3ds Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

- [Instructor] Soft selection is a great tool for modeling and it's found in the editable poly and editable mesh objects and their associated modifiers. But soft selection is generally a destructive process. You can't really reverse the operations of soft selection. So it's not really well suited to situations in which you want to change the level of detail of a model, for example. For that you need some parametric solution and it is possible to use soft selection in combination with a selection modifier, but that's actually pretty cumbersome and gets kind of complicated. However there's an easier way, which is the effect region modifier. I've got a simple plane here and I'm going to apply the effect region, allowing me to move part of the model around and change its shape. Then I'll be able to go and change the level of detail of the model afterward. I'll select that plane. Go to the modify panel. We see it's a procedural primitive. A plane with a certain number of length and width segments. Let's apply the effect region modifier. And we see a big bubble there. Let's zoom out to enclose that geometry. Use the Z keyboard shortcut for that. We can't really see it because it's obscured by the geometry, but there's an arrow gizmo inside the model. So let's go into wire frame mode with F3. We can orbit around with alt and middle mouse. So this arrow here is the gizmo for the effect region modifier and we've got points on either end. This point down here is the original point on the surface of the model. We've got a point up here, which is the new location of that surface. We can change the fall off amount here. Reduce that and get a sharper transition there. Just like with soft selection, we have pinch and bubble parameters. I'll set them both back to zero. To change the shape, we can go into the points sub-object mode. Open up the sub-objects, choose points, and then we can click on one or both of these points and move them around. Generally, we want to leave this point at the bottom here, somewhere on the original surface. But this top point we can move around to change that shape. If we move this point here, we probably want to move it only in the X and Y axes in this case. We can change its position and change the position of the other point as well. But if we move this off of the original surface, then that's going to diminish the effect. So I don't want to do that. I'll undo that with Control + Z. We can layer this deformation by adding as many effect region modifiers as we need. I'll exit out of subject mode and add another effect region. Once again, open it up, go into points, sub-object mode, and we can select both of the points and move them both in X and Y. Position that over here maybe. Then select the top point and move it down or move it over. As we orbit around, we see that those two effect region modifiers are adding their cumulative. Okay, I'll exit out of sub-object mode once again and go down to the level of the primitive object, which is the plane. Select plane in the stack and we can increase or decrease the level of detail. Bring the length segments up to 50, press tab, set the width segments to 50 as well and press enter. We've just non-destructively increased the level of detail without changing the overall shape of the model. That's how to use the effect region modifier for non-destructive soft transformations.