Yes, it is true. I like quad menu.
I have made several different quad menus to speed up my workflow in max. Now I am not a fan of having a ton of hotkeys, I do however use the normal hotkeys in 3d studio max. Back in the day when I used Maya as my main 3d application I was a huge fan of marking menus.
They were awesome.
You cant replicate the smoothness and the fast switch that comes with marking menus in Max. There are plugins for max that tries to give marking menus to max. Though not as good as Maya marking menus, and may contain bugs.
I have accepted that I cant have Maya marking menus in max and I have moved on. I don’t want to debate what is best, Max or Maya, I do prefer some features from both. I do my job in max and have been using max for the last 10 years so it is easy to tell what my weapon of choice is.
Anyway, I did get tired of moving my mouse cursor all the way to the right every time I wanted something. So to improve this I just made a couple of quad menus for everything I use. They are available without me having to go to the modify panel all the time.
So here are the marking menus I am currently using.
The first one is for modelling, its got everything I need. Also I added snaps in there. These ones I use a lot when modelling.
The second one is used for adding modifiers to my stack. I still need to go to the Modify panel to adjust some of these. I did how ever find it more easy to find the modifiers in my own list then the insane long max default list.
And finally the third one contains views, some merge/save as/export and create. This is a drawer full of random stuff I sometime find useful. Like the drawer I have under my desk with leftover computer equipment. Its nice to have it, when I need it. 😛
I also hit “show all quads” So that I can see everything right away.
And voila, we have our test custom quad menu. 🙂 I just dragged in some random things to show it off. Also you might not see all your options in your quad menu right away, for example you might not see loop edge without you being in edit poly mode on your object. Just worth mentioning that not all options will show up unless you can actually use it.
It is not the most ideal way of working, and not the fastest. I do believe shortcuts would be faster, but I also think this adds more options then having a ton of shortcuts. Its more convenient for me, but not everybody agrees.
Now to make this you first need to go into customize > customize User Interface. Then you will get up a box with options of what you want to customize. You should hit quads. Add a new one. Name it to whatever you want. I gave it the creative name of “test”. 😛
Then you need find whatever it is you want to add to the quad box. Like for example chamfer. Move it over to the empty list you see under the yellow box. Put a hotkey on the quad menu and you are done. Well, not done, it takes a lot of time sorting out what you want into what quad, and finding the right command. When you have done that remember to save the file as MaxStartUI.mnux. This should be saved to your app data. It will open the folder by default.
