The geniuses at companies such as Autodesk, Chaos, Pixologic, NVIDIA, Intel, and more have evolved the industry so far that in a few short years generating realistic content becomes as simple as playing a game of Sim City, leading to savings for clients and helping teams to be more efficient. Advances in technology such as RT rendering in 3ds Max and Datasmith for Unreal Engine leave us only a few short years from real-time rendering solutions. Prepacked solutions gave us the ability to generate content quickly and efficiently. When done adding commands to the toolbar, select the save option at the bottom. Finally, in Step 4, drag commands from the action panel into your toolbar. You can now create your toolbar following the steps in Figure 3. First, select Customize User Interface in the Customize menu. Custom ToolbarsĬreating custom toolbars in 3ds Max is an excellent alternative to access tools we use most often. We can do this by opening or setting up a file the way we prefer, then saving it in the MaxStart folder called “maxstart.max.” You can locate the MaxStart folder by navigating to the Configure User Paths option in the menus under File > I/O Panel. For example, let’s say we work primarily with Vray and wish to open 3ds Max to see our material editor already slotted with default Vray materials. See Figure 2 for a few examples of templates I use to assist with the development.įigure 2: Template examples Customize the StartupĬustomizing the startup file allows us to begin our 3ds Max sessions with preferred settings. The third and final step is to fill out the information about the file you have open and then select Add New. Second, choose Open Template Manager on the Create New Scene palette. First, select the File Menu, then choose New From Template. The steps to generate a template are simple and marked in Figure 1. Now I’m able to start a project using this file at any time.

Refer to Figure 1 where you’ll see I set up a file for mechanical rendering that shares my favorite materials, render settings, some kitbash elements, and an environment for a presentation that includes lights, a surface plane, and camera. Over time, we collect a library of templates for a variety of scenes and settings that allows us to produce the highest quality content we can in a shorter amount of time. Additionally, with repetition, our abilities grow and we can improve and refine these templates. With customized templates, we can store those we collect and create. Preparing scenes with the proper environments and render settings is time consuming. I’ll focus on templates, startup files, toolbars, and end on a note concerning content.

This article focuses on some of the ways that are helpful, regardless of the product we provide. It is helpful to understand ways we can customize 3ds Max® where it makes sense to customize it for our needs. Back November 26th, 2018 Customization with 3ds Max

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