Basic 3DSMax Tips and Tricks

Scaling:

The following sequence will allow you to set up the grid so that each square is the size of one Re-volt editor track tile.

In Max Version 2.5

Click Menu Bar "View" | Grid and Snap Settings | Home Grid Tab | Grid Spacing (change to 1000) | uncheck "inhibit grid spacing..." | press OK. Click Menu Bar "View" | Units Setup | Select Custom and Enter "RV Tile = 25.4 Meters" | press OK

In Max Version 3.x

Click Menu Bar "Customize" | Grid and Snap Settings | Home Grid Tab | Grid Spacing (change to 1000) | uncheck "inhibit grid spacing..." | press OK. Click Menu Bar "Customize" | Units Setup | Select Custom and enter "RV Tile = 25.4 Meters" | press OK

Your grid value should now be expressed in RV Tile units.

Rotating / Panning:

The "Degradation Override" switch can be used in Max 2.5 and Max 3.0 to allow objects to be moved and rotated as "solid" objects; it is not enabled by default in Max 2.5.  Enable this toggle option by clicking the Degradation Override icon which you should find at the bottom of the MAX screen to the left of "Animate". Max 3.x users can rotate objects by holding Alt and spinning with the middle mouse button, they can also control Zoom using CTRL+Alt and the middle mouse button.

Prior Knowledge:

You need to be able to create simple objects (like cubes), rotate them, and be comfortable with different modifiers like UVW map, UVW Unwrap, Edit_Mesh, and Material.   Read the tutorials on the  Re-volt to the MAX website or post a question at the Re-volt Forum at Racerspoint .  If you are having difficulties please make every effort to learn from your documentation and or the web before you request assistance, making tracks in Max is neither simple or fast, please don't expect it to be so.   Practice often, Max isn't easy and its very hard to make it straightforward as there are several unfamiliar concepts to learn, beginners need to try and make it familiar and that only comes with time in max. 

Re-volt Considerations:   

If your making a .w with ASE2W you may have to play with the start grid coordinates in the level.inf to make sure your car lands on the track. 

Re-volt uses antialiasing to blur the border between two pixels, therefore perfectly tilable organic textures are not easy to make (if they are possible at all) (Acclaim didn't bother and if you look closely at the floors in the origianl levels you will find the seams between tiles, look at the floor in museam1 underneath the dog thing for example, the art is in minimising these seams or driving so fast you don't notice them, personally I'd go for the second option but if you want to bash yourself on the head with the subject, try reducing the size of your textures by a pixel or two and then 'tiling' them on your bitmap, then use the UVW unwrap modifier change the position and the size of the virtual UV polygons to the size of a single tile (not the tiled area on the bitmap, it could be a right royal pain in the arse to set up, and thats if it works at all, and I'm not promising it will).

What's that Lingo:

When you see the word "Control Menu" I mean the draggable window on the right hand side of the main window in MAX that pops up with the various modifiers you can apply to objects. 

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