3D Studio Max Lesson 1.4: Animation Tools Overview

Snap Options/Tools

• 2D/2.5D/3D Snap Toggle: This button controls how your transformations snap to the geometry of the fields/environment that you’re working in. Snaps will “pull” the mouse towards certain geometrically defined points in your 3D space; this button controls whether your snaps are 2D(snaps only to the active grid on the XY plane, vertical/Z ignored), 2.5D(snaps to the vertices or corners of the projection of an object onto the working grid), or 3D(default, snaps directly to geometry in 3D space).
• Angle Snap Toggle: When turned on, this affects all rotational transformations, causing them to snap to grid points or predefined rotary points when transforming them in the object plane.
• Percent Snap Toggle: This causes scaling of objects to change in percentages; the percent can be changed, but the default is 10%. So say if you were scaling a cube with the Percent Snap on, it would increase to 110%, then 120%, etc., jumping from one increment of 10% to the next.
• Spinner Snap Toggle: The default value for the Spinner Snap is 1, and it controls the increment or decrement value for all spinners in the system.

• Animation Tools
• Animation Timeline
• Selection Options, Absolute Transformations, Shortcut and Degradation Overrides
• Snap Options/Tools
• Animation Key Frames and Playback
• Zoom/Display Tools
• View Control Tools