Use polygon modifiers in 3ds Max

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But once you've got the primitive added to your scene,

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let's go ahead and add a quick box here.

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Once you've got that primitive, you can go to modify again.

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Like I said, you can change the length, width and height,

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you can change the segments.

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But really, that's all you can do.

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We can't do any sort of modeling on this. We can't use our uh poly modelling tools.

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We can't even move the sub objects.

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So what we wanna do is convert this to a state

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where we can start to do some modeling on it.

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And there are really two main states that we can convert this to a mesh or a poly.

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If we right click on this object and we come down to convert to.

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You can see

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there's editable mesh and editable poly.

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In order to take advantage of a lot of the poly modelling tools in three Ds Macs.

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Normally you'll want to convert this to an editable poly rather than an edible mesh.

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So we'll go ahead and say convert to edible polly as we do this,

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watch the modify panel where it says box,

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you can see now it says editable polly.

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And there's also a little indicator letting us

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know that there's something underneath this hierarchy.

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If we click on this little arrow, you can see now the subj

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objects in this polygon.

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Let's talk for a moment about what the subj objects of a polygon are.

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So the first subj object is going to be a vertex

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and a vertex is simply a point in 3d space.

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So an X value A Y value and a Z value in 3d space, it really doesn't have a size or mass.

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We can see a little bit of an indicator of

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where it is just so we're able to manipulate it,

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but it's really just three numbers in space.

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Now, an edge

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is basically a completely straight line

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that connects

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two points or two vertices, vertices is gonna be the plural of vertex,

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two of those vertices connected by an edge.

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Again, the edge doesn't really have a, a mass or a size to it.

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It's really just a line between two points in space.

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It's always going to be straight.

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The third subj

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object that I wanna talk about is the one that we're actually going to see

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and that's a polygon or sometimes you'll see it referred to as a face.

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So if we go to our polygon subj

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and we click on one of those,

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you can see this is the geometry that's actually being created.

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And in this case, it's being created by four edges. So the

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all this kind of polygon you can have is a triangle.

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So three edges creating one of these and this one is four sided. So we call that a quad.

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So our three main types of subj objects are going to be a vertex,

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the vertices are connected by edges

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you can see here and then three or more of those edges combined to make polygons.

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And this is the actual geometry that we see in our scenes.

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Now, once we have a polygon in this state,

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there are several things that we can do to this and

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there are several places where we can find the tools.

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So as we have these different sub objects selected,

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you can see in our modify panel,

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we get a lot of different options for what

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we can do with those different subj objects.

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So for instance, if I go to polygon and I select this particular polygon,

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come down to edit polygons,

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you can see there are several tools here.

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Extrude is going to be a tool that you're gonna be using a lot.

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If you were to just click on the extrude button, come over here and click and drag.

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You can see

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I can drag that new geometry in or out of the object.

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And with that tool still selected, I can continue to come in and do those extrudes.

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We can also click on the boxes next to

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these tools to bring up settings which will enable you

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to change how the extrude happens,

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the amount of the extrude

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and then you'll want to check this.

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So this will allow you to, to make some changes to how the tool works on the fly.

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We can also do something like an inset

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that is like an extrude but happens on the surface of that polygon.

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So it's still planar.

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This is really good for creating pipes and things like that or elements that need to

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have some kind of support edges around them before we continue to extrude them out.

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Now, in this modify panel,

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you'll find lots of different things that you can do with these particular

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tools.

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If we go to edges,

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you can see that the tools that we can use change based on what we have selected.

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Now, another area that we can find tools that we can use is going to be the ribbon.

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So let's go back to polygon

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and let's select the polygon kind of up here

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and you can select multiple polygons by holding down control

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and clicking. So we'll click on those four

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and let's go ahead and open up our

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ribbon.

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And now you can see, whereas before we didn't have really much going on in this ribbon

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with this polygon selection here,

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you can see it opens up a lot of tools that we're able to use.

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You can see the groups listed by editing geometry, polygons, loops, et cetera. OK.

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We can modify the selection that we have, if we'd like to select a loop or a ring,

04:32

we can do that here.

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And this is under the first section of the ribbon here.

04:36

The modeling section,

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there's also a free form section which we'll look at in a moment.

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But the tools that we can use here are

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very much the same. So if we come under polygons, you can see there is an extrude here

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so I can click on that extrude by hover over this.

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You can see I can shift click for settings.

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So this brings up that window that we talked about earlier.

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Click the checkmark.

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You can also come in here to this little arrow next

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to extrude and click on the extrude settings as well.

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If we do this inset

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and let's actually do the settings.

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If we come up to this type here, we can change this from group to by polygon,

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which will now do the inset based on each particular polygon instead of

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the actual group. So depending on what you wanna do,

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you can change this. And that's one of the advantages of using the settings.

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If we want to get out of this without performing the actual extrude or inset,

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we could just click the little X.

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We can also, if we just select the object as a whole,

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you can see there are still some tools that we can use.

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For instance, if we wanted to add some edge loops here, we could turn on swift loop.

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And you can see I'm just hovering the mouse over and it gives us a

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little preview indicator of where that edge would be if I simply clicked like that,

05:43

that enables me to add an edge loop very, very quickly to our model.