From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

Getting familiar with the interface - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

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Getting familiar with the interface

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- [Narrator] Let's take a quick tour of the 3ds Max interface to get familiar with the various elements. Starting with the viewport, that's this big area in the center, and that is, of course, our window into the 3D world. By default, we're seeing a single viewport. We can have multiple view ports in a panel layout and we want to go to a multi-panel viewport display, go down to the lower right corner to an area known as the viewport navigation controls and in the extreme lower right there is a button maximize viewport toggle, click on that and we now have the four viewport layout. Click it again and we can go maximize that perspective view once again. Like most desktop programs, 3ds Max has a menu structure and there are many commands in here, but not all the commands available in 3ds Max are found in the menus, some of them are inside programs within the program or in this area over here, known as the command panel. This is really the beating heart of 3ds Max. It's where you can interactively, create and modify objects. It is a panel and it can be moved around and I know that because there's a textured bar at the top of that panel. Whenever you see one of those textured bars, known as a grab bar, that means you can move that panel or toolbar around, just click and drag, and I can move that command panel around, I can resize it and so on. This is very helpful, especially if you've got more than one monitor because you can place that command panel on a secondary monitor. I'll drag that back over and dock it once again. On the left we have something called the Scene Explorer and that is an outline or list view of all the objects in your scene. I don't need it right now, so I'm going to hide it. I can right click on any textured grab bar and I see a list of all the user interface elements and if it has a checkbox next to it, that means it's currently visible. The thing that I right clicked on will be at the top of the list here, Scene Explorer default. I can click on that to hide that and I can also hide this one over here, it's called the viewport layout tabs, we're not going to be using that, so I'll right click on that and hide that as well. At the top, we have the main toolbar and you'll probably want to have that visible at all times. That's the one that you're never going to want to hide because all the tools on here are really useful and you'll need them pretty much every day working with 3ds Max. Below that, we have the so-called ribbon and it is collapsed by default. I can open up the ribbon by clicking on this button, show full ribbon, and we don't see much on the ribbon right now and that's because we don't have anything in this scene. But this is primarily for modeling a particular type of object called an editable poly. We can hide the ribbon by clicking on the button on the main toolbar, show ribbon. Once we have an interface that we like, in this case, a strip down interface, we can lock the interface to prevent it from being changed. Go into the customized menu and choose lock UI layout and now we can't move any of these elements around. If we click and drag on those textured grab bars, we're not able to move those panels. And finally, at the bottom, we have some more controls specifically for animation over here. This is the animation transport tools, such as play and rewind, and there are some key frame creation tools next to it also. And finally, over here, just to the left of those animation playback controls, we have the so-called transform type in area and this is where we can read out and enter transform values. That is the numerical values for position, rotation and scale. All right, that's a basic rundown of the 3ds Max user interface.

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