Shortcuts for Drawing Lines in 3ds Max 2012

By Martin Phelps

Delegates on one of my recent Studio Max courses, like attendees to previous Max courses have found that when drawing a 2D line or spline, once the line command has been started and the user wishes to draw outside the current view the transparent pan function of the scroll wheel does not work as expected, (the command is cancelled if the mouse wheel is held down as if to pan across the view as in AutoCAD).

However by moving the cross hairs in the required pan direction and pressing the “I” key on the keyboard this will allow the user to pan around the view while remaining in the line command, so the pan display feature is working transparently while the line command is still active. Each time a change of view is required the crosshairs must be moved in the required direction and the “I” key pressed.

Turning the scroll still allows the view to be zooming in and out while keeping the line command active after the display has been changed.

Lines in 3D Studio Max are made up of as many segments as required and drawn as one object, similar to a polyline in AutoCAD, if the last line segment is required to be removed the can be accomplished by pressing the “backspace” key on the key board allowing the user to remove the line segments in the reverse order to how they were drawn.

Another useful key in short cut is the “S” key which will toggle the object snaps on and off which can very helpful in the scene production.