From the course: Game Art: Model & UV Map a Low Poly Character

Setting up the Max project - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: Game Art: Model & UV Map a Low Poly Character

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Setting up the Max project

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- The scene files that we will 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 will give us quick, easy and trouble-free access to the provided scene files from inside the 3ds Max application. To ensure that you are set up, and ready to take advantage of this file management system, we are 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 open up the Customize menu, and from the dropdown list that appears, choose the Preferences option. Once the Preferences dialog 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 oppose, 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 to another machine or artist. Do keep your mind though, that this will only work properly so long as we make certain that any files we do decide to add are located inside the exercise files project structure itself. 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, with our cursor over the Max viewport, is hit the x key, type "proj," and choose the Set Project Folder option from the list. This opens up a dialog that will let us select any folder on our available storage drives in order to set it as our project room. In this instance, I will of course need to locate the downloaded exercise files folder, which as noted has been placed on my desktop, and then click to select it. Once done, all we have to do is hit the OK button, and our exercise files 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 room. Whenever we want to open up a Start Scene File 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 Start Scene file.

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