Share your favorite tips, tricks, workflows, and secrets in 3ds Max.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello Everyone!

I wanted to make a thread about sharing your favorite tips, tricks, or secrets found within 3ds Max.  From awesome hotkey combos to those really essential tools that everyone may not know about, this is the place to share!  I've started the ball rolling below with some really cool tidbits on the particle flow presets that people may not be aware of.  

Please, share yours too! 

Best Regards,

[AdrianWise8371]

Do you know how to create decals on Geometry? how about on just one side, like a sheet of glass in a window?Create a base material, for a window it would be glass, then create a decal material, if it is a single colour decal it can be a simple material colour, say Black [but It can be a full colour bitmap in the diffuse channel].Wire both into a Blend material and use a Black and white image as a mask to reveal you decal on the glass....This will put the decal on both sides of the glass, to resolve this select the faces on one side of your glass and make them MatID 2.Create a multi sub material wire your decal blend material to slot 2 and you base material [ours is glass] to channel 1.Assign it to your geometry and you have decals on one side of your glass and not both.*This method requires mapping co-ordinates on your geometry 

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[AdrianWise8371]

Instancing Modifiers... Did you know you can instance a selection of objects with the same modifier? yes of course you can, but how do you do it to EACH object and not as a selection of objects in one big group?

Use Pivot Points...

Great for applying say and edit poly to change a bunch of objects at once, or apply UV's to a bunch of objects... the attached example is with a bend modifier so you can easily identify what going on.

...

see it in action here

http://screencast.com/t/hngxIC0yyxcj

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[AdrianWise8371]

If you are rigging, characters or machines, with bones, CAT, or Biped, and even simple parent child links, cycle up and down your parented objects with page up and page down. Select all child objects or bones by pressing ctrl + page down.

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[AdrianWise8371]

If you are rigging, characters or machines, with bones, CAT, or Biped, and even simple parent child links, cycle up and down your parented objects with page up and page down. Select all child objects or bones by pressing ctrl + page down.

See more like this at

https://www.facebook.com/Doyouknowin3DSMAX

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Wow @AdrianWise8371, you're bringing the heat today!  Thanks for the awesome tips and tricks!  

Best Regards,

[melissa.lax]

I got to give it to the community, seems like we've got a few everyday Max heroes! 

So question: Was it largely through trial and error, a mentor, colleagues, or a combination of all of these that you learnt these tips and tricks? 

[Swordslayer]

You might have noticed that while you can toggle Command Panel, Ribbon or Track Bar through the Customize menu, some items are not in there. Some, like the Track Bar, can be customized through their right-click menu - you can for example hide the numbers to make it smaller. For some of the others, like the Time Slider or Status Panel, there are built-in commands to hide/show them:

-- toggle Time Slider:
timeSlider.setVisible (not timeSlider.isVisible())

-- toggle Status Panel:
statusPanel.visible = not statusPanel.visible

Then there are items added with the Autodesk's rendition of the ribbon framework:

-- hide the Quick Access Toolbar:
(dotNetClass "Autodesk.Windows.ComponentManager").QuickAccessToolBar.IsVisible = false

-- hide the Menu Bar:
(dotNetClass "Autodesk.Windows.ComponentManager").QuickAccessToolBar.IsMenuBarVisible = false

For the rest, the last resort is to use the UIAccessor:

-- close the Info Center:
UIAccessor.CloseDialog (windows.getChildHWND #max "InfoCenterHwndSource")[1]

Also, not limited to these snippets, if you want to make a toolbar button for such a script, select the script text and drag it to a toolbar - a macroscript and a button will be created automatically.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Here's a quick tip to keep this thread going! 

When I was doing viz work I often had huge stores filled with product and clothing that needed to be rendered.  Those scenes were so heavy that it was very difficult to move around and maximize/go to 4 up views and the scenes would often crash due to heavy load on the graphics card or because of all the textures being loaded.

Three of the things that really helped for this were to display as object color (shown below), display as box for my heavy geometry, and to use bitmap proxies.  The effect on the scenes was huge and made them easy to rotate around when I had 400M polygons and 800 textures.  If you work in viz and have heavy scenes, I can't recommend these two features enough.  (Also using layers to hide things I wasn't using, but that's not really something new to many people.)  

Best Regards,

[kris]

Quads are your best friend.  Customize the hell out of them, and things like subobject modes can be changed without having to do it manually; for example, in my quad (for splines) I have outline, trim, etc... if I select trim while in vertex subobject mode, it will automatically switch to spline subobject mode.

Saves oodles of mouse time.

[kris]

 @melissa.lax - Doing it is the only way to learn it, and doing it alone can't be underestimated.  There's nothing worse (in my mind) than being spoon fed education, because if you can't problem solve, you can't do anything outside what was in your spoon(s).  I taught myself max; when I started, I couldn't afford the only school nearby (Sheridan College), and so I used 1/2 of my tuition to buy an educational license while I went to a local university doing a degree in physics & geology.  Then I got a work from my demo reel, bought a commercial license, and haven't looked back.

