From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

Setting preferences - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

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Setting preferences

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- [Instructor] The very first time you launch 3ds Max, you should see this heads up alert. And if you're a new user, then the fact that the default color management mode has changed may not be that meaningful to you, but this is actually critically important, and we need to go into this. It has profound implications for what you see in your viewport, and the colors that you get when you render a file. I'll go ahead and click continue, and let 3ds Max finish loading. Once the interface is completely loaded, we get this lovely welcome screen. I'll go ahead and close that. We need to look into our color management settings. That's very important, because if we don't do this, then what we see in our viewport, what we see in a rendered window, and what we get when we render a file are all going to be three different things. So we need to streamline this and simplify it. Let's go into rendering, color management. And this dialogue is pretty bewildering. There's a lot going on in here. And frankly, we don't have time in an essential training course to go over all of this because without exaggeration, it would take 20 or 30 minutes to explain everything that's going on in this dialogue. It's really designed for expert users. It's designed for artists working in a very specific pipeline in a studio that does film and visual effects. And it's really not set up to be friendly to beginners. And unless we make a change in here, like I said, what we see in different windows and what we see in a rendered file are going to be different colors. And yeah, that's not going to work out for us as beginners who may be working in different industries, the game industry, or maybe we're doing architectural visualization, stuff like that. In those use cases, these default settings are actually getting in our way and are actually going to cause more problems than they solve. So what we're going to do here is revert to an earlier form of color management. Go up here to the color management mode at the top. And from this pull down list that says OCIO, 3ds Max default, we want to choose gamma workflow. And it's unfortunate that we need to do this because the developments in color management have actually vastly improved the quality of renderings. But we're going to have to sacrifice that in this case, because like I said, it's just so complicated. We don't have time to go over how all that stuff works. We're just going to go back to an earlier workflow, and this is going to make sure that all of the different windows and the saved files will all conform to the SRGB color standard. And once we've changed this to gamma workflow, we need to click the button that says, save as system defaults. And we get a warning. Do you really want to do this? Absolutely. We really don't have any choice. And we have to cut the Gordian knot here and go back to a much simpler version of color management just to preserve our sanity. So we'll click yes, we get a confirmation, yes, this has been saved as the new default, that's great. Click okay, and then we can close this window. We also want to go into the generic preferences window and make one small change. Go to customize, preferences. And there's a ton of stuff in here, and we could go crazy changing a whole bunch of preferences, but the only thing that's really important is in the files tab. There's a switch labeled, convert local file paths to relative. We want to enable that. What that's going to do is make sure that any file paths that we see are displayed as relative to the current project. If it were an absolute path, we would see a drive letter or a network volume name and a string indicating the entire path to where the asset is stored. But what we really want is to display that path as relative to the current project. That will make the project portable. That means that we could move the project somewhere else, or we could rename the root level of the project, and all the links within the project would be preserved, and they would be displayed as relative. We wouldn't be confused or sidetracked by these absolute paths. So this is really what I recommend. Convert local file paths to relative is on. Go ahead and click okay. All right, those are the all-important preferences that we need to change in order to move forward with this course.

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