From the course: 3ds Max 2017 Essential Training

Editing vertex types - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2017 Essential Training

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Editing vertex types

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- [Voiceover] Our line is created, now let's shape it up a bit. I'll select it and go to the Modify panel. We can see it's of the type line. Depending upon how you create the line, it may say editable spline here. For example, if you created a circle and then converted it, then it would say editable spline. Well that's just a synonym. Line and editable spline mean the same thing in 3DS Max. If we open this up, we can see that there are several different sub-object types and they're also at the top of the Selection section in the Modify panel. We have vertex which is point and we have segment which is a section between two points, and then we have spline which is an entire line. And you can have more than one spline sub-object inside your line object. We can select these and move these around. We want to do this all in the front view port. For a lade, it's important that the line be 2-dimensional. Let's go out to the four view port lay out for just a second with Alt, W and look in the left view, it should be a straight line here. If it's not, if you have any 3 dimensionality to it, then your lade is going to be really weird and you're going to have problems controlling it so just make sure you do all your edits in the front view port here. There are multiple different types of vertices. If we go to vertex sub-object mode and select one of these, this one I created by clicking and dragging during creation time. If I go to the quad menu, I can find out what type of vertex that is. Remember, the quad menu is the right click context menu. Hold down the right mouse button, and in this case we do actually have four quadrants to the quad menu. And here in the center left, we have a listing of the vertex segment and spline sub-objects and then above that we have a listing of the types of vertices and the selected vertex or vertices will have a check box next to it indicating which type of vertex or vertices it is. That's a bezier vertex. It has these very familiar looking tangent handles here. If you've ever used Photoshop or Illustrator or really any 3D program you should be familiar with a bezier handle. We can go to the Move tool and then let's turn off snaps and we can drag that around and start to shape the model. These guys here at the beginning and end are corner vertices. If I select one of those, we don't get any handles and if we right click and go to the quad menu, we're seeing that it's a corner vertex. Alright, let's make another vertex on here. We'll refine the curve and I'll go into the Modify panel and scroll down a bit, and there's a button labeled Refine. It's very simple, you just activate that button and then click somewhere on the line, your cursor will change and now when you click you've got another vertex there at that location. And then we can right click to exit the Refine tool. The new vertex is probably a smooth type vertex. Let's investigate, I'll select it, it's not. It's actually a bezier vertex but let's look at the other types of vertices we've got available. I can right click to get the quad menu once again, and I can convert it to a smooth vertex. And that's one that does not have any handles and it just uses a spline interpolation that just tries to create a smooth curve through that point. I can move that around and start to shape up the model. I previously said we wanted these two vertices to be aligned vertically and that would be the case if we wanted the shape to be closed but I want my lamp to be open actually so I'm going to move this bottom vertex over and start to build this up a bit. Now this one here, we don't actually want it to be a smooth vertex. What we want is to have a nice sharp corner at that location but we want to control the curvature. If I made it a corner vertex we wouldn't really have a lot of control. Let's look at that, I'll right click, go to the quad menu again and convert it to a corner vertex. And now I get a sharp corner there but I really don't get any curvature in that location. What I want here is a bezier corner vertex that has two tangent handles that are independent of one another, or broken. I'll right click and go to the quad menu again and choose bezier corner from the list. And now I can actually shape this up and kind of make it pretty. Alright, we're not doing anything really complicated here, we're just making a very simple lade shape. Alright, so that's a little bit about converting between vertex types and doing some very simple editing for a line object.

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