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Hi. Welcome to 3D motive dot com.
My name is Steven [G Wells]
and I'm the senior character artist.
In this quick tips and tricks tutorials,
we'll take a look at setting up custom UI colors
and take a look at creating shortcuts within
3D Studio Max.
This is what 3D Studio Max looks like as a default.
This is just an old model of mine that I never finished.
I though I'd have it on screen so it's cool to look at.
If I hit F4, you can actually see that the wire frames off.
F4 again to bring it back on.
One of the first things we'll take a look at
is our view port.
Obviously, we loose some real estate,
and mind you, I got the entire screen condensed [unintelligible]
I can record it with Camtasia, but
often times you'll still have a couple different
command panels over on these sides.
You might be loosing some view port real estate.
The default setting for that is Control X.
If you hit Control X, you can then have a lot more real estate with it.
To zoom in and out is just rolling my wheel mouse.
To pan around is I hold my middle mouse and hold it,
makes it really simple and easy.
Control X rings all the panels back in my
regular view port, and bring zoom back in a little bit.
For me, I have a default of rotation meeting
around the particular item is V.
I can actually rotate around.
So I can rotate that around.
You can, in fact, hit F, that's front.
To be actually to do any rotation, they do give you this,
this is the View Port gizmo.
I can just left click and drag it around,
and I can rotate it as I need to.
That does come in handy.
It's one of those where, if you grab the item itself
you're rotating around the object, but
if you grab the little hinges, the little hinges on the circle,
you're spinning around on a axis. As you can see.
Simple, easy, but it's gets the point.
Right now, it says we're in Orthographic.
If you might notice, it's looks a little odd
proportion wise, because Orthographic has no
real Z depth. In order to get prospective,
you have P, and there we go.
Now we're in perspective, everything scales up a
little bit better.
You can always click the little plus sign here,
and you can configure your view ports.
If you want to configure your view ports, for the
Rendering level smooth, facets, things like that.
In this case, right over here if you see it,
it says Polygons 14 thousand, Vertices 15 thousand,
Frames per second. That's changed under statics.
You can change your Poly count to Triangle count,
Edge count. You can turn off the Vertex count.
You can turn off Frames per second.
You might want to grab it so it's just on the
selection rather than the total scene.
You might have some objects that are hidden.
So, or even in the scene, but it won't show up
as a number unless your selecting it.
If I hit okay, see, it says Polygons are zero.
Well,we know that's not true, because
if i select this model, there you go.
Then, I have the Polygons, and it shows how many Polygons it is.
Again, that's just clicking this little arrow,
going down to Configure view ports,
I'll just click that right there.
You can do statics. You can change the layout
of how you want your layout.
There are several different screens.
I like the 4 panel one myself, but
I know there are some artist that like just a
split panel where it's 3.
I known a couple that like one big shot, just a 2 panel thing.
I like the 4, because I can just do a simple toggle.
For me, the shortcut is W.
I can do a simple toggle and get all 4 view ports in,
or if I simply click, in a single panel,
you see that little red line?
That means it's selected. Whatever one is selected,
when I hit W, that's what comes up.
Hit W again, and click on that, and hit W.
Just some things to be aware of in the UI.
To change things, customize, kind of self explanatory,
just go to the Customize use interface, and
this is basically, for this particular thing
as you can see, this says the Main UI,
which is what we're in. The category, in this case
is all Commands, and here are all the shortcuts,
all the shortcuts you can create.
It's quiet a long list.
There are some that are defaulted all ready,
like for instance, if I hit F I'm in front.
If I hit R I'm in right-hand side.
If I'm left, I think I actually had to create
one for back, which was K.
If I want to be underneath, I could hit B.
That's the bottom. If I hit T, that's the top.
T is standard, but the bottom and the back ones are created.
I did that by going to Customize,
customize user interface, and I literally found, and I'd scroll down
and found a back view,
to change all you have to do is type a hot-key.
Whatever hot-key you want on your keyboard.
It can be U, it can be I, it could be whatever.
Once you've got that in there, in this case,
I just going to do K, just so it's there.
Click a sign, and that's it.
That will now be your default shortcut for this particular piece for the back view.
What you can do is you can change a lot of different things
in here, the active shades, all sorts of stuff.
I like to stick with the Main UI.
Then from here, I can go for different things like
the Quad menu sets, Projection modifiers,
things like that.
You can change so many different things.
What you can do by the way, while you're working
with this, is you can change your tool bars.
How their set up.
You can move them up, you can move them down.
You can use the different quads, et cetra.
The menus, again, you get to list different things,
add and subtract things in your menus.
If you have the tab I like to use a lot,
and I'm sure you guys would use it, the ones you
want to use mostly will be keyboard shortcuts and the colors.
The colors, you can change your backgrounds
and everything else. To show you, there's the
view port background I selected on the View port background.
That's the grey color that is there.
I can change this to whatever color I want.
I tried to use red, but that's okay.
Let's assume for a second that's it. I just want to change that.
As soon as you close this, it updates.
Did you see that?
It updates instantly.
Whatever colors you're using it'll turn around
and update that instantly.
You can go back to the background.
I'll go back to the kind of grey it was.
Let's see something like this, actually,
let's pull it down, and do that.
If I close it, there you go.
If you thing that's a little lite, we'll just darken it.
View port background, and I'm to darken it up a little bit.
There we go. Let's go ahead and close this. There we go.
You can also, one of the nice things is, you can actually
load up right here, this button right here,
you can click and load a custom UI.
I should have my own one set up.
Once you create all the colors you want to create,
you can actually save it, and it'll save it
in the UI folder.
Here you go. UI folder. You can name it whatever you want.
Again, I have my own.
You can turn around an literally change
everything going in this.
You can change the color of statics.
Right now their yellow, you see that?
Their yellow, it's yellow.
I can change that to like a brilliant green.
Let's go ahead and close that.
There you go changed it instantly.
Again, any changes you make, if you made it,
it'll keep it automatically as your default.
You can always reset it to whatever the original was.
Or, you can just click on it and, in this case,
I'm to go back to my yellow, and it's going to be there.
I like yellow against grey, it's actually pretty easy to read.
So, again, to customize everything you can go through
each one of these, find what each one of these things are.
These are View ports. You can do active shades.
You can do characters. You can do the geometry.
How do each one of these, when you freeze geometry
is it going to be yellow, is it going to be green.
You can change all of that.
Everything is customizable. That's what I really love about it.
It pretty much whatever you want it be able to do.
Again, then you can save it when you are done.
If a friend of yours has [unintelligible]
you can get a copy of that, load it up,
drop it in, and it becomes your default.
Anyway, this is has been Steven [G Wells] for 3d motive dot com.
Hope you guys have had fun with this and thanks for watching.