- [Instructor] The ribbon is a panel holding tools
for modeling, procedural animation and placement of objects.
I've got the ribbon hidden currently.
I'll reveal it from its button on the main toolbar.
Show ribbon and then show the full ribbon,
click on this down facing arrow.
And we reveal that there are numerous tabs.
There's five tabs up here.
Let's take a quick look at these.
Populate on the far right
is a procedural animation system for simulating crowds.
The next tab over is object paint,
which holds tools for instancing
or placing many objects in the scene.
I covered object paint
in an earlier version of this course,
3ds Max 2016 Essential Training.
The other three tabs, selection, free form and modeling
will only operate when two conditions are met.
First, the modify panel must be active.
We need to be in so-called modify mode
and we could select the modify panel explicitly.
We can also activate it from the ribbon.
So I'll go back to the create panel.
If we select some object,
then in the ribbon, we can activate the modify panel
by clicking the button labeled modify mode.
And that opens up the modify panel for the selected object
showing us that it is of the type boolean
but we don't see all the tools that are available
because the other condition that must be met
is that the current selection in the modifier stack
must be an editable poly base object
or a modifier called edit poly,
which encapsulates the functionality
of the editable poly object implemented as a modifier.
Since this object is neither an editable poly,
nor does it have an edit poly modifier,
we don't see any tools up here.
Now the design of the ribbon is to automatically add
an edit poly modifier whenever necessary.
For example, if we go into a sub object mode
but this can be very problematic for new users.
The edit poly modifier complicates things
and it can even lead to topology dependence issues.
To protect ourselves
from any potential problems down the road,
we need to be vigilant about what happens
when we enter sub object modes from the ribbon.
Let's say I want to create hard edges on the model.
I've got shading artifacts we can see
if we orbit around with alt and middle mouse.
Just as in the previous movie,
this boolean has got some issues with soft edges
that should be hard.
I can fix that using the ribbon,
but to do that, I need to go into sub object mode.
So I'll just innocently go up to the ribbon
and enable polygon sub object mode.
And as soon as I do that,
I get a whole bunch of cool tools available.
But if we look closely in the modify panel,
now we see there's an edit poly modifier
stacked above the boolean that wasn't there a moment ago.
And over in the ribbon,
the button that used to say modify mode
now reads out the current level of the stack.
And we can actually navigate inside the modify stack
using the ribbon.
So we don't actually even need to select things
in the modify stack itself.
We can use these buttons here.
Previous modifier will take us down one level
and currently our selection is a boolean
and therefore, we don't see any tools.
Or we can go back up one level
to the edit poly modifier and restore all of those tools.
So again, when edit poly is the current stack selection
or when the object is an editable poly object,
then we'll be able to see all of the tools
including these freeform and selection tools.
Let's just detour into that for a moment.
Freeform is a set of brush-based tools
to sculpt the editable poly
and I covered that in an earlier course,
3ds Max 2020 Essential Training.
The selection tools are a suite of advanced automation tools
to make complex selections of sub objects
based upon criteria such as convexity or face angle,
view dependence, or even random selections.
I covered the selection tools in my weekly series,
3ds Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques.
Okay, back to the modeling tab.
We're in a kind of difficult situation here
because we've inadvertently added an edit poly
and that is a typology dependent modifier,
meaning that we effectively can't change
the underlying parameters such as the booleans.
Anyway, if we for example,
added or removed a boolean operand,
then that would pretty much destroy the work that we've done
in the subsequent edit poly modifier.
To avoid these issues,
you'll want to convert the object to editable poly
in almost all cases,
unless you had some very compelling reason
to preserve the parametric model.
So actually before you use the ribbon,
you should convert the object to editable poly
in most cases.
The object is still selected
even though we don't see the selection highlighting
because we're in a sub object mode,
but we can go ahead and convert this to editable poly.
I'll exit out of sub object,
right click in the view port
and choose convert to, convert to editable poly.
And now we won't incur any of the problems
that we might have had with the parametric model
and the edit poly modifier stacked on top of it.
Now the modeling tools are all revealed
but some of them will be grayed out
depending upon scene conditions.
For example, at the object level,
the modify selection tools over here
are going to be grayed out.
They only work in sub object modes.
Once we go back into polygon sub object mode,
then those tools will be available once again.
By the way, if you don't want to see the modify panel,
you can hide it directly from the modeling ribbon.
The tools on the modify panel are actually redundant.
We don't necessarily need to see them
if we're working exclusively in the ribbon.
So we can click on this button up here,
toggle command panel, and we're still in modify mode
but we've just hidden that panel.
Okay, I'll bring that back
by clicking that button once again.
I just want to set hard edges on everything
as we did in the previous movie.
So I'm going to click off of the object
to deselect anything that might be selected.
And I've got a properties panel over here
and it's collapsed.
It's because the resolution of my desktop is kind of low
and so any panel that won't fit
is going to be minimized or collapsed.
You can hover your mouse
over any one of those collapsed panels
to get access to the underlying tools.
I just want to click on this button which is labeled hard.
Click on that.
And because I had nothing selected,
all of the polygons on the object now have hard edges.
We've just performed the same operation
that we did earlier with the smooth modifier,
except this is a destructive act.
So it's not like a modifier
where we can just toggle some parameter.
If we wanted to change this, we'd have to drill back down
into this object, select, in this case none of the polygons,
but reissue that command
and once again, destructively change all of those edges
to some other shading state.
So now what this is actually done behind the scenes
is it has automatically partitioned the polygons
into something called smoothing groups.
If we hover the mouse here,
we can see there's a button for smoothing groups.
We can open that up and just reveal that.
We don't actually really need to worry about this right now
but I'm just telling you what's going on.
What it's done is it has automatically
partitioned the polygons into smoothing groups.
If two polygons are in the same smoothing group,
then the edge between them will be smoothed.
And that hard button just assigned
each polygon to a smoothing group,
such that no two adjacent polygons are in the same group.
Therefore, we're going to get hard edges everywhere.
Okay, I can close that
and I can exit out of sub object mode.
That is an introduction to the ribbon
and accessing some of the polygon modeling tools.