Tree views are great for keeping track of a large amount of scene nodes and organizing them on the fly. In this tutorial we will go over some of the basic functions of the Scene Objects Tree View
1. Load the file SceneObjectsTreeView.max. This scene has a number of objects that we will manipulate in the Tree View.
2. From the Zookeeper Menu choose Open/Close.
This will launch the Zookeeper UI were you will be working in the Scene Objects tab.
3. Select a few objects in the Tree View and notice it is a live "outliner" style selection. To select multiple objects just click and drag on multiple object names. You can also use the Ctrl key to add to a selection and Alt to remove item.
Next we will link the a few objects together
4. Select Box03 and drag it onto Box02. Then select Box02 and drag it onto Box01. The objects will highlight green on drag over, and then be linked together in a visible hierarchy.
NOTE you want to click once to select the object then drag it onto the object you want to link it to. Clicking and dragging immediately will select multiple objects.
5.Rotate Box01 and Box02 in the Viewport to see they have been linked.
Next we will group a few objects together. To do this we will select all the objects named Chair. Lets use the name selection filter to do so.
6. Type "Chair" into the Name Filter box. The Tree view will now update to only show objects named Chair.
7. Select all these objects and right click. Choose Group from the right click menu and when prompted name this group "ChairGroup".
8. Clear the Name Filter box.
Next we will edit only the lights in the scene. The lights all have different names but they are all the same object type. So we will filter them by object type.
9. Click on the Camera icon in the Filter Objects toolbar. You will see that all the cameras in the scene are now not present in the Scene Objects Tree View.
10. Ctrl click on the Lights button in the Filter Objects toolbar. This will show only lights in the view. Ctrl clicking will show only that object type and Alt clicking will show everything but that object type.
Now you can easily select only the lights. Next lets set some properties for objects. You can see that all the Chair objects are not the same color. So you will quickly change that.
11. Select all the Chair objects and click on the Object Color swatch. Change the color to Green. You see thet all the chair objects update to green.
12. With the Chair objects still selected. Click on the object icon (the sphere next to the eye icon). This will freeze all these objects so we don't mistakenly select or edit them in the view port.
Freezing these objects has turned them grey which is 3ds max's default property for frozen objects. Lets change this property so you can see the red color you set for the chair objects instead of grey.
13. With the Chair objects still selected, right click and go to Node Properties. From this menu choose Show Frozen With Materials.
Now you can see the color or material of these objects even if they are frozen. Lastly you will hide the linked chain of boxes you made earlier so that only the chair is left in the scene.
14. Ctrl click on the plus sing next to Box01 to expand its entire hierarchy. Now right click on Box01 and choose Select all Descendants.
15. Click on the eye icon next to any one of the Box objects to hide them all.
Hopefully this quick tutorial has helped to get you up and running with some of the basic Scene Object View options.
