6. Now we are going to make a particular adjustment to our first cylinder.  Select it and uncheck the Smooth box. What this does is tell Max not to smooth the object. By doing so we see that the sides of our cylinder now have a more pronounced visual impact. To be more accurate, it is turning off all smoothing groups. We'll get more into this later, but for now I just want you to understand what impact this option has on our geometry (Fig.07).


Big difference, huh!

Now it's time to learn something new that's really going to help you out.

7. With our unsmoothed cylinder still selected, use the Rotate tool, and while holding Shift (yes we are making a copy) rotate the cylinder 90 degrees (Fig.08).


Tip: turn on Angle Snap Toggle (Fig.09) so you can make this adjustment easier.


Now make the following adjustment (Fig.10).


Note: I just rotate the view not the object, at this point.

8. Go to the Hierarchy tab and click on Affect Pivot Only. Then hit Center to Object. By doing this you'll notice that the pivot point moves from the base of the cylinder to the middle. Note Max shows you that you are working on a pivot point by creating the blocky arrows around the pivot point (Fig.11).


9. Before we move on, I want you to do the same thing for our original cylinder (the unsmoothed one – you'll see why in a minute) (Fig.12).



Don't forget to turn Affect Pivot Only off!

10. Back to our smaller cylinder (the second unsmoothed one), select it and use the Align tool (Fig.13). Then select on the first cylinder to align the small one to the large one (Fig.14).



In the window that opens just make sure that the settings are as you see in Fig.14, and then hit OK.

So what happened here?  Obviously, by using the Align tool, we made our smaller cylinder pop right to the centred pivot point of the larger one. The align tool is something that you should be using a lot – it is way too convenient to not have it in your arsenal!

By adjusting our pivots we have enabled ourselves to have some cool control over modelling manipulations. Let's take a look now at some more adjustments that are made easier because of what we just did.

11. First off, switch to your Top View, make sure we are in Wireframe mode (F3), and then rotate our cylinder -15 degrees, like in Fig.15.  What we are doing is centring this cylinder to the face of the larger cylinder.