- [Instructor] The scene explorer gives an outline view
of everything in the scene and it allows us to do things
like hide or freeze objects so that they can't be selected.
I've got the scene explorer hidden right now
so I'll bring it back from its button on the main toolbar,
toggle scene explorer.
And this is a list of everything in the scene
and the type of object is indicated by the icons here.
So, some of these objects are polygon meshes,
I've also got some lights and cameras and so on.
And I can display or hide different object types
in the scene explorer here by filtering it
using these buttons.
It's not going to affect the visibility
of the objects in the scene,
it's just going to make the invisible in this list or not.
So for example, if I wanted to hide everything
that was a polygon mesh, I could click on this icon
up at the top.
It's display geometry, and the icon is just a circle.
So, if I enable that switch,
it's going to turn off the display of all polygon objects.
Now, curiously, you'll see that some objects
such as these pergola crossbeams are not hidden
even though I know that these are polygon meshes.
Well, it's because they started out their lives
as splines or curve-based objects.
So, in 3ds Max terminology, that's called a shape.
If I select one of those crossbeams,
go over to the modified panel
we'll see at the bottom of the modifier stack,
it says editable spline.
We'll get more into splines in the modifier stack
and so on later.
I just wanted to illustrate
that that's why when I hid all polygon meshes
or all geometry,
those objects didn't get hidden in the display here
because they started out there lives as splines.
So, they're still considered to be splines
for the purposes of the scene explorer.
I could hide them by disabling the display of shapes.
And I could keep doing this.
I could hide all the lights, hide all the cameras and so on
or I could turn all those back on again.
If I wanted to see just one certain object type,
I could solo that object type
and that's done by holding down the Alt key
and clicking on the appropriate icon
such as this old school incandescent and bulb icon.
Hold down Alt and click on that
and now I've just filtered the scene explorer display
to only show lights, and I can turn soloing back off again
by holding down Alt and clicking on that icon once again.
So, the primary things that we can do in the scene explorer
are hide objects, freeze them so that they can't be selected
in the view ports or manage hierarchies
or the links between objects.
So, hiding is done from the little eye icons here.
So, for example, I could hide the floor in the courtyard.
Just click on the little eye icon
and now it's been hidden in the view,
and that additionally means it will not render.
I can make that visible once again.
The icons over here on the right allow us to freeze objects,
meaning that they cannot be selected in the view port.
If an object is unfrozen, then I can select it.
I can select that floor courtyard.
Okay, I'll deselect it.
But if I freeze it by enabling this little snow flaked icon,
then I can't select it in the view port
and that's really important actually in layout
because you commonly will want to freeze the architecture
or environment so that you can't accidentally select it
and move it.
Okay, so I can unfreeze that.
So we can hide and freeze things,
we can also manage hierarchies.
A hierarchy is a linkage
in which some objects are subordinate to others
and one example of a hierarchy in 3ds Max is a group.
We can see that there are some groups listed here
such as chair group 001.
If I select that in the scene explorer, it selects the group
and all its me here in the view ports.
Then I can zoom in in this perspective view,
just hover my mouse over there and press the Z key
to zoom in and I can tumble or orbit around
with Alt and middle mouse button.
So, selecting a group node here in the scene explorer,
by default will select that group and all its members,
and I can actually move the object around.
Even though that's a whole bunch of objects,
they've been grouped or kind of containerized.
We can open up the hierarchy
by clicking on the little right facing arrow,
and that shows me all the members of that group.
Now, the way groups work in 3ds Max
is that if you select the group node
or any member of the group,
you're effectively selecting everything in that group.
So, I can click on any one of these
and I don't see anything change over here in the view port.
Drilling a little bit deeper down into this,
let's say I wanted to hide this group.
So, I would just naively go up here
and click on the little eye icon,
and I would think that that would hide
all the members of the group.
But with the default settings for the scene explorer,
that doesn't happen.
I've hidden the group node
but that group node is actually an invisible container
for all the group members.
We will look at groups in more detail later
but just to explain it right now,
a group is a kind out of an empty container
and it's not visible in the view ports to begin with.
So, hiding it didn't really do anything.
If I wanted to hide all the members,
I could hide them one at a time
or I could select them all holding down the Shift key
and then hide them all at once
by clicking on any one of their eye icons,
that's a little bit cumbersome.
There's another way we can go about this.
So, I'll select that group note and all of its members
with a Shift key, unhide them all,
and I'll show you a way that you can actually hide
all the group members at once.
And that's done by selecting all the children.
So, I can go up here and select chair group 001
and then go into a right click context menu,
which is called the quad menu.
Right click, and the quad menu appears
and you can choose select child nodes
and that selects all the members of the group.
Now, once again, I can hide all of them
by clicking on any one of their eye icons.
Okay, I'll bring that back
and then deselect everything once again.
There's an automated method for that.
If you wish, you can make this scene explorer
automatically select all child members.
Okay, and that's done by going into the scene explorer menu
to the select menu and we can enable select children.
Once that's on, if I select chair group 001,
it will automatically select all the children
and I can go ahead and hide them all at once or unhide them.
Okay, so that's optional.
It is off by default, so I'm going to turn it back off again.
One more thing that is turned off by default
but might be useful to you is auto expand selection.
So, right now it's off, it's off by default.
If it were on,
then when we select something in the view port,
the scene explorer would automatically scroll to that object
and then automatically open up any children.
Okay, so let's see how that works.
Right now, if I select chair group 001,
then it just selects that group node here
in the scene explorer and nothing else happens.
It doesn't select any of the children
and it doesn't display any of the children.
All right, I'll deselect that go into the menus to display,
we can enable auto expand to selection.
Once that's on, if I click on something in the view port,
it selects that object and it also opens up the hierarchy
and additionally selects all the members of the hierarchy.
So, in this case, because it's a group,
it didn't just expand the selection.
It also additionally selected all of the members.
Okay, and now once again,
I could hide all the members by clicking on the eye icon.
So, if we selected some other object like this sofa here,
click on that, then once again,
the scene explorer is going to scroll to that object,
open up the hierarchy, and again, because it's a group,
it's going to select all the members of the group.
Okay, that option is off by default
so I'm going to turn it back off again.
Display auto-expand to selection.
All right, that's the basics of the scene explorer.