Introduction

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.

The Sky Fisherman

Akin Bilgic

cggallery.com

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 Revit^® Architecture: 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.

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:

All those customers and users who have allowed us to showcase their artwork, whether in the User Showcase section or elsewhere in the help and tutorials.
All those who have contributed models and methods used in these tutorials, including Jean-Marc Belloncik (skinning and quadruped animation), Michele Bousquet (two-legged Biped animation), Mark Gerhard (Set Key animation and the character studio introduction), and Amer Yassine (models, methods, and artwork too numerous to list). There are other contributors whose names aren’t available: We apologize for omitting them, and thank you for your help as well.

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