If I want to do something, I always find a way.  When I'm doing something I do often, I will (assuming I have the time) try and find a different way to do it.  At least twice a year, I take a couple weeks to work on a "personal project" wherein I do something that I have no idea how to do going in.  That means learning new parts of max, learning new plugins, or other related software (after effects, photoshop, solidworks, etc.).  Not everyone has that luxury, of course, but you have to continually learn and practice to find workflows that are more efficient.

The community helps, too, but these forums are nothing like they were in the late 90s.  Though YouTube has a lot of good content now.

Kris. 

[melissa.lax]

Morning Kris,

Thanks for the sharing your tip with the community! I definitely see your point that learning by being thrown into the "deep end" is a preferred way to learn. With this method, it's a great way to build curiosity leading you down new paths of discovery and ultimately confirming your passion. So I've heard a lot about the Max forums in the 90's. Please enlighten me, what can we bring back? 

Best,

Melissa

- Sent from a chilly -20c in Montreal 

[kris]

@melissa.lax

Posted to a new thread so as not to pollute this one with OT material:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-forum/what-can-make-this-forum-as-good-as-it-was-in-the-late-9...

From a rapidly warming -5C in Sudbury, ON.

Kris.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello all!

I wanted to share another one!  For those of you using the Art renderer, it's a pretty cool and fast to learn renderer.  The one thing that slows me down a bit is how it draws materials in the material editor.  Well, you can use scanline or Mental Ray for the material editor while ART is your main renderer and get the best of both worlds!  Scanline does show the highlights a bit more similarly to the ART renderer, but Mental Ray has cleaner outer edges in the material editor.  

Best Regards,

[AdrianWise8371]

Following on from Alfreds great little tip, I got a great tip from Zap Andersson about speeding up the Material editor.

As Hardware gets better and better we now have the power of GPUs in our systems and the best way to leverage that power in the Material Editor is to set the Material Editor just as Alfred illustrated to QuickSilver and unlock GPU rendering in you Material Workflow...

A

[AdrianWise8371]

More material goodies....

I once spent lots of time creating images of dirty things being cleaned, so I thought I'd share how I achieve it with multi-channel mapping.

Carpet texture used is from The Texture Mill App applied on Channel 1 with a UV tiling of 20cm by 20cm a 'dirty' version is the same bitmap put through an output shader and simply made darker [obviously there are other ways, mix map with another shader, ...or composite map but output worked just fine for me here]

Clean carpet went in Layer1 of a composite shader and dirty carpet went in layer 2 of a composite shader.

Channel 2 UVW 100cm by 100cm was a noise shader [but could be anything] which would control where the dirty carpet shows over the clean, this could be piped into the layer 2 (Mask) and you have a dirty carpet, but I needed a carpet 'being' cleaned.

Channel 3 UVW the whole floor area 400cm by 400cm for this I needed some simple strokes of where a carpet cleaner had already been. No need for Mudbox or anything too fancy Sketchbook a few simple grey strokes building up layers to get progressively darker. Layer this into a composite shader with the noise shader, pipe that into the Layer 2 (Mask) and you have a 'clean area' of your dirty carpet

additional pipe the carpet bitmap into a color correct make it monochrome and pipe that into bump for your carpet.

Note: I had to turn up the values in the noise shader so that they would be clearly visible for the post, it doesn't have to be that harsh and subtle changes can be achieved with this technique

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[AdrianWise8371]

Do you know if you right click a flag in gradient ramp you have access to all the controls? assign a map to the flag instead of a colour, change the interpolation, set the position, and move on to the next, previous or any other flag.

[AdrianWise8371]

did you ever want a better preview of you material than that little ball or cube? right click on a material in Slate and Open Preview Window... make it a big as you wish, let it float about or dock it anywhere in the slate window.

[Swordslayer]

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@AdrianWise8371 wrote:

Do you know if you right click a flag in gradient ramp you have access to all the controls? assign a map to the flag instead of a colour, change the interpolation, set the position, and move on to the next, previous or any other flag.

---

And you can also set the gradient type to 'Mapped' which uses gradient values to replace values from the map, which can be used to create really intricate stuff. For example here it used with a Falloff Shadow/Light in the map slot to get thin lines where the object is lit and thick lines in the dark:

[AdrianWise8371]

From Shawn Hendriks AU video

Polar Snap, no longer in the interface by default go to Customize User Interface, and look for Polar Snap, to see it work, watch Shawn's AU Video, you wont need to watch the whole thing [though you should] it's his first tip in the video

[AdrianWise8371]

To speed my character workflow I have a base mesh character 'Bob' rigged and skinned with CAT and control objects, he has one job, make skinning other more complex character meshes quicker and easier...

its amazing how quickly you can rig and skin a completely new character with Max, the 'detailed' character doesn't need to have the same topology or vert count, just fit the proportions of the base mesh...

see how I do it here...

http://www.screencast.com/t/VxtFsmmuL

[its a jing video so it uses flash, sorry apple fans]