- [Instructor] 3D desktop applications
are notoriously complicated.
And their user interfaces can be overwhelming.
And in order to help us focus on the task at hand,
we can customize that interface
and strip it down to only the elements
that are relevant at the current time.
So I'm going to do that.
I'm actually going to get rid
of a lot the stuff on the screen here
for the purposes of keeping our sanity
and also for the purposes of making it easier
to learn the program in the first place.
So let's start with customizing toolbars and panels.
As I showed you earlier,
we can drag and drop panels and toolbars
around on the screen.
And that's done by clicking and dragging on the grab bar
or this textured line,
which will be found at the top
or the side of a panel or a toolbar.
So we can click and drag
and make that Command Panel float,
or we can drag it back over and dock it once again.
On the main toolbar,
we have a bunch of other toolbars.
We've got our projects,
we've got auto backup,
and we've also got the brush presets.
Well, the only one here that's really important to me
is my project.
I want to know what my current project is,
and I want to know that at all times.
And because my screen area here is limited,
I'm going to choose to move that Project toolbar down.
So I'm going to click and drag on that grab bar
and put my Project toolbar down here.
So now I can see exactly where my current project
is located at all times.
Then up here, once again,
we've got a couple more toolbars.
We've got this one which is called the Auto Backup toolbar.
And I'm not going to turn that on or off.
I'm going to leave Auto Backup on,
but I want to hide this toolbar.
And you'll notice, there's no little X button
to hide that toolbar.
What you need to do is right-click on that grab bar
and you'll get a pop-up menu.
And then from that menu,
you can enable or disable various user interface elements.
Here, I'm going to turn off the Auto Backup toolbar.
And now, it's disappeared.
We've also got this one here which is Brush Presets.
We're not going to be using that.
So once again, I'm going to right-click on that grab bar
and turn off the Brush Presets.
When we come over here to the far left,
we've got something called the Viewport Layout Tabs.
We will be using this a little bit later,
but most of the time, we're going to have that hidden.
So once again, we'll right-click on that grab bar,
and we'll turn off the Viewport Layout Tabs.
Now, we come to the Scene Explorer,
and that's really important.
We need the outline view of everything in our scene,
a list of all the objects.
However, we don't want that Scene Explorer
taking up screen space all the time.
There is a button on the main toolbar
that lets us show and hide that Scene Explorer at any time.
And here it is, it's called Toggle Scene Explorer.
If we click that button,
we see something a little bit unexpected.
We get another Scene Explorer.
So now, I got two.
Why is this happening?
Well, it's because these Explorer windows
come in two flavors.
They can be global or local.
And a global Explorer is one where it remembers the settings
for that window regardless of what scene you have loaded.
So this is a global Explorer.
The other one here is a local Explorer,
and the settings in this window
are only going relevant to the current scene file.
Practically speaking,
it doesn't really matter whether you use a global
or a local Explorer,
but in this case,
I want the ability to turn this Scene Explorer
on or off from a button.
And what that effectively means
is I need to hide this global Explorer
and substitute the local Explorer in its place.
So I'll right-click on that grab bar,
turn off Scene Explorer Default,
and then dock this local Explorer over here on the left.
And now, I can turn that on or off at will.
And that's very helpful.
Also on that main toolbar, I can hide the ribbon
because I'm not going to be using it all the time.
So I can just turn that off.
And now, I've got the layout that I want.
And I want to make sure I don't accidentally
drag and drop anything and move it around,
I can go into the Customize menu
and lock the UI layout.
And now, I actually can't drag and drop,
but I can still show and hide things
by once again, right-clicking on that grab bar.
And finally,
there's a user interface element here
that I want to disable.
It's called the ViewCube.
And it allows you to navigate in your view,
but it's misleading and problematic,
and I don't recommend that you use it.
So I'm going to disable that ViewCube.
And if we go to the Views menu here,
we'll see that there is a submenu that says ViewCube
that allows us to hide the ViewCube.
However, unfortunately, if we do it through this menu,
the ViewCube will come back the next time we start 3ds Max.
I want to turn it off permanently.
To do that, I go into Viewports Configuration.
And in that configuration dialogue,
I'll go to the ViewCube tab
and disable it from here,
and click Okay.
And now, that ViewCube is not going to come back
the next time I start 3ds Max.
When we exit out of 3ds Max,
all the settings for the user interface
are going to be stored.
We can also store them explicitly and manually
by going into the Workspaces,
to that pull down list,
go to Manage Workspaces.
Once that loads up,
we can just click the button Save Default State,
and that explicitly stores our current user interface.
And that's how to customize and strip down 3ds Max
in order to simplify it and make it easier to use.