From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

Using the Freeform tools on the ribbon - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2019 Essential Training

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Using the Freeform tools on the ribbon

- [Narrator] In this chapter we'll look at freeform modeling with ribbon. This is an intuitive method for sculpting a surface using a brush interface. Before we begin to use the freeform modeling tools, be aware that the scale of your model is very important. In this case I want to model a terrain, or landscape and eventually I want it to look as if it's one kilometer on a side. However, if I built it at that scale to begin with then the brush tools would not be able to handle an object of that scale. We wouldn't be able to make the brush large enough in order to sculpt the surface. So to get around this we need to start from a miniature if we're going to model something very large and that's what I've done here. This is a plain primitive, I'll select it and in the modify panel we can see it's a plain, it is 10 meters on a side or one one hundredth scale. So if I scaled this up by a factor of 100 it would end up being 1,000 meters on a side. And it's got 100 segments in length and width and that's just for teaching purposes. In real life you would need to set this a lot higher in order to get a decent sculpt. Okay this needs to be an editable poly object in order to access the free form tools on the ribbon. So right click and convert to, convert to editable poly. And now it's an editable poly object as we see in the modify panel. I don't need to see the edged faces any longer so I can turn those off with the keyword shortcut, F4. Open up the ribbon if it's not already visible. I can toggle the ribbon the main tool bar. And if the ribbon is minimized I can click this button to show the full ribbon. As I mentioned in a previous movie, in order to access all the tools on the ribbon the modify panel should be displayed. If I go over here and select the create panel or any other panel then a lot of the tools on the ribbon are grayed out and inaccessible. We can make the modify panel active even if it's invisible, or hidden, so let's do that in fact. Because we're not going to use the command panel so we can actually just hide it. Right click on the textured bar at the top of the command panel and disable it. If you need to get that back later you can do that from the customize menu, Show UI, Show Command Panel. Or by right clicking on any one of the other textured bars. So right now the command panel is hidden and the modifier panel is not active but I can activate that hidden modify panel by clicking on this modify mode button on the modeling tab of the ribbon. So click that button. And now all of our tools are available to us. And that goes for the tools on the free form tab as well. So let's go over there and as long as the modify panel is active all these icons will be visible. The first one you're going to want to look at is the push pull brush and here it is. Click on that and a little window pops up over here. I recommend that you dock that onto the ribbon. So I'll just drag that over and drop it on an empty spot on the ribbon. And as I hover my mouse over the surface I see a cursor indicating the brush and it's a little bit small so I'll increase the size here and set the size to 80. And if I drag my mouse across here I'll see a very faint result. And the longer I drag the larger that deformation will be. I can also give it a larger offset. And increase that offset to 10. And that will result in taller deformations. We're going to look at all these tools in great detail but that's the introduction to the free form tools on the modeling ribbon. We can exit out of push pull and if we want to erase what we've done so far we can just press the x button here to cancel and that cancels all the strokes that we've drawn recently. And we're restored back to a flat plain. That's an introduction to the free form modeling tools.

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