I did need to do a bit of computer setup in 3DS Max for the office modeling. As I was looking at my office and thinking about the different things I need to put in it and things I need to measure, I decided I was going to be best off if I set up everything to use inches. That way I can take my measurements in inches and just translate them and know it’s to scale.
I couldn’t remember where to do this so I poked around and first I found, under tools Grids and Snaps and then the Grids and Snaps settings…
I figured the Home Grid was what I wanted. It was and it wasn’t. This is not where I set my units. This though let me set how far apart the grid lines would be. So I set the spacing as you see here.
I still needed to set my units. That I finally found under Customize. It was there plain as can be as Units Setup…
I actually set it to US Standard and used decimal inches. Since I will be adding lights to the room as well I set the Lighting Units to American. Now that’s all set time to get modeling.
So the room is 144 inches by 155 inches. About 12 feet by amlost 13 feet. It’s a good size room really. And the walls are about 106.5 inches tall so a bit over 8 feet closer to 9 feet high. Not bad. Now I need to build them
The nice thing is that for this, no I don’t actually need to frame them and sheet rock them and all that. I just need boxes of the same shape and size. I also need a floor and a ceiling. It will make things easier.
I put in two of the walls and then decided to do the floor and then ceiling. When I added the floor I decided to move it so it is just below the grid so I can see the grid as I’m working. Also, since the floor is the size of the room I adjusted the walls so they sit at the edges of the floor. So those boxes sit corner to corner. For the ceiling it was just a matter of making a copy of the floor and transposing it up to the height it is supposed to be.
I added the other two walls to finish out the room. Now I have a box. Ok. Nope. Not very exciting this way. But it’s a start. I will have to hide some of the walls as I work so that I can see where things go. Looking through the wire frame can become confusing at a certain point. So this is it so far.
