Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll take a look at how we can start to save out our work. OK, so when we get a result that we like, and we'd like to save our file out, there are several options for us to do. We can up here, quickly, just do a save file. We can go up here and say Save, and that'll save it as whatever name that we happen to be using at the moment. We can also save it as a different name. And so let's go ahead and say we'll just save this as, and we'll call this something like save_test_01, and save that. And so you can see, I've saved it out as another file, and this is now actually the file that we're working on. So anything that we save from this point will be saved into this new file. Now, there's a little bit of a different twist on that as far as saving as, save copy as. If we were to save a copy as-- and let's just call this copy-- you can see it's gone ahead and automatically incremented that number. But if we just say copy, we save copy as, you can see that we've saved that out, but we're still working on that original file. So save as and save as copy are a little bit different in that way in that if you are working on a particular file, you hit Save As, you're going to now be working on that new file. If you hit Save Copy As, it's going to save that state out, but you're going to be still working on your original file. So just keep that in mind. If you're working incrementally, you saw that Save Copy As automatically incremented your number, but we can also just go ahead and let's say Save As. And so our file is called save_test_01. If we just hit this plus sign, we can actually increment that to the next number. And so that'll automatically just change and increment that last number from and 01 to an 02. So if you're working on something where you want to save incrementally and keep your process saved out, you can save incrementally there using that Save As. OK. And if you want to save as a copy, you can do that as well under Save As, Save Copy As, and then Save As. OK. So make sure that, when you're working, you save as often as you can. There's also an option here for saving automatically. You can find that here if we go to Customize, Preferences, under Files, if you take a look down here in the lower left hand corner, you'll notice an option for auto backup, and this is a good thing to have on in many cases, because sometimes you'll work for a couple of hours on something and then realize maybe you haven't saved. So obviously, we all try to save as often as possible as far as making sure that we keep all of our work so we don't lose anything, but things happen. You get distracted. And so having this auto backup is a good insurance policy for that. And so we can turn that on just clicking the Enable button here. We can choose to have a max number of backup files, and then we can choose also how often we want to back up. Five minutes maybe is a little bit too short of a time, so maybe every 10, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, something like that. It all depends on how you want to work. But sometimes, having that turned on will save you a lot of time, and you'll really be glad that you had it on in those times where something happens and you feel like you may have lost some work, but you go back and realize, well, I've got an auto backed up file that I can go back and refer to. We also have some options up here for saving as well, and that's going to be located in our preferences under Customize Preferences here. OK. So those are some of the options we have for saving out our files. Before we jump into actually our modeling project, let's go ahead and, real quick, take a look at working with projects, setting our project folder, and then checking our paths with the asset manager. So we'll go ahead and take a look at that in the next lesson.