- [Instructor] Let's take a tour of the 3ds Max interface
and learn the names and functions
of the primary user interface elements.
Like almost every desktop program,
3ds Max has a menu at the top,
and this is known as the main menu
and that's because there are lots of menus.
This is just the primary menu in the main window.
Unlike some programs,
the 3ds Max main menu is not really complete.
There's lots of things that are not found in that main menu.
And if it's not in the main menu
it's probably going to be over here in this panel,
on the far right, which is called the command panel.
And it's really the heart of 3ds Max.
The command panel is divided into six sub panels.
The default one is the create panel.
We've also got modify, hierarchy, motion,
display and utilities.
The most important ones are create and modify.
As the name indicates, the modified panel
allows you to make changes to selected objects
by applying program modules called modifiers.
In the center of the 3ds Max interface are the view ports.
These are the windows into your 3D scene
and there are three 2D or orthographic view ports by default
we've got the front view, top view and left view.
There's also a default perspective or 3D view port.
You can customize the layout.
We'll look at how to set that up later in the course.
Over on the left, we'll see something called
the scene Explorer.
This is an outline view that lists all the objects
in your scene.
Currently, there's nothing in my scene
so the scene Explorer is blank.
Above the view ports, we have an area called the ribbon
and this primarily gives us access to modeling tools.
The ribbon is collapsed right now.
I can open that up by clicking this down facing arrow,
show full ribbon.
And when that loads up, we can see that some of these tabs
are actually blank and we won't see any tools there
unless we have a certain type of object selected
which is called an editable poly.
There are some other ones that don't rely on editable poly.
So that's the ribbon. I'll collapse that once again.
Above the ribbon and below the main menu is a strip of icons
called the main toolbar.
And these are icons that give access to tools
that you'll need most commonly.
So they're there all the time
because you'll need access to those pretty much always.
There are a couple other toolbar here
and they're kind of squished on my screen
because of my current capture area.
But we've got the project toolbar
and there's also an auto backup and a brush presets toolbar.
We'll look at how to customize all this in a little bit,
but for now we just want to get familiar with
all the different user interface elements.
Now at the bottom, you have something called
the time slider
and this shows us the current time that we're on
if we're doing animation.
We've also got some transport controls down here
to play rewind and so on.
We've got some key framing controls here
in order to create animation key frames.
And in the extreme lower right we have navigation tools
which allow us to change our viewpoint in the 3D scene.
Also here in the center,
we've got a section called the transform type in area
that allows us to see and enter numerical values
for position, rotation and scale data for selected object.
And then finally over here,
we've got the MAXScript mini listener, I'll expand that.
This will allow us to enter in commands
in the 3ds Max scripting languages, MAXScript and Python.
That's the basic overview of the 3ds Max user interface.