- [Instructor] The 3ds Max user interface
has a dark color scheme in order to minimize eyes strain
after long hours on the computer
and that's great.
However, unfortunately, the choices that were made
for the viewport background
and the grid are actually not optimal in my opinion.
We've got some issues
especially around reading the grid
and the grid's really important for precision.
And if you can't read it then
it kind of makes your life difficult.
So for example, if you look at this grid you'll see that
one of these sets of lines is very dark, it's black.
Those are the major axes of the world,
all right that makes a lot of sense.
Then we've got these grid lines
and these are in kind of a like gray color,
which kind of doesn't make sense in a way,
because the axis are black
so why would these be white, but, okay.
But then if we look really closely
we'll see that one of these lines,
one set of lines is actually just ever so slightly different
and that a difference is almost impossible to see
but that's actually a very important distinction
because this line here, which is ever so slightly darker
than the ones around it is a major grid line.
So in Max, we have major grid lines and minor grid lines.
We could, for example, say we want a major grid line
every meter and a minor grid line, every 10 centimeters.
If we can't really see the difference between these
then it's not helpful.
So we want to change up these colors
and really bring out that distinction,
make that easier to see.
Additionally the way that 3ds Max was developed
was kind of piecemeal.
And there may be issues around visibility
of certain screen elements using this default color scheme
for the view ports.
What I want to do here is actually find a balance
between this current dark color scheme
which has some issues and a more legacy,
more traditional color scheme, in which, for example
the grid is darker than the background.
Not some parts of the grid darker
and some parts of the grid lighter
and not making a lot of sense.
So we're going to change up this color scheme,
this is completely optional.
There's no requirement that you do this
but I do recommend it.
It is going to make it a lot easier for you to see
and navigate in your scenes.
Another optional thing that I do recommend
is getting rid of this gradient here.
That can be confusing when you're looking at a scene.
If the background itself is not consistent
it's actually going to introduce optical illusions.
It's going to make it harder
for you to evaluate things like 3D models.
I strongly recommend
that you set all the viewport backgrounds
to be a solid color instead of this gradient.
There's one trick to this though,
because it will only work if the viewport
is in this so-called default shading mode,
we'll see that the perspective use says default shading
in its menu.
These other ones, the orthographic views say wire frame.
We have to switch them out of wire frame mode
before we make this change
otherwise the change will not take effect.
So this is a little bit weird and wonky
but this is what you have to do.
Go into each one of these menus,
click on the menu item that currently reads wire frame
and switch that over to default shading.
And now you'll see that actually all of view ports
have that gradient.
All right, once we've done that
we can go into the main menus to view
viewport background, configure viewport background.
In this dialogue choose use custom, user interface,
solid color, enable that button
and then click the button in the lower left
that says apply to all views in active layout tab.
Once you click that
now all the views show a solid color and no gradient.
We can click OK.
And if we want, we can switch these back to wire frame.
We'll talk more about these shading modes
in the view ports later, it was just important
that we exit out of wire frame mode
in order to affect that change that we just made.
All right, so the next thing we want to do is change up
the view port background and grid colors
and that'll be done from the customized menu
go to customize user interface
and we have some tabs up here.
We want to go to the colors tab, before we make any changes
let's save out the current user interface scheme
in case we want to get back to it.
So we can go down here and click on Save
and it takes us to our current user's profile.
And this is at actually interesting to look at
because it'll tell us where all of our settings are stored
and it's going to be in the current user's hidden folder
called App Data,
Local Autodesk, 3ds Max, version number,
and then language and then region and then UI.
So that's where all your UI settings
are actually going to be stored.
So I'm going to store this with a new file name down here.
I'm just going to call it default and click Save.
So I can always get back to this color scheme if I want.
Now let's make some changes.
We need to choose an element
and the default element is view ports
so that's what we want.
Scroll down in the list.
We want to choose viewport background
and then we have a color swatch click on that color swatch
and let's brighten it a little bit.
We've got a color value here.
Let's set it to a value of 70 and click OK.
We won't see any changes
unless we click apply colors now.
And now we see it's just a little bit brighter
not enough to cause eye strain
but enough who allow us to distinguish the background
from the grid more easily.
So we want to change up the grid color too.
So we go to elements and we want to choose grids.
We can choose to set by color or set by intensity.
Intensity is chosen by default
and we can just put a numerical value
over here for intensity.
We can set that to, let's say 60 and click apply colors now.
And now we can see that our grid is darker
than the background.
And additionally, it's easier to see the major grid line
and minor grid line distinction.
And we can change this, we can set this to some other value
like 50 and click apply colors and see what that does
or maybe a value like 70 click apply colors now.
So you see with intensity up to a higher value
we have greater contrast
between the major and minor grid lines.
I'm going to set that back to 60
'cause I think that was a good balance.
Click apply colors now
and if we want, we can store this explicitly.
If we don't save this, it'll be stored
in our user profile when 3ds Max successfully exits
or we can go ahead and click Save
and we can explicitly save it and we'll give it a file name
we'll call it Dark Viewport and click Save.
We can exit out of the customized user interface dialogue
and that's how to optimize the viewport background
and grid colors.