From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

Outlining object names with Scene Explorer - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

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Outlining object names with Scene Explorer

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- [Instructor] To effectively manage a 3ds Max scene, especially if it has many objects, you'll need to employ a window called the Scene Explorer. That's an outline view, a list of all the objects in the scene. I've currently got it hidden. I'll bring it back from its button on the main toolbar toggle Scene Explorer. I've got it docked over here on the left. If your Scene Explorer appears in a floating window, you can dock it if you wish. All the objects in the scene are listed here and the type of object is indicated by an icon to the immediate left of the object name. There are many different types of objects in 3ds Max. There's for example, geometry, which usually refers to polygon meshes. There are shapes which are splines or curve based objects, lights and cameras and so on. We can filter this list to only display certain object types if we wish. That won't affect the visibility of objects in the viewport. So for example, if I wanted to hide all the geometric polygon objects, then I can go up to the top of this row of icons here and filter the display of geometry by clicking on the icon at the top with a circle in it, and that hides all of the polygon geometry. But strangely, very little in my scene actually was hidden. In other words, I have lots of polygon objects in this scene, and when I clicked on that button, not very much disappeared from the list. This brings up a core concept of 3ds Max, which is called the modifier stack, and we can take a look at that. I'll select one of these pergola cross beam objects. Go over to the modify panel and we see something called the modifier stack. And this is kind of a history of everything that I've done to this particular selected object. It started out as a spline, which is a curve, and we see here at the bottom it says editable spline. At the bottom is the so-called base object type. I took that spline or curve and added some modifiers or program modules in order to turn that curve into an actual 3D mesh. Okay, so it is a 3D polygon mesh right now, but for the purposes of its object type, its base object is a spline or a curve based object known in max as a shape, and that's how it's going to be indicated over here in the Scene Explorer. The cross beams all have a shape icon. If I wanted to filter those from the display here, I would need to click on the display shapes button. And now all the objects that started out as shapes are filtered out from this display. I could also do things like hide all the lights or all the cameras and so on. I'll bring those back by clicking on those buttons again. If I wanted to see just one particular type of object, I could solo that object type. And to do that, I'll hold down the alt key and click on a particular object type icon such as the incandescent bulb for lights. Alt click on that and only lights are now displayed here in the Scene Explorer. If I want to un solo the lights and go back to displaying everything, I'll hold down alt and click on the light icon once again. And now the filter has been disabled. Nothing's being filtered out. A couple of the primary functions of the Scene Explorer are to change the visibility of objects in the scene or to make objects unselectable in the scene to prevent mistakes and errors. The visibility is indicated by the little eyeball icon on the left of each one of the object type icons. If I wanted to hide the floor in the courtyard, I just click on the eye icon there, and now that floor is hidden in the viewport and it also will not render. I can bring that back by clicking on that icon again. If I want to make sure that I can't select something in the viewport, then I can freeze it. And that's done from these snowflake icons in this column over here for the floor courtyard. If I enable the snowflake, now that courtyard floor object is frozen and I cannot select it in the viewport much as I try, it's unselectable because it's frozen. Alright, I can unfreeze that. The Scene Explorer also shows us hierarchies or parent child links among objects. We'll take a look at that in the following movie.

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