3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [129]
Once the Edit Soft Selection mode is enabled, the cursor changes to a custom cursor. When this cursor appears, you can drag to change the Soft Selection's falloff value. If you click, the cursor changes and lets you drag to change the Pinch value. One more click and you can edit the Bubble value and another click returns you to the falloff edit mode. Pressing the keyboard shortcut again exits Edit Soft Selection mode.
For Editable Poly objects, the bottom of the Soft Selection rollout includes a Paint Soft Selection section. You can use these controls to paint the soft selection weights that subobjects receive.
Cross-Reference
For more information on the paint interface and these controls, see Chapter 26, “Deforming Surfaces and Using the Mesh Modifiers.” •
FIGURE 10.5
The Soft Selection curve is affected by the Falloff, Pinch, and Bubble values.
Tutorial: Soft selecting a heart shape from a plane
Soft Selection enables a smooth transition between subobjects, but sometimes you want the abrupt edge. This tutorial looks at moving some subobject vertices in a plane object with and without Soft Selection enabled.
To move subobject vertices with and without Soft Selection, follow these steps:
1. Open the Soft selection heart.max file from the Chap 10 directory on the CD.
This file contains two simple plane objects that have been converted to Editable Mesh objects. Several vertices in the shape of a heart are selected.
2. The vertices on the first plane object are already selected; in Vertex subobject mode, click the Select and Move button (or press the W key), move the cursor over the selected vertices, and drag upward in the Left viewport away from the plane.
3. Exit subobject mode, select the second plane object, and enter Vertex subobject mode. The same vertices are again selected. Open the Soft Selection rollout, enable the Use Soft Selection option, and set the Falloff value to 40.
4. Click the Select and Move button (or press the W key), and move the selected vertices upward. Notice the difference that Soft Selection makes.
Figure 10.6 shows the two resulting plane objects with the heart selections.
FIGURE 10.6
Soft Selection makes a smooth transition between the subobjects that are moved and those that are not.
When you select subobjects, they turn red. Non-selected subobjects are blue, and soft selected subobjects are a gradient from orange to yellow, depending on their distance from the selected subobjects. This visual clue provides valuable feedback on how the Soft Selection affects the subobjects. Figure 10.7 shows the selected vertices from the preceding tutorial with Falloff values of 0, 20, 40, 60, and 80.
FIGURE 10.7
A gradient of colors shows the transition zone for soft selected subobjects.
For the Editable Poly and Editable Patch objects, the Soft Selection rollout includes a Shaded Face Toggle button below its curve. This button shades the surface using the soft selection gradient colors, as shown in Figure 10.8. This shaded surface is displayed in any shaded viewports. The cooler colors have less of an impact over the transform.
FIGURE 10.8
The Shaded Face Toggle shades the surface using the soft selection gradient colors.
Applying modifiers to subobject selections
The preceding chapter introduced modifiers and showed how they can be applied to entire objects. But you can also apply modifiers to subobjects. If the modifier isn't available for subobjects, it is excluded from the Modifier List or disabled in the Modifiers menu.
If your object isn't an editable object with available subobjects, you can still apply a modifier using one of the specialized Select modifiers. These modifiers let you select a subobject and apply a modifier to it without having to convert it to a non-parametric object. These Select modifiers include Mesh Select, Poly Select, Patch Select, Spline Select, Volume Select, FFD (Free Form Deformers) Select, and Select by Channel. You can find all these modifiers in the Modifiers⇒Selection submenu.
After you apply a Select modifier to an