Using the Ribbon with editable polys

- One of the great strengths of 3DS Max is polygon modeling, and we can do that from the modify panel, but there are a bunch of advanced tools that are available only in the modeling ribbon and that's what this chapter is going to be all about, the modeling ribbon. Before we begin I just wanna do a little bit of housekeeping. Namely, I wanna bring this image plane down a bit so that we can see the entire model. Right now it's frozen, I can't actually select that image plane. To unfreeze it I'll go into the scene explorer.

On the main toolbar, click Toggle Scene Explorer. And here's Plane001. Simply turn off the frozen parameter and now I can select that object and use the move tool to position it down. Just orbit around a little bit here and bring that down a little bit so that it's below the sword. It'lll still be aligned in the top view. I can close the scene explorer. Go over to the top view and switch its display mode over to Shaded. And then we can just position this a little bit.

You can see that it still lines up just perfectly. Before I start working with the ribbon I want to set a base level of detail on the sword's blade. I'll select that blade and maximize the perspective view with alt W and just, in the modify panel, set up some base segment values here. The length segments I'll set to a value of four because I wanna have a scalloped area here in the center of the sword, that's kind of depressed inward and I need enough detail to do that.

Likewise I wanna increase the width segments here. Let's set that to a value of three. I need to have a point at the end of the sword and I also need to have a transition zone between the scalloped area in the center and the point, so I need at least two more edge loops, or three segments of polygons here to accomplish that. Okay, so we've got our base level of detail. In order to use the ribbon and the graphite tools inside it we have to convert the object to editable poly. Right click and choose Convert To, Convert to Editable Poly.

And now, in the modify panel, you'll see that it's a new object type, and there are quite a lot of tools in here. In fact I can expand that modify panel out and you can see more of those tools. But all of these tools are also available from the ribbon and more, so we won't actually be using the modify panel. So I can collapse that a little bit. We wanna instead open up the ribbon, and it's currently hidden. You can open it from the main toolbar button here, Toggle Ribbon. Don't be alarmed if it takes a moment for the ribbon to load.

There are a lot of icons, and it can actually take a few seconds for that ribbon to load the first time. Right now I'm able to start working, all of these icons are lighting up, meaning that they are available. That's only because the modify panel is currently active. So this is a bit of a paradox. We don't actually need the modify panel, but modeling in 3DS Max requires that the modify panel be active. Even if it's not even visible, it has to be active. So it's a bit strange.

I can go to the create panel to illustrate that. As soon as I click on create or any of these other panels, my tools are all grayed out here on the ribbon. So we have to be in the modify mode, and there's two ways of doing that. One is to select the modify panel here, but the better way is probably to do it from the ribbon itself because we can actually hide the modify panel completely. Because as I said, we won't really be needing these tools. To illustrate that I'll go back to the create panel and up here on the ribbon you will see a couple of buttons.

First there's Modify Mode. That simply activates the modify panel. But even better there's one up here that says Toggle Command Panel. What that will do is hide the entire command panel and all of these tabs, and also enter modify mode at the same time. Click on that. And now the modify panel and all the other command panels are hidden, and we have all these icons available to us now. The two important things you need to remember if you want to use the ribbon for polygon modeling is that the object must be an editable poly and that the modify panel must be active, even if it's hidden.

I know that it's active now because these icons are lighting up and also because this big button here says Editable Poly now it doesn't say Modify Mode anymore. So this is a bit strange. It will read out the word Modify Mode when you're not in modify mode. That's a button that you click in order to enter modify mode. And once you're in that mode it will read out Editable Poly. All right, so we've got all those tools available and in the next movie we'll start looking at manipulating sub-objects.