My First Attempt – 3D Studio Max

This was my first attempt at doing something in 3ds max for some time. My first run in with 3ds max was coming up to quite possibly 10 years ago now when I followed a tutorial to design a jet. It was rather successful but I have no idea where the files or renders have gone. They are probably sat on a HD in a box somewhere in the cupboard.

Back to the point then (I told you my mind wandered)! My first attempt following which I have to say was a brilliant tutorial was to create a cardboard box. The tutorial was from a book I picked up from Amazon “3ds Max Modeling for Games by Andrew Gahan” which you can grab for yourselves for under £20 for the paperback. This was the dreaded Chapter 1 which I worked my way through on a Monday after work. It was only supposed to take 30 minutes but ended up taking me around an hour due to some silly mistakes at trying to get to grips with the Material Editor.

The basics that Chapter 1 teach you give you a brilliant starting point which included creating a primitive object, scaling, applying texture maps and UVW mapping. All in all I think it went quite well as you can see from this render. You can click for the full view.

The textures were provided for this exercise but he does take you through the whole texture creation process a little later on in the book which I am really looking forward to. I did originally render it with a light grey background but thought it would be a good idea to play with the lighting settings (Really stupid idea) and I couldn’t get it back to defaults so it stayed black for this render.

So there you have it, my first attempt and my first post on an actual topic.