Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
In your viewports you also should take note that Max
tells you that you are using a working pivot. Just under the
viewport name (Perspective, for example) will be “Edit WP”
or “Use WP.” For a video example of this, grab the companion
files at www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008.
The Motion tab is pretty animation specific. As we are
focusing mainly on modeling, the Motion panel is not really
covered in this topic.
The Display panel is where you can find all the hiding and
unhiding tools we talked about in the “Hiding and Freezing
Objects” section.
The Utility panel contains a collection of tools that aren't
very commonly used. I'll cover these as needed, but for now
we'll skip over them.
Changing Viewport Preferences
Depending on what you are doing, you may want to adjust
your viewports in 3ds Max. There are many ways to do this;
the most basic way is to just manually move them to suit your
needs. For example, let's say I want to see all four views but
make the Perspective viewport larger. When you click and
hold one of the viewport's border lines, you will notice that
your cursor changes to a crosshair. This means that this is an
adjustable part of the user interface. Simply click and hold and
move your mouse up and to the left. The viewport will expand
on the fly. This is true for all bordering lines in all four
viewports. Experiment for a moment and start scaling your
different viewports. This is the fastest and most flexible way
to adjust your viewports. If you are like me, however, you
don't always need to see all four views. You may only want to
work with two or three views. That means we need to totally
change our layout. At the upper-left corner of all four
viewports, as shown in Figure 2-2, you'll see the name of that
viewport (Top, Front, Left, Perspective).
