3ds Max 5 Fundamentals [With CDROM]

I hesitated to buy this book because I consider myself a "veteran" user and I didn't want to go back to basics but I was pleasantly surprised at how advanced it was and the wealth of information that the book had to offer. The author seems to really want you to know what you need to know and goes out of his way to show you. The pages have lots of sidebars with valuable tips and cautions. The book is also a great way to segue from 4x to 5.0. The new features are showcased in many of the tutorials.

I really thought this book was a great investment. It has a pretty thorough tutorial, and the book complemented with the CD was comprehensive enough for me to fly through the menus and interfaces of 3ds max 5 by the first third of the book. I was especially interested in how the book extensively covered radiosity, since I am currently in third year university, majoring in Computer Science with a keen interest in computer graphics and animation. This book has helped me greatly with my thesis. All in all, a really great book to learn from and to use as a reference.

This is a superb book on Max 5. One of the major upgrade from 3ds Max 3,4 to Max 5 is the new functionality of radiosity engine/photon mapping in Max 5. a Kind of merger of Max and Lightscape. For this important subject along is worth of buying this book. If you need to learn about 3ds Max modeling,Texture mapping & animations,there are many good books out there. But for Max 5's new Radiosity Lighting feature(make your rendered images look very clean and photo-realistic),this book given an in-depth look on the subject of outdoor & indoor lighting. In 3d visualization, successful lighting of a scene is almost everything... one sees.

I've found this book to be an excellent companion to the tutorials included with 3ds max. While I felt that one or two chapters near the middle of the book focus somewhat too heavily on the fine points of radiosity, overall this is a wonderful introduction to modeling, lighting, and animation.