Welcome to the World of 3ds Max

Welcome, and congratulations! You’ve just bought a ticket to the world of Autodesk® 3ds Max® . Hang on and get ready for the ride of a lifetime! With 3ds Max, you can create 3D places and characters, objects and subjects of any type. You can arrange them in settings and environments to build the scenes for your movie or game or visualization. You can animate the characters, set them in motion, make them speak, sing and dance, or kick and fight. And then you can shoot movies of the whole virtual thing.

You can use 3ds Max to visualize designs of real things that will actually be built, such as buildings and machines. The File Link feature of 3ds Max lets you base visualizations on designs created in AutoCAD or Autodesk Architectural Desktop: when the design changes in these other applications, the revisions can be automatically updated in your 3ds Max scene. Add lighting and materials, then render to still image or movie formats.

These tutorials teach 3ds Max through a series of hands-on exercises. Prepare to be entertained and fascinated by the awesome power at your fingertips.

Printed and Online Tutorials

The tutorials are provided in two forms, as an online help file, and as a printed manual. Due to space limitations, not all of the tutorials are printed in the book.

Links between the online tutorials and the User Reference appear in the printed manual as underlined text. Illustrations are printed in black and white in the manual, and are full color in the online system.

To do the online tutorials, from the 3ds Max Help menu, choose Tutorials to display the online collection.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to a number of hardworking and talented individuals who helped create this volume of tutorials. A tip of the virtual hat to:

Jean-Yves Arboit, Jaykar Arudra, Alessandro Baldasseroni, Beans Magic Co. Ltd, Martin Coven, Frances Gainer Davey, Joana Garrido, Tommy Hjalmarsson, Kameswaran R. Iyer, Michael Koch, James Ku, Sören Larsson, Daniel Martínez Lara, Casey McGovern, Eni Oken, Ponsonnet Olivier, Ben Paine, Herman Saksono, Johannes Schlörb, Pradipta Seth, Metin Seven, and Marc Tan, for creating beautiful images using 3ds Max and allowing their reproduction in the online tutorial collection.
Michael B. Comet, for creating the character bones and rigging tutorials and the low-poly character-modeling tutorial.
Brandon Davis and Grant Adam, for the Particle Flow and particle effects tutorials.
Alberto Flores, for design of the mental ray water material.
Swami Lama, for providing the tutorials on scripting.
Peter Carisi de Lappe, of the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Quality Engineering group, for his help creating the lesson on using IK and FK together.
Pia Maffei, of Applied IDEAS, for providing the head model used in the Creating the Skin Material tutorial. The model was created with Applied IDEAS's Head Designer plug-in.
Jon McFarland, for providing the tutorials on working with CAD files, and fixing problems in imported files.
Paul Neale, for additional tutorials on character rigging.
Jeff Patton, along with other users on the Web, for good tips on how to use the mental ray (lume) Ocean shader.
Miroslaw Piekutowski, for the model demonstrating the mental ray Dielectric Material shader.
Retired Captain Irv Styer, fighter pilot, for expertise and assistance in modeling for the P-38 tutorial.
Fred Ruff and Mike O'Rourke for the games and skin-deformers tutorials.