- [Instructor] 3ds Max gives us many options
for displaying objects in the viewport.
We can change the viewport's shading modes
in many, many different ways.
And that's important not just for aesthetics,
but for productivity.
For example, sometimes we need to see
the surfaces of objects, and that's called a shaded mode.
Sometimes we just need to see the wireframes.
First thing I want to show you,
is how to change up some basic settings
that affect the quality of the display.
And that's going to be found
in the viewport configuration dialogue.
I want to talk about how to enable anti-aliasing,
and also how to disable progressive display.
So aliasing is when lines look crunchy.
And that's what we see here on the grid.
So we see some aliasing,
we want to clean that up, make that smoother.
The other thing I want to do,
is turn off progressive refinement of the display.
If you move around in a shaded viewport,
using any of the viewport navigation controls,
such as pan with a middle mouse.
You'll see that while you're moving around,
the quality of the display is poor.
And then when you release the mouse and settle down,
it cleans up.
Well, really most video cards today are so fast,
that this progressive refinement thing
isn't necessary at all, we can just turn it off,
and we won't be distracted by that,
we'll always see our display in full quality,
regardless of whether we're moving or not.
These controls are going to be found
in the viewport configuration dialogue.
One way to get to that,
is from the viewport menu in the upper left.
On the extreme upper left is a plus sign,
that's a menu, it's called the general viewport menu.
Click on that, and go to configure viewports.
In the display performance tab up here,
we have, improve quality progressively.
I want to turn that off.
Then we come to the anti-aliasing quality,
and you can usually just turn this all the way up,
to its maximum of eight times.
And this will be fine for any newer video hardware.
If you're working on very low end video hardware,
if your computer doesn't have a good video card,
then you might want different settings.
I'm going to go ahead and click okay here,
and we can see our grid is much cleaner,
all of our edges and lines in the viewports are cleaner,
and if we move around again with the middle mouse button,
we don't have that distracting, progressive display issue.
All right, so next let's look at how to switch between
wireframe and shaded modes.
Another one of the viewport menus over here,
is called the viewport preferences menu.
And it's currently displayed as default shading,
here in my perspective view.
We see the word wireframe in the orthographic views.
That should tell you that these menus are going to change,
the name displayed here is going to depend upon
what settings you have currently chosen.
To switch between default shading and wireframe,
we can click on that menu, and enable wireframe override.
Or we can go back and disable wireframe override.
Same thing up here, we can go into default shading,
or we can turn default shading off,
by setting wireframe override on.
I can switch back to default shading,
and that'll do the same as turning wireframe override off.
You'll need to switch that on and off so many times a day
that you really want to use the keyboard shortcut,
which is F3, that'll toggle the state of wireframe.
And we can do that just by hovering the mouse
over a viewport and pressing F3.
Sometimes you want to see wireframes superposed
over a shaded view, that wireframe on shaded mode
is called edged faces in Max.
We can access it once again
from the viewport preference menu.
We can enable edged faces,
and now we see wireframes on top of our shaded view.
There's a keyboard shortcut for that also,
which is F4, toggles the state of edged faces.
Finally, in that viewport preferences menu,
we can enable some special display modes.
I'll maximize this perspective view with alt W,
go into that viewport preference menu,
and you'll see we've got some options here,
such as a clay mode.
Go back in there again,
we've got some stylized modes, such as graphite.
And this is fully interactive, as we move around,
we can see that we're still getting that display.
Now that's not terribly useful, but you know what is useful?
If we go back into that menu, there's a hidden line option,
enable that, and it's kind of similar to wireframe,
except that any wires that are behind surfaces
are not displayed.
In other words, any occluded wires are hidden,
and that's different from wireframe.
We can see if we switch to wireframe override,
we see all the wires, but if we're in the hidden line mode,
we only see the wires that are not occluded by surfaces.
All right, I'll go back to the default shading mode.