More Tips

The last meeting we had, I mentioned naming the objects correctly to make handling scenes easier for texturers and animators (even modellers adding to other people models). If you name an object such as a roof tile or something you know will be cloned many times, before the copy they will all inherit the same name such as "tile01" "tile02" and so on. Well I found a nifty tool today for renaming. Not actually hidden or anything, but theres so many tools in Max, I keep finding new things.

Its in Tools --> Rename Objects

You can select as many objects as you want, and the tool provides features to deal with the properly. In the screenshot I only had 6 objects all previously called plane. Also, do you notice the top toolbar has a dropdown menu? Thats for "selection sets" which are kind of groups of objects. In the image below, I used it to seperate objects into easily selectable groups. Unlike the annoying 'group' tool you can still deal with objects seperately if needed, which makes it handy for quick texturing, and changes such as scaling, without it acting as one big object like a normal group would. I mostly use it to hide/freeze/show things though, because when I'm modeling one type like ropes, its annoying to accidentaly select/move other things, and takes too long to find all the names etc to freeze them.