Introduction
I GOT MY FIRST TASTE of the computer graphics world back in the early 1980s with the ground breaking Atari system, to which I, like so many other kids of my generation, were hopelessly addicted. To this day, I kick myself for giving away that and my next great system, the Commodore 64; another piece of hardware that had a profound effect on my eventual decision to make a career out of computer graphics.
I don’t imagine many very young game players could relate, but I find it a bit sad to see the types of games found in the few arcades still around today and the demise of the great old classic games of the 1980s, to which countless thousands of my quarters went by the wayside. OK, mostly my parents’ quarters, but who was counting.
Back then, I was quite sure that if I didn’t become an astronaut, a professional ball player, a secret agent or some other cool dude that all boys envision themselves becoming, I would be making video games. I never would have imagined that I would eventually find myself creating architectural visualizations and loving what I do. Nor did I imagine that somewhere along the way I would find myself waking up to the sound of Reveille and marching, quite literally, to the beat of a completely different tune.
After surviving more years in the military than I care to recall, I landed a job with an aerospace firm; which I thought was appropriate since I had dedicated so much time earning an aerospace degree in school. It wasn’t long before I realized that, short of being that astronaut I once thought I might be, the aerospace industry isn’t as glamorous and appealing as it seems from the outside. While on occasion very interesting, most of my time was spent designing, quite literally again, nuts and bolts to tolerances of 1/10,000th of an inch. That got old quite quickly and I started looking at the architectural field.
I got lucky and landed an architectural drafting position, not because of my experience in architecture, but because the employee was a former Army officer who wanted to see what I could do. Unfortunately, I was so unskilled in the field that I literally couldn’t pick out a door from a window on a floor plan. My employer also found it odd that I was placing dimensions on floor plans that were written to 1/256th of an inch, which made some of his contractors laugh. But I’m a fairly quick learner and it wasn’t long before I knew all I needed to know about architectural drawings. It also wasn’t very long before I was teaching myself all I needed to know to turn a set of architectural drawings into a 3D visualization, using the old 3d Studio DOS version of the program we all use today.
From the time I began teaching myself 3D, I was always frustrated with the lack of practical visualization material and having to create the really useful techniques on my own. I decided that if a decent book dedicated to visualization wasn’t written before I had the opportunity, I would write one myself. Thus, the idea of writing the Beginner to Intermediate book was born.
Even more frustrating than a lack of a decent visualization book was the lack of intermediate or advanced level training; regardless of the industry. To this day, you would be hard-pressed to find such training anywhere. So the idea for this more advanced book began about the same time as the beginner book, and now after another two years of laboring, another title is realized. With the help of 8 other individuals directly responsible for writing some of the material presented in this book, and with the help of countless others in less conspicuous roles, I believe we have put together a book that is a first of its kind. One that presents advanced visualization techniques that have been time-tested in production for maximum speed and efficiency. And what we believe makes our writing valid is that we use these techniques in production every day.
A tremendous amount of time and effort was put into determining the best possible content to present in this book as well as the order in which it would be presented. Since the first days that work began on this book, the table of contents was changed, revised, massaged, and edited more times than any of us can recall. In the end, we believe that a great mixture of practical application and real-world experience was achieved and presented in the most logical order. We hope you agree.
Tutorial and Layout Conventions
All of the tutorials within this book are carefully designed to maximize the amount of features and techniques presented while at the same time minimizing the time needed to complete the tutorials. Some of the tutorials contain several hundred steps because, in some cases, a large number of steps were needed to provide a thorough demonstration of a particular workflow. Nonetheless, great care was taken to craft the tutorials in such a way that minimized the total number of steps needed to complete the demonstration and to minimize the unnecessary repetition of duplicate commands. The result, we believe, are tutorials that maximize the transfer of knowledge in a minimal amount of time.
To keep this book as clear and easy to follow as possible, the following text conventions are used throughout:
Bold text is used to draw your attention to on-screen elements in the 3ds Max interface and the first appearance of important words or concepts.
Menu commands are written in the form Menu > Submenu > Submenu.
Support Files for Exercises
The files needed to complete the exercises in this book can be found at http://www.thecgschool.com/books.
Reader Feedback
An enormous amount of effort went into checking this book for errors and to validate the material and exercises presented herein. Nevertheless, it would be impractical to think that a book of this size and complexity is completely free of any errors. If you find errors of any kind, we kindly ask that you let us know so we can remove them on future printings. Please send all comments to [email protected]. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
1st-Person Perspective
This book is written in the 1st-person perspective. However, because this book was written by so many individuals, and because it is not practical to mention who wrote each part, any reference to ‘I’ is simply a reference to one of the authors.
This book is powerful! As a fan of Einstein and the law of relativity, I wanted to know how much energy this book could release if its mass were completely converted to useable energy. Knowing that E=mc2, this 1.8kg book represents 162 trillion joules, or 45 million kilowatt hours, which is enough energy to power the city of New York for roughly 4 hours.