- [Man] Now that we've tamed the 3ds Max user interface,
we can proceed now to actually creating some objects.
And we can create objects in a couple different ways.
One way is through the main menus.
You'll see create, and there are a bunch of categories
such as standard primitives.
A primitive is a building block object
such as a box or a sphere.
But if you do it this way,
you only have the option to create objects
interactively by clicking and dragging,
you don't have the ability to plug in numerical values
at this stage.
However, if you create primitives using the other method,
then you can choose
whether you want to plug in numerical values
or interactively drag in order to create your object.
So usually 3ds Max users will do it the other way,
which is through the create panel.
So over here we've got our create panel,
and we see that the create panel has a bunch of categories,
geometry, shapes, lights, cameras, and so on.
And sometimes within each one of these object categories
there are going to be subcategories.
For example, in the geometry or surfaces category,
we have a pull down list from which we can choose
all these different types of surfaces.
We're going to stick with standard primitives right now.
So we've got a bunch of buttons here
and each one of these buttons will invoke a creation tool
for that primitive type.
And that's going to take us out of our current tool,
whatever that may be.
The default tool is up here on the toolbar at select object.
So currently we're in a mode where we can select objects.
Now we're going to go into a mode
where we can create a particular type of object.
So click on the box button,
and we can scroll down here a little bit in this panel,
and we see that we've got some rollouts.
A rollout is a container for controls.
We've got the keyboard entry rollout,
let's open that up.
And this will allow us to plug in the position
and the dimensions of a new box.
Below that we've got the parameters rollout.
And this applies to the creation method of keyboard entry
in as much as it allows us a to change
the number of segments or the number of polygon faces.
But these parameters also apply
to the interactive creation mode, which we will see
in the following movie.
Up here at the top,
we can choose whether we want to create a box
which will have three separate dimensions
for length, width and height, or we can choose cube,
in which case the width and height will be grayed out
because a cube is going to be the same dimension on all sides.
So let's say I want to create a cube,
I'll need to plug in some non-zero value for the dimensions.
Let's set this length to a value of 24 and press enter.
Now that's going to give us a cube that's 24 units on a side.
You may be wondering, well, what are these units?
By default, we're going to be working
in 3ds Max default units, so called.
And a default unit is also equal to a system unit.
We're going to be looking at this in more detail later,
but 3ds Max has system units
which are kind of internal to the program
and it also has display units.
And the system units by default are inches.
That doesn't mean you can't work in centimeters
or any other unit of measurement you want,
you can work in any units you wish,
but the default system units,
kind of in the guts of the program are inches by default.
We'll see how to change all that later.
So this means we're going to be creating a cube
that is 24 inches or two feet on a side.
If we wanted to have some segmentation,
then we can plug in some values here
for the length, width, and height segments.
Right now if we just create this with one segment,
we'll get a cube that has six polygon faces
and there won't be any divisions to the sides of the cube,
but let's give this some non-zero value.
Here we'll set the length to 12,
press Tab, set the width to 12,
press Tab, set the height to 12, and press Enter.
And now we're ready to actually create our cube.
And it's going to be 24 inches on a side
and it'll be subdivided 12 times on each side.
And it's going to be created at the or origin
or the center of the world because our X, Y and Z values
are all still zero.
Click create, and now we've got our cube.
And it has a random color assigned by default.
As long as we don't click off of this object,
as long as it's still selected,
we can continue to make some changes
in these parameters here.
For example, we can change the height.
We can type in a value of 48 and now it's four feet tall
instead of two.
We can adjust these values interactively as well.
Next to each one of these numerical fields are two arrows,
and that is collectively known as a spinner.
If you click and hold else button down
on either the up or the down facing arrow,
then you can incrementally increase or decrease
that particular parameter.
An easier way to do this is actually to click
and drag up and down,
and that's what most users will do.
Or again, we can plug in a numeric value like 48.
If we deselect this object,
we will exit out of creation mode
and we can deselect in lots of different ways.
One would be to simply choose the select object tool,
and we actually still have the object selected,
but we've exited out of creation mode.
You can always get back to those parameters if we want,
as long as that object is selected.
So if I deselect it, then I can't access its parameters
even if I go to the modify panel.
We also have to have something selected.
And so now we can go back in here,
and for example change up the height
and set that to some other value.
That's how to create objects through keyboard entry.