From the course: 3ds Max: Hard Surface Modeling

Setting up the 3ds Max project structure - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max: Hard Surface Modeling

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Setting up the 3ds Max project structure

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- The scene files that we'll be using for this course have been set up using 3ds Max's built in project management tools. Meaning, I've made use of a very specific project folder that would give us quick and easy and hopefully trouble-free access to the provided scene files from inside the 3ds Max application. Just to ensure that you are set up and ready to take advantage of this file management system, we're going to quickly walk through setting up and then making use of the exercise files project folder for this course. Before doing that, however, we also want to perform a quick check on our 3ds Max preference settings. To do that, we can open up the customize menu and from the drop down list that appears choose the preferences option. Once the preferences dialogue opens we want to jump into the files tab and inside there make certain that we have a check in the convert local file paths to relative option. This just ensures that should we decide to add any files to the project from this point forward, then they will always receive a file path that is relative to the project folder itself. As opposed, that is, to receiving a hard coded local path which can cause all sorts of problems, should we want to move or pass our project folder to another machine or artist. Do keep in mind though, that this will only work properly so long as we make certain that any files that we do decide to add are located inside the exercise files project structure itself. Okay, with that done, we can now step through the process of setting up our 3ds Max project folder for this course. To do that all we need to do is come up to our quick access toolbar and click on the project folder icon. This will open up a dialogue that allows us to select any folder on available storage drives in order to set it as our project route. In this instance I will, of course, need to locate the downloaded exercise file folder which, as noted earlier, has been placed on my desktop. And then, click to select it. And once done, all we have to do is hit the okay button. And our exercise file folder has been set up to serve as our project folder. What we will find now, is that, whenever we use application functions, such as, open, import, export or even set up a render output path, we will find ourselves automatically taken straight to the appropriate folder in our project route. Whenever we want to open up a start scene, for instance, all we need to do is use the open command which takes us straight to the project scenes folder and then from there select the appropriate chapter folder and then the appropriate starting file.

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