can see that we just have one type here. And we have a target and a free. And we can select and create those cameras. We also have helper objects that we can create. And you can see that we have a number of different categories for those helper objects. Things like tape, grid, protractor, compass, things like that that will help us to build up our scenes. And those will be located here. Moving across from Helpers, we have Space Warps, which include forces, deflectors, modifier-based things. So these will help us to kind of modify and change and warp our geometry in different ways, drag, gravity, things like that. And then next to our Space Warp, we have different types of systems, so bones, biped systems, sunlight, ring array, things like that. So, you go from Geometry to Shapes, Lights, Cameras, Helpers, Space Warps, and Systems. Again with the categories that you can create here. And then those specific items that you can create in the rollout underneath. And this is all in the Create panel. Now, once we've created whatever it is that we're working with, unless you want to create something else, we're gonna move to the Modify panel to change that thing. And in the next lesson, we'll actually create an object and do that. But let's look at the Modify panel. And so here in the Modify panel, right now we don't really see much at all. And that's because we don't have any geometry in our scene. But this is gonna be the list of modifiers that we can add to our scene. This is gonna be the modifier stack, which we'll look at specifically a little bit later. And these are gonna be some of the options for a modifier stack. So really, this is pretty empty because we don't have anything to modify at the moment. Moving over from our Modify panel, we have the Hierarchy panel. So this will allow us to adjust pivots, center pivots. We can use a working pivot if we want to use kind of a temporary pivot instead of the pivot based on our particular object. Adjusting transforms. So these all have to do with hierarchy and hierarchies within our scene here. So we've got pivot options here. We also have the ability to modify our IK and linking information OK. And that's gonna be located our Hierarchy panel. Across from Hierarchy, we have Motion panel, which we can work with the motion controllers, which we won't really worry about too much in this lesson. And next to that is gonna be Display. So here we can change the wire frame color. We can change the color of our objects here. If we want to, we can hide different types of objects. We can hide, hide unselected, hide selected, different options for the freezing and visibility of our objects. And that's all gonna be found here in the Display panel. And then we have a Utility panel with some miscellaneous utilities that we may be able to use. So we're gonna concentrate in this course since we're just getting started, we'll concentrate mostly on the Create and Modify panels. OK. Just keep getting used to using the Create panel to drop in your geometry. And then you will use the Modify panel to modify it. And so we'll actually have a practical example of that in the next lesson as we create our first object. And then look at how we can actually modify that object here in the Modify panel. So we'll go ahead and do that in the next lesson.