3d studio max is a really huge and complex program for making 3d graphics.
But don't allow this to scare you because actually, you can make really nice looking
pics
without knowing every function.
First of all I wanna state that I'm no expert at 3d studio max, I do not work
for any
company but I am currently studying Virtual Reality at university level so I'm
learning.
And trust me, you will always be learning new stuff when working with 3d graphics.
In this tutorial I will guide the "newer-used-a-3d-program-guy" to
actually doing some
nice looking things. In later articles I will also (hopefully) go through some
more advanced
stuff. I would really like a lot of feedback on these articles so don't hesitate
to mail me... ok.
Actually I was thinking of telling you how I created my "divine light"
pic for the assembly2k
raytrace compo. You can download it from nextempire.com and have a sneakpeek
at what
I'm going to teach you in these articles. Of course... this will be after we
have gone through all the
other basic things such as modelling, texturing, lightning etc etc... :)
If you have suggestions about what the following articles should contain,
any special effect, modelling technique or whatever you want to be explained:
Drop me a mail and I'll see what we can work out.
So let's get started then...
Getting to know the GUI
Ok. This is how 3d studio max r3 looks (for me) when it's started.
Actually, the 3d studio max r3 (from now on called max) GUI can be configured
to look as you want it to. You can do this, but I don't recommend it since I'm
gonna
use the standard look.
As you can see there are 4 so-called viewports, top, front, left and perspective.
What they show of your scene is quite obvious, they are named after what they
show.
If you have an opengl accelerated card you can get an opengl preview in the
viewports.
This is very helpful when you want to see the object you're working with without
rendering
the whole scene, which usually takes a long time.
Of course it is also possible to configure the layout of these viewports, which
is easily done by
right-clicking on the text in the upper-left corner in a viewport and selecting
preferences.
In the uppermost part of the screen you can see the usual rolldown menus as well
as the max
toolbars. See the picture below.
Note: You might not see the whole toolbar as in the picture.
This is because you might be running a resolution smaller than 1280*1024 as I'm doing.
In this case, you will have to click and drag it to see the whole bar.
This toolbar contains every tool you ever wanna use in max, at least for now.
In the right part of the screen you also have the tools from the
toolbar.
Actually the icons in the toolbar are "shortcuts" to the main tools
at your right.
By default the create menu is highlighted. This is the menu where you can, as
you might
expect, create different objects, elements etc etc...
As you can see there are some so called standard primitives which you can select
by clicking the
corresponding buttons. More on creating stuff later. We first need to go through
the GUI.
Be patient and you will be rewarded, as a cool guy I know said once. :)
At the bottom of your screen you can see the animation slider and its tools
and also the viewport
zooming tools.
This is what the max GUI looks like. Perhaps it might look a bit scary at first
glance, but don't
worry - you will get used to it very fast.
So what I suggest you to do is clicking around a bit in the program and
getting used to the
GUI, and when you're done... go read part 2 and get ready for some 3d creating mania.
:)
