Foundations of 3ds Max 6

After Director's Third Dimension, the next best software book that leaps to mind is the Foundations of 3ds Max 6 by Aaron Ross. Like myself, Aaron Ross taught 3ds Max at an Art Institute - though we are at different Art Institues and have never met, I have been completely impressed by the clarity and teaching style in this book, and recommended it to my students every term.

If you are new to 3ds Max, this is the best, first, book to get. Do not let the fact that this book references 3ds Max 6 dissuade you from the purchase. The features that get added each release are generally for very advanced or specialized purposes. The ground-level of 3ds Max stays basically the same, release after release. A few hours a day with this book and you will have the basics down well inside of a month.

If you are already competent with Max, this is probably not the book for you; it does such a good job with the basics, there is really not much space left in the book for more advanced concepts or examples.

Aaron has chapters on how bitmaps work, the basics, the interface, using polygon meshes, shapes, splines, lathing, using modifiers, keygraming, using the Curve Editor, booleans, lofting, meshes, spline-cage modeling, creasting a faucet, creating a simple car, modeling a spaceship, working with materials, cameras, lights, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, character animation, and special effects. He hits all the basics so you will have a clue what is going on in the complex world of 3ds Max.

One project he walks the reader through involves modeling a Low Polygon Toy Car sets up the project extremely well, explains new tools and techniques for each new feature on the car, and by the end it is amazing how well he managed to sneak in so many valuable concepts into a simple modeling project.

I can well imagine how this book happened; teaching the first few terms of 3ds Max is very demanding for an instructor, and you have limited time to get some pretty complex information into the heads of between 20 and 25 students at a time. Aaron, like myself, was simply forced by the demands of the job to streamline his verbage and examples until they were as perfect as possible.

Aaron knows how to explain clearly and how to keep it simple. After wrestling with teaching themselves (very time consuming and almost impossible), or with poorly written manuals (unfortunately very common), many students have been blessed by this excellent introduction to 3ds Max.