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# 6 03-01-2009 , 10:28 AM
Chirone's Avatar
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: NZ
Posts: 3,125
1. not sure? you could hit the Mesh > Smooth button, this will actually smooth your mesh permanently (undoable, but it could get lost in the undo steps)
you could switch it to subDs, it works a little different to polys but it's still somewhat the same. you can just go into finer details
the box you see when you hit 2 is the box of the original mesh. you can modify that box and the changes will be reflected in the smooth preview

2. not sure what sort of level you want, but you could convert to subD (if you get an error doing this then read it and do what it suggests)

3. haven't used 3DS Max ever, but i have used XSI. i think they use the same algorithm, so a smooth in one program will give the same results as a smooth in the other. TBH, i think XSI probably has what you could be looking for? hit the + button on your numpad and you start to smooth the mesh, hit the - and i does the opposite, although the smoothing will always look the same unless you add extra edges

4. if you accidentally unselect evertyhing then you can only use undo to select everything back.
not like in XSI where if you were in vertex selection, switch to some other selection and switch back to vertex selection and all the vertices you used to have selected are selected again.

3. (was that meant to be 5?) use the paint select tool, it will only select/unselect things in a user defined radius. it's on your toolbox on the left there
also, you should use the display layers. on the bottom right there is a panel with two radio buttons (or 3 if you have 2009)
the first one is your display layers. they are like layers in photoshop, except you can only turn the layer visible, or unselectable.
create a new layer
add selected objects
click on the little square on the left of the layer name
you'll toggle between visible, unselectable but visible, and normal



i think it's worth noting how smoothing works
if i got this right then what it does is it takes two vertices that are joined by an edge and linearly or parametrically (i think it's the latter) interpolates a curve
in otherwords, it takes two verts and makes a curve between them

the closer the verts are the sharper the curve




that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

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