Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

In this lesson, we'll pick up where we left off and continue working on our engine shell. So here is where we left off. And so we've got this large polygon selected on the end of our cylinder. And we'd like to now add some detail. So we can start using our polygon modeling tools. And there are a few places we can find some of these tools. The first place we'll look is in our Modify panel. We'll go down to the roll outs here, and I'll close down selection. And you'll find one called Edit Polygons. There's also one called Edit Geometry. Let's look at Edit Polygons. So there are few tools here that we can use on our polygon faces. And you'll notice that this changes as we change our sub objects selection. For instance, we have edges. And we have an edges here now. So we have some tools we can use on our edges. So this will change based on the sub object that you have selected. So in our case we have a polygon selected. So we've got Edit Polygons. Now there are a few tools that we're going to concentrate on, Inset, Extrude, and Bevel. Inset, now go ahead and just click on that to activate it. And we can click and drag. You can see that will actually allow you to inset that geometry. So it's kind of like if you've done an extrude in another application. And instead of moving it off of the surface, you just scale it down. So it's the same kind of thing here, where it stays on that plane. But now we have this new smaller face, and it creates this row of this loop of polygons on the outside. Now apart from going ahead and just clicking this and manually changing things, we can also use our settings. So let's say we want to push this polygon in. We can use Extrude. And we can go ahead and just click on the name and do it manually. Or we can click on the settings. This will bring up something that's a little bit new. It's new here in 2011. And that's the in-context direct manipulation UI here. And so what you're looking at is this little UI that's floating around. It's kind of close to where we're actually doing our work so that we don't have to look over here or somewhere else to change the settings. And this will allow us to interactively change what's going on with the tool that we've applied. So in this case, we're doing an Extrude. So we can change our distance here. So pushing that out, we want to actually pull it in a little bit. So we want to change that value there. There's also some options in here which we'll look at a little bit later. Right now it's not going to matter too much to us because we've got the single polygon selected. But once we've got our values set, if we'd like to do another Extrude immediately following this, we can go ahead and just say Apply and Continue. Or if we're done, we could just say OK, and that will apply that Extrude. So that's a nice little feature to be able to come in and manipulate that, and get it exactly looking the way that you want before you actually apply that. If you need an exact numerical value in there, you could put that in, as well. OK? Let's try the same thing with Inset. So we'll click on the Inset settings. And here, again, we've got the values that we can dial up and down until we get the kind of the look that we want. We can rotate around. It still hasn't been applied yet. Once we get it to a position that we like, to say OK. All right. We could do another Extrude. This will do it with the same values as we had before. If we want to manipulate those values a little bit, we can change those up. OK. And say OK. Now there's also a bevel. And this bevel sort of combines the Extrude and the Inset together. So if we click on these settings for the bevel, we can change how far in or out this bevel goes. So it's kind of the Extrude value. Let's push it in a little bit. And maybe not that far. And then we can also change the inset amount. So you can see here, we've got now a combination of those. So instead of just saying OK, let's go ahead and apply and continue. It's going to go ahead and apply that, and then use the same settings to apply it to that new face. So in this case it's not committed. We could still cancel out of that, and we would be left with our initial bevel. But in this case, we want to continue. We can keep going until we get to a point where we say, OK, that's good. We'll leave it right there. OK? And then if you wanted to move these faces around, you could do that. Now if you want to select polygons here, for instance if I wanted to move some of this up, we'd go into an Edge selection. We could select Edges. If we click on an edge-- click on the next edge-- you can see it just kind of goes along the edge. But if we click on an edge and then shift click on the next edge, it will select that loop. So that will allow us to select this loop. You could also come in here. And if we go to Selection, you can see you have a Loop button right in here that we can use. OK? The same thing goes for polygons, Shift click, and that will give you that loop. So some nice features here to be able to quickly select some geometry for us. The next thing that we want to do is to sort of shape the back end. So the back of this pod engine I want to be open. So the first thing we can do is go ahead and select the polygon at the back. Just hit Delete to get rid of that. All right. And now we also might want to come in and delete some polygons on the side. So coming in here and having kind of a side that's a little bit more open. So we can come in here and select our polygons. And we can use whatever selection method that we want to. And you can cycle through those. OK. Right now we've got our rectangular selection. But you can see I can still come in and just manually click on any of these polygons to select those. OK. And we can come in, select those polygons. And if you want to-- you Alt W to look at it from the side. Make sure you've got all those polygons selected. You could also come in and just drag a rectangle across there to select them all, too. So really get used to using all of your views to help you do your selecting. OK? We can now go ahead and delete those. Now let's say I want to add a little bit of detail here on the corners. OK. Let's say I want to knock off this corner. Well I want to maintain three or four-sided geometry. I don't want to have too many ngons, what we talked about earlier. So I need a little bit of resolution in here. Now there are a few ways that we can do this. We could select all of these edges. OK. And now if we jump down here into our Edit Edges, you can see that we have some new tools that we're able to use. Connect to something that will allow you to connect an edge loop from here basically to here. From the edges that we have selected. So we'll jump in here. And again, this gives us our in context direct manipulation. We can decide how many edge loops we want. I only want one. We can decide if we want to pinch those. So for instance, if we have two, we can kind of pinch those together. And that's useful in a variety of situations. Let's say we just have one, though. And so what I can do a slide it along. So let's say I want to bring it down here. So having all of this right here is going to be really, really useful. So I'll go ahead and save. OK to that. And that gives us a new line right in there. Now let's say I want to cut this off right in here. So just have a kind of a cut right there. What we can do is go to our top level, to our object, and go to Edit Geometry. And there's a button called Cut. So activate that, and this will allow us to manually cut across here. So you can see as I hover over the different sub-objects, the cursor changes. So this lets me know I'm over a vertex. Now I'm over an edge. And now I'm in the middle of a polygon. So if I want to go from point to point, I will go from vertex, click. You can see it's trying to connect those up. And I'll just go over here and click on this vertex. And right click to end that. And it'll add a new line right in there. Let's do the same thing over here on this side. Click here. Add that and right click. OK. Now let's get out of that tool. And delete our polygons that we created, and it gives us a little bit of an area that's knocked off there in the back. So Connect is good for manually drawing out topology and edge loops when the occasion arises that you need to do that. OK? So now we've got our little bit of detail added here, let's go ahead and in the next lesson, add some larger pieces up here on the front of the engine. And we can reuse the geometry that we have in some different ways to actually get that. So we will do that in the next lesson.