- [Man] Parametric modeling is a very powerful technique.
However, there will always come some point
at which you're going to need to convert a parametric model
to an editable model.
This is sometimes known as collapsing the modifier stack
or baking the model.
Now, there are many reasons to do this.
One of them is performance.
If you have a complex modifier stack,
that's going to use up memory
and it's going to take time to calculate.
It's going to take longer to load
because 3ds Max has to process
all the operations within the stack.
However, a parametric model always takes up less disc space
than an editable or baked model, so it's a trade off.
There are more reasons why you might want to collapse
the modifier stack.
Sometimes you'll need to convert to editable,
simply to use some tool
that is not implemented as a modifier.
It's very common that you need to convert to editable
because you need 100% compatibility
with some other programs such as a game engine.
And yet another reason for collapsing the stack
is future proofing your work.
This is something that can bite you if you're not careful.
It can happen that if you open a scene with a complex stack
in some future version of 3ds Max,
the actual behavior of the modifiers may have changed,
and the result you get in your model may be different.
It could be an extreme change where the model
is completely corrupted, I have seen this,
or it could just be a subtle change
that might pass unnoticed,
but whatever the reason for collapsing the stack,
it's always a best practice to save a backup first.
Save the parametric model in that state.
And that's because a parametric model
is like a recipe or instructions for creating something,
it's not the baked cake or the finished result.
To put this another way,
when you create a parametric model
such as this monitor stack,
the modified panel that you'll see has a stack of effects,
and those are instructions for building the object.
Every time 3ds Max loads the scene,
it follows those instructions.
And in this case it'll create a box
that has certain parameters
and add a taper that has other parameters and so on.
And it lands at this shape.
And as long as the behavior of the modifiers hasn't changed,
that shape will be the same every time.
So to future proof the project,
I want to convert the object to editable,
and that will also give me
the full range of polygon tools available.
So converting to editable
or baking the model is destructive and nonreversible.
We cannot unbake a cake if we convert to editable
and then save over the top of the same scene file,
that would be like baking the cake
and then throwing away the recipe.
Well, I want to keep this recipe,
I want to keep the parametric version
in case I need to go back to it.
It's just an insurance policy, but do you know what?
It's very common
that you'll need to invoke that insurance policy
and go back to your parametric version.
Before I make any changes to this scene,
I'm going to save this scene to a new file name.
I always recommend this process in any program,
but especially in 3D where things are really complicated
and tend to go awry all the time.
Before you perform any destructive edit,
save your file to a new file name
and then make the changes in the new file.
That way you're not touching the original file,
there's no chance that you'll accidentally save over it.
My current file is 05_06_versioning.max.
So I'm going to save a new version.
Okay, I'll go into the file menu to save as,
and then my current project,
I'm going to save 05_06_versioning
and then put an underscore
and put in the word baked, B-A-K-E-D,
and click save.
Now I've got a new version, a new scene file
and I can't accidentally break my old one.
If I ever need to go back to the parametric version,
I can always open the old file.
Converting a parametric model to an editable model
is very easy.
You can do it in a couple of different ways.
One is from the modifier stack.
If you right click on any modifier,
you'll get a popup menu
and one of the options in there is collapse all.
And if you perform that, then you'll convert the object
to something called an editable mesh
and all of the modifiers will be destroyed.
So let's try it.
If I do collapse all, I get a warning,
this is going to remove everything.
You're going to end up wiping everything out.
Do you really want to do this?
Yes.
So now I don't have a modifier stack
with a bunch of modifiers.
I just have a base object called editable mesh.
And it's got a lot of cool tools in it,
but there's a better way to do this
which is to convert to editable poly.
And the reason is that there are two different versions
of polygon mesh in 3ds Max.
There's editable mesh,
which is the more antique older version
that goes all the way back
to version one of 3ds Max,
but it has actually been superseded by editable poly
which is much more advanced.
But this collapse menu has not been updated.
Okay, so I'm going to undo that.
Just click undo.
You can also collapse just part of the stack.
For example, if I select the taper and right click,
I can choose collapse to.
If we do that, we get a different warning.
It says we will remove a portion of the stack
up to and including the current level, which is taper.
Well, let's try it.
We'll click, yes, and now we have an editable mesh.
We've collapsed everything up to and including that taper,
but anything above that was left alone.
So we have an editable mesh with a bend.
All right, I'll undo that as well.
Go back to our parametric version.
If I'm planning to make subsequent changes to this model,
then I'll want to convert to editable poly.
And that's the newer more advanced polygon object
that has many more tools.
So to do that,
we can do it from another modifier stack itself,
but that command is available from the quad menu.
With the object selected,
right click anywhere in the view port
and in the lower right
we can choose convert to editable poly.
And now I've collapsed the stack.
We no longer have a parametric model,
there's no box, no taper, no bend,
but we have all of these other tools that are available.
And a lot of these are not available in the editable mesh.
And as we'll see later there's even more tools
in editable poly that are available
from the ribbon interface.
Okay, so if we save the scene now
and then reopen it, we can never get back
to the original modifier parameters, they've been destroyed.
And that's why I saved out to a new file name
before performing that destructive conversion.
So having made that change,
I'll go ahead and click file save.
And now the baked version is an editable poly.
Let's have a version of scene file
before performing a destructive change
such as converting a parametric model
to an editable poly.
That wraps up our chapter
on parametric modeling with modifiers.