Mastering 3ds max 4 [With CDROM]

As a college instructor of MAX modeling, texturing, and animation, I both recommend this book to my students and use it myself as a resource. I had the pleasure of contributing to this work in a few sections, and so had the opportunity to examine this work closely as it was written. In addition to providing comprehensive instruction on all areas of MAX, Cat Woods discusses the principles of 3D space and the creation of 3D art with greater elegance and clarity than any book I have encountered on the subject. Those struggling with the tools will find help here. A must-have for beginners, and a strong resource for experienced users.

Unlike a lot of people using MAX, I was close to a beginner, and was trying to learn it along with a graduate course in animation and design. A friend recommended this book to me, after I had trouble with another...book which was our course text. I can't say whether "Mastering 3ds max 4" is the best MAX book on the market, but it's light years ahead of what our instructor chose.If you were to open the book, you might get the impression -- the wrong impression -- that it was 'dumbed down', because there are so many illustrations. In fact, I almost didn't buy it for that reason. Only later it hit me that this is a book *about* graphics, so of course it would be graphical, and not like some book teaching you about, say, databases. Once I got used to the way the material was presented, I found the book really easy to follow, and was able to create real animations, from scratch, on my own. I think almost anyone can learn to do it from this book, if they stick with it.The writing is (for a book like this) almost entirely free of jargon and always clear, even if sometimes, due to my lack of experience, I had to go over things a few times to get the knack of them. I can't say whether this would be the optimal guide for a professional animator, but it seems ideal for people with a good general background in using graphics software, and for 'advanced beginners' like me (and a bunch of other people in the class who borrowed it from me... and didn't want to give it back).

Because I needed to learn the program thoroughly for my dissertation work, this is the fifth 3dsMax book I've bought, and it's the first that's not been overtly disappointing. If someone wants to have every little feature laid out in boring detail, there are the official materials and release notes for that. This book is the literal opposite (others suggesting otherwise have clearly not read the book in much detail).What is most impressive here is that the book is NOT a systematic, unstructured tour of the program, dutifully covering each minor feature. Rather, it is results-oriented: if you want to accomplish X, here is how you go about it. Although it is graphically-rich and amazingly clear, it is most certainly not a comic book version of a Max book, and is clearly targeted to the sophisticated user. Even though a beginner would find the book quite useful, it should probably be bought in conjunction with a primer or a book "introducing" 3dsMax.The writing is sprightly and, although there are spots where the editing might have been tightened, it is well above average even in that regard. In fact, if anything, the book has a crisp literary feel to it that will appeal to most readers, but may not be the style of choice for really hard-core users. Still, this is preferable to the studied dessication of nearly all the other books I've seen on the topic.Finally, the graphical illustrations are uniformly excellent, leaving little to the imagination. I'm hoping that this team sees fit to write such a guide for the next, inevitable incarnation of the program. I for one will be advance ordering it.

I'm only an intermediate user of 3ds Max, but I found this book to be EXACTLY what I was looking for. Even though it might be a bit much for someone using the program for the first time, so long as you have a good background, this book makes it amazingly simple to do some pretty complex things. The writing and illustrations are EXCELLENT, and some of the explanations are the clearest I've seen in any software manual. Although there were some problems with the CD in the earlier version (v3) of the book, those have been cleared up, and all patches are downloadable in any case.The book is also really nicely laid out, and you can hop around from chapter to chapter and focus on just what you're looking for. The first part of the book, maybe 2/3 of it, teaches you all the 'basics' (many of which aren't basic at all!) of the program -- the interface, meshes, patches, nurbs, mapping, through to animation -- and the last part goes surprisingly deeply into scripting. I didn't get too far into scripting, as I didn't need to learn that, but the first part of the book taught me enough to really use the program.If you're looking for something which goes WAY beyond the cryptic materials which accompany the program, this book is about as good as you'll come across.

To put it mildly, 3ds Max is a daunting program to learn. Those looking for the ideal introduction to REALLY using the program - understanding its logical workings and wide range of capabilities - need look no further than this marvelous book. While it's suitable for beginners, it is especially superb for those with at least a passing familiarity with 3D modeling and complex software design (the authors, to their credit, are very clear about this). That the authors devote their first chapters to reviewing concepts and context (areas utterly lacking in slapdash software guides written on a "Topic X for Dummies" level) speaks volumes about their philosophy for the book: that you will learn not only how to use 3ds Max, but to 'understand' it, to get inside it.That some might find the book anything but exceptionally well-written is a mystery, and suggests they've never encountered literature outside the driest of engineering texts. In fact, it's rare to find ANY technical material as thoughtfully laid-out and beautifully phrased as this. The book is sensibly divided into 14 chapters covering everything one might want to know about the program's capabilities, and an additional 6 on scripting, a nice bonus. Although it might seem frivolous to comment on it, the Index is the most comprehensive you'll encounter, making locating just about anything in the main body of the book a snap.Also rare is the inclusion, in a book ostensibly covering so vast a terrain as this, of detailed treatment of a number of advanced, specialized topics, like character animation and post-production. These are presented in enough detail that the reader can use them right out of the box, and can 'learn how to learn' more on his or her own. In short, this is indispensable.