From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

Position, Rotate, and Scale objects - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

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Position, Rotate, and Scale objects

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- [Instructor] Manipulating objects in the 3D scene is accomplished with the transform tools. Transform is short for transformation, and that refers to position, rotation, and scale. We've got three buttons on the main toolbar for that. We have the select and move, which is position, select and rotate, and select and scale. We'll start with the move tool, activate that and click on any object and you will see a tripod. That is the move gizmo. The word gizmo is American slang for some small device. The gizmo is a manipulator. We can use it to move the object in the three cardinal directions of X, Y, and Z in 3D space. If I click on the red arrow, then that's the X dimension or axis. I can move in the x axis. I can move in the Y axis or in the Z axis, which in 3ds Max is elevation. I can undo that by clicking on the undo button. Also, if we click on the little brackets, we can move in two axes at once. If I click on the bracket here at the bottom X and Y, I can move in X and Y without moving in Z. That's easier to see if we look at this in a four viewport layout. I'll go to maximize viewport toggle, the button in the lower right hand corner, click on that, and now I've got a four viewport layout. And again, if I move in the X and Y axes, it's not going to move in Z. It's not changing elevation, staying stuck to the ground. Cool. All right, then we have rotate. And that gives us a gizmo as well, looks like an orb. And we can rotate around a single axis, rotate around the Z axis in this case, that's the blue axis. I can undo that with control Z. I can rotate around the Y axis, control Z to undo, rotate around the X axis, control Z to undo once again. If I click in the center of that orb, then I can freely rotate in all three axes, but I actually don't recommend that, because it's very hard to control. You might think that you've set something to a neutral rotation, but it's actually not. It's really more trouble than it's worth, so I'll undo that with control Z. Really, we just want to rotate in a single axis at a time. Finally, we have scale and there are multiple flavors of scale. If we click and hold that button down, we'll see what's called a flyout. We have a choice of three icons here. The default is so-called Select and Uniform Scale. And in this mode we actually can scale non-uniformly, but by default, if we click in the center, we're going to scale in all three axes uniformly. I'll undo that with control Z. And even though the tool is select and uniform scale, we can scale non-uniformly, and that's accomplished once again by clicking on the brackets. If I click here on the XY bracket, I can scale in X and Y without scaling in Z. I'll undo that with control Z. The reason this is called select and uniform scale, even though we can scale non-uniformly, is that the numeric entry is uniform. Down here at the bottom we have the transform type in area, and you'll see that the X axis is lit up, but the Y and Z axis are grayed out. So in select and uniform scale I can click and drag on the X axis spinner here in the transform type in area, and I can scale uniformly, but I can't numerically scale non-uniformly. I'll undo that with control Z. If I did need to scale non-uniformly using numeric entry, then I could go up to the flyout and choose the middle icon, which is select and non-uniform scale. Now all three X, Y and Z axes are available and I can, for example, scale only in Z to increase the height. I'll undo that with control Z. All right, that's a real quick introduction to the transform tools of position, rotation and scale.

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