Select, Move, Rotate and Scale In this tutorial we will cover the basic tools necessary for navigating, moving, and manipulating objects in 3DS Max. It is less of a how to tutorial and more of a guide to the tools and what they do both visually and verbally. Of course the first tools we must mention are the stand by tools. The tools you use in conjunction with all of the other tools. These tools are (in order of appearance on the Main Toolbar across the top of your 3DS Max window(: Selection Tools-----------------> Move, Rotate, Scale These are the tools that we will use to place, position, turn, enlarge, and shrink things in virtual space. The Selection tools: These tools are used in selecting objects and sub-objects (Vertices, Edges, Borders, Polygons, and Elements) in your scene. The first is the: Select Object Tool - It's the icon with an arrow over top of a cube and the first in the above image. This item lets you target, and select anything in your scene. It does not let you move the object in any way. Holding Control while using this tool, will add objects to your selection. Holding while clicking, will unselect items you have in your current selection. Select By Name - This is the icon to the right of the first, an Arrow and a list of lines. This will bring up a customizable list of all the objects you have in your scene, and allow you to select the item from the list, instead of finding it in your scene. Select Region Tools - To the right of the Select By Name tool, is the Selection Regions tool. This is a setting that allows you to click and drag a dotted selection line around items in your scene, making it easier to select more than one item. It is defaulted at a rectangular Selection Region, if you click and hold down on this button you can get other shapes: Current Selection Rectangle Oval Polygon Lasso Lasso Spray Selection Area.
Next to the Region Tools, you have a toggle button that switches between Window and Crossing modes of selection This will let you drag a selection around only part of an object in your scene and still let that object be selected. It's counter toggle - will require that the object be fully encased in your selection region before it will join your selection. If you are having trouble getting the things you want selected in your selections, be sure to check if this is on or off. It could help speed up your workflow. Virtual space is defined by an X, Y, Z axis coordinate system. Basically there are three directions you can move the items and pieces of your scene in. X - Side to Side in your viewport. Y - Back to Front in your viewport. Z- Up and Down in your viewport. These three directions, and the combination of these directions allow us to move objects anywhere in our virtual scene. While depending on the viewport you're in (Top, Front, Left, Right, Back, Bottom, Perspective, or Orthographic.) these directions will appear to move on you. Check the Bottom Right corner of each viewport, to make sure you know which axis is facing in what direction. Like Below: In every corner are directions as to each axis and where they take you.
Y axis will always take you back and forth from the front view, X will always take you side to side from the front view, and Z will always take up Up and Down. But looking at the top view we have to realize that back and forth appears to be up and down in this view. Realizing that we are seeing the scene from the top we realize that Y axis, really is going back and forth from front to back. If in the Left viewport the Y axis seems to take us from side to side, but if we realize that we are looking at our entire scene from the side already, then we can realize that Y truly is taking us from front to back still. Hopefully this makes sense to you all, but if not... just remember to check which direction your Axis is going in the bottom right corner of the viewports. Now that we have talked about how to move in Virtual Space, let's talk about the: Move Tool - One of the absolute most important tools in 3DS Max. This tool lets us move objects based on the axis theme we talked about above. With this button toggled down, our move tool will show up in our viewports. It appears as a colored pyramid of arrows. Z is blue, X is red, and Y is green. Knowing what directions these Axis take you in, you can move items throughout the scene. This is a view of an object in our perspective viewport, selected with the Move Tool. You can see the icon show up, that looks like a blue, red and green arrows pointing in their specific directions. Hover over the individual arrows, and notice that as you mouse over each arrow it turns yellow at the shaft. At this point, clicking and dragging will move your object in the single direction that is highlighted yellow. If you have hovered over the blue Z axis arrows shaft, and it highlights yellow and you click and drag, you will only be able to move your object along the Z axis which goes Up and Down in your scene.
Towards the middle of the move tool icon, you will notice that they branch together. Hovering over the perpendicular points where the colors meet like below, will let you move the selected object(s) in both directions. The selection below would allow you to move the sphere shown in both the Up and Down Z axis, and the Side to Side X axis at once. Only two directions can be selected at once with the Move tool, anymore would be impossible as your objects would be trying to pull itself in all directions. Try creating any object and moving it around the scene in all of your viewports to get a feel for it. All the tools in 3DS Max work along these same 3 axis. Next on our list is the:
Rotate Tool - This tool lets us spin our objects using the 3 X,Y,Z axis as a center point which the object spins around. Think about the axis of the Earth, and the North and South Poles are the equivalent in our program to the Z axis. The earth spins around the Poles, or the axis. It is the same in our 3DS viewports for each of our axis. Here we see the mouse has hovered over the Blue Line in the Rotate tool icon. We can spin our object around any of these axis one at a time to allow us to position items and their sub-objects. Last but definitely not least we have the:
Scale Tool - The scale tool can be used in a myriad of ways, and even has several tools within it. If you click on this button and hold, it will bring up several ways in which you can use it. <--- Current Selection <--- Uniform Scale Tool <--- Select and Non-Uniform Scale Tool <--- Select and Squash Tool It defaults at the Uniform Scale Tool option. This allows you to scale in all directions, or any combination so it is a good one to start with. The others have slight differences in the way they scale your objects, try experimenting with them to see the differences. For now we'll focus on the Uniform Scale Tool as it is a good catch all scale. We will see what looks like a pyramid of connected lines with squares at the end of each axis instead of arrows. Once again you can scale an object only in one direction by hovering your mouse over a single line until it is highlighted yellow, like above.
Clicking and dragging along only one highlighted axis will stretch your object out along ONLY the axis which you have highlighted. It will not squash it. Like the image above, the object scaled along the Z axis, the X and Y axis remained exactly the same scale as the object started. Towards the center of the icon, where the lines begin to converge into a pyramid shape, you will see two layers. Hovering over the first layer of lines like below:
Will allow you to scale the selected object along 2 axis points by clicking and dragging. The result is the object scales along those two axis, but not the third: The second layer, will highlight all three directions, clicking and dragging will uniformly scale the entire object, Bigger and smaller.
The result of our sphere is just a bigger or smaller sphere, like the image below: <--------> Utilizing these tools together should allow you to navigate, move, and manipulate all of your objects and 3D models within virtual space. I recommend you read the Basic Polygon Modeling tools tutorial next, so you can see how these tools are used to manipulate sub-objects and change the shape of something primitive, to anything you can imagine.