My First Post

So for my first post I thought I'd write a little about me and why this blog!

Well, I've been using 3ds Max now for about 10 years now. It started off just as a hobby for 2 years and then I studied the subject at Uni for 3 years before finally using it for work for the past 5 years in the visualisation field. What I love about it is it's ability to pretty much create anything, with the only thing holding you back being your imagination (or computing power). Now it can be tough to get it to do exactly what you want, but thankfully there is a wealth of knowledge and help out there and with a quick search you can find most of what you need or at least adapt it to your needs; which leads me nicely to why this blog.

Well, after using Max all these years and using other websites and forums to help me I thought I'd like to give back a little. So that's the plan, as I come across problems and fixes I'll post them up here as well as any other interesting bits and bobs.

Well that's enough about me and the blog so to finish, here are a couple of very handy hints and tips that cost me many hours trying to figure out when I first started:

1: When you have lost your transform gizmo (the xyz thingy) it's normally down to accidentally hitting the x key, so hit it again and back it comes.

2: Autosave, ensure it's set to on, as there is nothing worse than spending hours and losing all your work. Also on that point...

3: Save your work incrementally, just in case you need to go back to an earlier draft.

4: In the same vain as above, stack your modifiers. In other words, as your modelling something, each time your making big steps add another edit poly, this way if you make a mistake you can just delete it and go back a step (very handy when chamfering edges).

5: Gamma, if your renders are coming out very faded, just double check your gamma is set to 2.2 as a lot of the time this can be over looked.

6: Don't model and texture everything to extreme levels. Not only is this time consuming but most of the time it won't be seen or will be so far away from the camera that it will be wasted, so better focus your time on the pieces near the camera.

7: Read and follow tutorials and don't forget the Max help, there is so much free and already available to you, so before you give up have a search on-line or in the help section and most of the time someone else has had the same problem and given steps to resolve it.

So that's it for now, I'll add some more posts soon but in the mean time I highly recommend that you check out these two sites, especially if your using Mental Ray/iRay (and why wouldn't you eh).

Zap Andersson aka Master Zap - http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/
Jeff Patton - http://jeffpatton.net/