Acknowledgments

We are thrilled to be updating Introducing 3ds Max for a third edition in honor of version 2011. Education is an all-important goal in life and should always be approached with eagerness and earnestness. We would like to show appreciation to the teachers who inspired us; you can always remember the teachers who touched your life, and to them we say thanks. We would also like to thank all of our students, who taught us a lot during the course of our many combined academic years. Equally, we would like to extend many thanks to the student artists who contributed to this book; many of them are our own students from The Art Institute of California—Los Angeles. Thanks to the AI faculty for their help in gathering the inspiring work for the color insert and for their support in writing this book.

Having a good computer system is important with this type of work; so a special thank you goes to HP for keeping us on the cutting edge of workstation hardware. Special thanks go to Mariann Barsolo, Lisa Bishop, Dassi Zeidel, and Candace English, our editors at Wiley who have been professional, courteous, and ever patient. Our appreciation also goes to technical editors Jon McFarland and Nick Poznick, who worked hard to make sure this book is of the utmost quality, as well as contributed elements to the writing of a few chapters. We could not have done this revision without their help.

In addition, tremendous gratitude again goes to Jon McFarland for his fantastic contributions to the previous editions of this book, some of which have been updated over to this edition. Finally, thanks to Dariush’s mother and brother for their love and support, not to mention the life-saving babysitting services.