Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll take a look at how we can start to Transform our geometry. By Transform our geometry, I mean, let's say that we want to move it, rotate it or scale it in our 3D view. So here we have a couple of objects here from our last lesson. And let's say that we now want to start to move these objects around in 3D space. Well, the first thing that we want to do, is to actually select the objects. Right now, you can see that we have an object selected, because we have the selection bracket here. If I click off into our viewport, you can see that now nothing has been selected. So the first key step is to actually select our objects, and you can see that as we select those, the selection bracket comes on. If you want to turn that bracket off, you can just J on your keyboard, and J again, to toggle that back on. Now that we have our objects selected, now we need to actually decide how we want to transform our object. So let's say we want to move our object. We can come up here, and choose to select and move, which we'll turn on the Move gizmo here. Or, if we go ahead and hit Q, you go back to selection, we can actually hit W on our keyboard, and that will do the same thing. So W will activate Move, E will activate Rotate, and if I hit R, it will activate Scale. And so E and then W, so those are the Hot Keys for our transforms. Now once we have Move selected, we can now come in, and if we just click on the Taurus, you can see we can move that around. Clicking, also, on the different axes will allow us to move those in a particular axis. In the Z-axis, you can see how that axis is highlighted. Also, you can see as I come over this plane here between the Z and the Y-axis, it highlights. This will allow us to move it just on that particular plane. And if I go ahead and take a look in our 3D, our views, you can see how that is actually moving. We can come in here, and if we just want to move it along this plane, you can see it's not moving up and down in the front and left view. So that will allow you to isolate, and just move it along the different axes that you want. And that's based on whichever one of these axes is highlighted. Then when you're done moving, if we click off of our object here, we're still in Move mode. So if I were to go and select the circle, I can just click and drag that around. So just keep that in mind. Sometimes you can accidentally start moving things around when, in reality, you just want to select something. So when you're done moving, you can go ahead and just hit Q on your keyboard and you'll go back to regular selection, and won't have to worry about moving anything around. If we'd like to rotate, we'll go ahead and just go to Rotate, and you can see we have another gizmo here we can select the different axes here, or X-axis come around here, and rotate our object. Rotating in the middle, we can just rotate this sort of freeform. If we want to rotate that, and to move it, just hit W, and move that up and over. And then, if you want to do the same thing here, we can just use or combination of our keys to move that around, rotate it around, and so forth. Scaling will work in the same way. We'll hit R on our keyboard, and here, you can see that we have, again, a gizmo that looks a little bit different. So I can grab one of the axis handles, and pull that out, and then I'll scale that out. We can also just scale it in a particular plane, or we can scale it overall. And so you just go by how that particular portion of the gizmo is highlighted, and that will let you know how that's actually going to be transformed. Now, another thing that we can look at here, is that if we go up to, let's say, our selected Move and we right-click on this, this will give us some absolute World values for our Move values here. So if we zero this out, we can move that back into position. If we go ahead and right-click on a rotation, you can see that we have those values in here, we can zero those back out as well. If you want to take the sphere and sort of do the same thing, you can zero that out as well. And again, for the scaling, this is going to be based on 100% instead of zero, and so you can change that. That will allow you to zero all of your Transform values back if you want to. So just keep that in mind, when you're transforming your geometry, work with the Hot Keys the Q, W, E, R, T and that will allow you to Move, and Rotate, and Scale your different objects. And just remember, you're going to be in that mode until you get out using the Q key to go back, and now select geometry without accidentally moving it. Definitely something to keep in mind. Now that we can create geometry, and we can transform geometry, let's next look at different ways of viewing our geometry. There are some different filters and things that we can use to view our geometry differently here in our 3D views, and we'll take a look at those in the next lesson.