One of the most productive tools in 3ds Max is often overlooked by even experienced users; the Reference Coordinate System.  New users are often confused by the View reference coordinate system, but manage to bull their way through making it work without an understanding of how to take advantage of the options. 

In this upcoming series of blogs I'll do my best to shed some light on each of the available coordinate systems and I'll try to give working examples of where they'll be useful in day-to-day production.  However, I encourage you to practice with simple scenes until the selection of an appropriate reference coordinate system becomes second nature. 

3D space --- where am I? 

There's nothing really difficult about the reference coordinate systems, but there's usually nothing in our work experience that we can relate them to and in our haste to do "cool" things with 3ds Max we neglect to take the time to learn them.  

A solid understanding of the reference coordinate systems is important in laying a foundation on which to build efficient and flexible object transformations and alignments throughout the 3ds Max workflow. 

The World Coordinate System --- a little background

The World coordinate system for 3ds Max is a fixed coordinate space which cannot be altered; the origin of this coordinate space is indicated by the intersection of the heavy black gridlines defining the coordinate 0, 0, 0.  Every point in 3-D space is measured from this origin in six axes; positive or negative values in X,Y,Z directions.  The positive directions of those three axes are indicated by the red, green, blue tripod at the lower left corner of each viewport and it's important to familiarize yourself with how the tripod relates to the Grid planes that define the work plane for each viewport. 

Refer to Figure 1 for callouts indicating the World origin and the tripod showing the positive axes directions in the Top viewport.  You'll also notice a selected box in the image and the Select and Move transform gizmo axes which match the directions of the World coordinate system... coincidentally. 

Is that "forehead slapping" that I hear? 

Yes, this is probably very fundamental information that you are all extremely familiar with.  However, it's important to be positive that you understand the concepts from the ground up in order to build your knowledge base into that solid foundation I mentioned.  Failing to understand just one element of 3ds Max fundamentals can result in much wasted production time and in efficient workflow down the line when it becomes important. 

The vast majority of work you'll perform in 3ds Max is simply more and more complex combinations of these fundamental techniques, so bear with me and follow along to make sure each step is clear before moving on to the next topic. 

Next time...