Workshop Activity

Creating a Scene with Drag and Drop Objects

In this tutorial you will be creating a scene and making some simple animations within it.

This week's class meeting will give you some initial hand-on experience in using 3D Studio MAX. Take some time to get familiar with the user interface, and create a static scene of the sort shown below.

As with all your assignments in this course, you will be working on it during the Studio Lab meeting. You will also be able to make some refinements and/or catch-up with the schedule, if necessary, in the Open Lab.

You will learn how to use pre-prepared 3D object models and how to arrange then in a 3D scene. Optionally, you will also learn how the virtual camera can be animated.

Instructions

Following the instructions found in the Introductory Tutorials\Creating an Animated Still Life section of the online tutorial, create a 3D scene as described in the Creating a Scene with Drag-and-Drop Objects subsection. As time permits, work through the Animating the Camera subsection and create an animation with moving camera. Bring up the tutorial from the Help menu in MAX. Also make sure you have mapped the 3dsMax tutorial drive first (see below).

3ds MAX tutorials and resources.
We have put the tutorial CD-ROM on a student server for you to use. Whenever max calls for tutorial files, this is where you access them. You access the tutorial disk by mounting \\storage\3dsmax. Best to "map" this to your workstation, so MAX, or other apps, can see it correctly. To map a drive, in Explorer, go to "Tools", "map network drive". Then map \\storage\3dsmax to a drive letter like "Z".

Save you files to your ftp area!