From the course: 3ds Max 2018 Essential Training

Setting preferences - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2018 Essential Training

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Setting preferences

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- [Instructor] With the new installation of 3ds Max, you're going to want to change a couple of the key system preferences for the application. Those will be found in Customize, Preferences. And in this dialogue, there are many settings. We're just going to look at a few of them. First and foremost, already highlighted here is the number of Scene Undos in the General tab. I strongly recommend increasing that. In my experience, if I make a big mistake in a 3D program, I usually have to undo more than 20 times to get back to where I was. Of course, the higher this number is, the more memory you will be using, because every command will have to be stored in RAM. Hopefully you've got 16 gigabytes of RAM. I'm going to turn this up to 100. Let's now go over to the Files tab, and we have some file handling options here. I recommend that you enable this one that says Convert local file paths to Relative. What this is going to do is it's going to display any file and folder locations relative to your current project folder. In other words, it's not going to show you a drive letter or a specific folder. If you've got, for example, texture that's inside your project folder, then what you will see in 3ds Max is not that the texture is on your D-drive or your E-drive or whatever, but simply that it's inside your project folder inside a folder called Scene Assets, and so on. So in other words, it's a relative path, and the reason why you want to do this is so that your projects will be portable. You can easily move your project to a different folder or a different computer, and the paths will not get mangled. 3ds Max won't go looking for something that's not there, because you haven't stored the absolute path. Technically, we are storing the absolute path, but it's converting that path to a relative path on the fly. I know that's a bit technical, but trust me, you will want to enable this to avoid issues with your textures and so on getting lost in the shuffle. Moving onto the next tab, we've got our Viewports. This one's really important, because this is where you choose your display driver, and by default, you should see Nitrous down here. Nitrous is the name of the display technology that 3ds Max uses to interface with your video hardware or your graphics card. If you do experience issues, such as your screen flickering, or poor updates, and so on, you can go into this Choose Driver button, and switch it out to a different display driver type. That's only if you're having issues. If you're not having issues, you should leave it at the default, Nitrous Direct3D, 11 or higher. And finally, go over to the Gamma and LUT, or lookup table, and we just want to make sure that Gamma is enabled. It is enabled by default. Gamma is the correction for contrast curve, and when you're using photometric lights, and modern types of shading and rendering in 3ds Max, you do want to have Gamma enabled. And it is enabled by default. Just wanted to make sure that we took a look at that, to be aware that Gamma will always be enabled by default, and if you're using standard lights and old school rendering, you will want to go in here and turn this off, but in this course, we're going to be using photometric lights and the sort of new school rendering, so we do want to have the Gamma enabled in here. And those are just some of the key preferences for the 3ds Max application.

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