3ds Max: Design Visualization

Learn how to visualize your designs—buildings, furniture, landscapes, and more—before they are built with 3ds Max.

If you want to visualize and sell your product, architectural, engineering, or landscaping designs to your clients before they are built, then 3ds Max is the tool for you. Learn how to use this incredibly sophisticated 3D modeling and rendering program to visualize almost anything you can imagine.

In this course, author Scott Onstott shows you how to build walls, doors, windows, stairs, railings, moldings, cloth, pottery, furniture, grass, trees, landscapes, and much more, using splines, modifiers, Booleans, and NURBS modeling. You'll also learn to texture-map objects, light them with both direct and indirect illumination, place virtual cameras, render, and animate scenes.

Introduction

• Welcome
• Using the exercise files

1. Getting Started

• Touring the user interface and selecting workspaces
• Setting defaults
• Exploring the standard templates

2. Working with Other Programs

• Linking to AutoCAD or Revit files
• Substituting XREFed objects for linked geometry
• Importing a SketchUp model
• Importing an AutoCAD model with the SAT format

3. Creating Parametric AEC Objects

• Drawing AEC extended walls
• Inserting doors and windows into walls
• Constraining doorknobs to doors
• Creating parametric stairs
• Creating parametric railings

4. Spline Modeling Techniques

• Configuring the viewport background with a bitmap
• Tracing a spline over the background image
• Reshaping the spline profile
• Lathing a 2D profile and configuring the resulting model
• Creating walls with custom-shaped openings
• Designing custom spline-based windows
• Linking the transforms of the window to the wall opening

5. Modifying Objects

• Using parametric modifiers and deformations
• Shaping architectural moldings

6. Attaching, Grouping, and Compounding Objects

• Attaching versus grouping
• Compounding objects with ProBooleans

7. Sculpting and Painting Landscapes

• Using the Paint Deform tools to sculpt a landscape
• Sectioning a landscape into 2D contours
• Building a landscape from contours
• Conforming a pathway into a landscape
• Painting on surfaces with Viewport Canvas

8. NURBS Modeling Techniques

• Understanding NURBS
• Shaping a seat surface
• Offsetting the seat surface and blending
• Completing the chair model

9. Specialty Objects

• Simulating a tablecloth
• Creating a 3D tree and its rendering
• Creating a tree with a rendering
• Rendering grass with the hair and fur modifier

10. Materials

• Applying Autodesk and Arch & Design materials
• Analyzing a complex material

11. Capturing Light and Shadow in Virtual Cameras

• Placing cameras and composing scenes
• Configuring photometric lights and casting shadows

12. Rendering Images

• Rendering architectural interiors with mental ray
• Rendering outdoor scenes with the scanline renderer

13. Animation

• Making time-lapse shadow studies
• Animating a camera along a flight path

Conclusion

• Next steps