Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll take a look at some of the different ways that we can view our 3D geometry. So here we just have a couple of objects from our last lesson. And without the selection bracket on, for instance, if I turn this selection bracket off, it's really difficult to see what exactly I have selected here, OK? So there are number of different options for viewing our geometry. Some of these will make it a little bit easier. So right now we're just in a Smooth plus Highlights view. If I click on this, you can see that there are a number of different options here for us. So this is just giving us a smooth version with highlights. If we go to Hidden Line, that will give us a wire frame, but it has the wire frame behind where we can't see it. It has those lines hidden, so it's kind of like a-- it looks like a texture with a wire frame on it. If we go now actually to Wire Frame, you can see that shows us all of the wires of that particular mesh, so all the way through. We can also see a flat version with no shading on it. And we have an Edged Faces option here, which will give us these wire frames. So let's go back to Smooth plus Highlights. We'll turn off Edged Faces. There are also some hot keys that we can use here. So hitting at F3 here will turn this into a wire frame view. Hitting F3 again, we can go back to Smooth plus Highlights, and now we can turn on Edged Faces by hitting F4. So hitting F4 will turn on those edged faces, and that's kind of just a wire frame view. But now when we select our object, you can see that that's much more clear what object is actually being selected. We can toggle that on and off using F4, but we need to be in a smooth mode, where here in wire frame, you can see we don't really see an effect of that. So we need to be in Smooth, or we can be in Flat mode as well. So those are just some different options for viewing our geometry. We can also hide our geometry. So if we select our torus here, we can right click to go or Quad menu and just go Hide Selection if we want to do that, and then we won't be able to see that. Or we can Unhide All to get that back. We can also go into our Display panel, and you can see that we have some hide options here that we can change. And then we have options down here for displaying as well. So the main things you're going to find are going to be up here in your View port be able to use and look at your geometry in different ways. Oftentimes, you'll need to use a wire frame if you're working on some geometry where you need to access points and see how those are connected. A lot of times, you may want to use wire frame to be able to go in and look at different areas of your model. But many times, if you have something that's very complex, you're not going to be able to see too much because of the wire frame. It's going to kind of cloud everything because you're going to see both sides. And so in those cases, you may want to look at the Hidden Line option, or you may just use Smooth with Edged Faces. That will give you good idea of what your topology actually looks like, OK? So just to take some time getting used to that and the display of your objects. And then in the next lesson, we're going to take a closer look at the modifier stack which is something that kind of sets 3ds Max apart from other applications in how it works. And so we'll go ahead and take a closer look at that in the next lesson.