Part III: Additional Lessons

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Chapter List

Lesson 12: Navigation in 3ds Max Viewports, Object Manipulations, and Special Features

Lesson 13: Coordinates, Transform Centers, Alignment, and Snaps

Lesson 14: Texture Creation

Lesson 15: Modeling a Car Body using a Sketch

Lesson 16: Modeling a Human Head

Lesson 17: Modeling Lightning and an Electric Discharge

Lesson 18: Modeling a Soccer Ball

Lesson 19: Using 3ds Max with Other Autodesk and Discreet Packages

Lesson 20: 3ds Max and Landscape Generators

Lesson 21: Useful Add-Ons

Part Overview

Several separate lessons giving the solutions to various tasks are presented in this part.

• Lesson 12: Navigation in 3ds max Viewports, Object Manipulations, and Special Features. In this lesson, we tried to sum up these options in 3ds max to make your work more efficient. The lesson is intended for beginners, but is also useful for advanced users.

• Lesson 13: Coordinates, Transform Centers, Alignment, and Snaps. This lesson is also aimed at helping beginners understand their actions when working with objects.

• Lesson 14: Texture Creation. Every 3D package devotes a lot of space to textures created in 2D packages. Creating new textures and effectively using the existing ones considerably enhances efficiency and improves the final result.

• Lesson 15: Modeling a car Body Using a Sketch. In this lesson, we examine the right way to prepare a sketch for further modeling. In addition, we discuss creating a car body with minimal geometry by changing textures.

• Lesson 16: Modeling a Human Head. This lesson is useful for those who want to create animated characters. When we wrote this lesson, we were governed by the principle: "Less words, more action!"

• Lesson 17: Modeling Lightning and an Electric Discharge. Can you create special effects in 3ds max without the use of additional modules? You can and must! The simple examples in this lesson demonstrate the options for creating special effects in 3ds max.

• Lesson 18: Modeling a Soccer Ball. A soccer ball is a rather difficult object to model but because of the variety of geometrical primitives available in 3ds max, the process turns out to be very easy.

• Lesson 19: Using 3ds max with Other Autodesk and Discreet Packages. In this review lesson, we describe the joint work of 3ds max and Discreet Combustion and provide brief descriptions of the applications based on 3ds max — Autodesk VIZ, Discreet Plasma, and Discreet Gmax.

• Lesson 20: 3ds max and Landscape Generators. A wide range of landscape generators can be quite useful. In this lesson, we describe the most popular ones, as well as the options to use them with 3ds max.

• Lesson 21: Useful Add-Ons. This lesson covers a few freeware modules (plug-ins and scripts) that expand 3ds max capabilities in various areas.

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