Customer Reviews

3ds max 5 for Dummies

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is a great confidence booster and teaches you the basics so that you can create your own art in 3dsmax 5. It is VERY user friendly and the info is clear and useful. If you want complicated, headache inducing tutorials, search else where. To gain a better understanding of 3dsmax, in plain English, buy this book. Read from cover to cover for best results.
* Friendly note to 3D egg-heads: This book does not cover scripting.

Caution, reader. Caution.
Buying this book means you have absolutely no knowledge of 3ds Max or any knowledge in 3D whatsoever. The author spends a lot of time spelling out what a polygon is, what normals are, etc. If you already know this stuff, get another book. Another thing to be aware of is the chapter's sub-heading are often goofy and have no relation whatsoever to the content of that section; this often makes scanning the pages a little difficult. Humor is good, but I'm not sure I want to go there with such a complicated program.

Finally, the lessons here certainly get you on your way, but this is by no means a definitive guide on workflow and procedures. The tutorials are a bit shallow at best. If you know anything at all about Max or 3D in general, skip this book.

A book in the 'Dummies' series written for Studio Max is a bit strange. The 'Dummies' books are pretty much written for people who barely know how to turn on a computer (my mother, for instance). Studio Max is a professional-level 3D application designed to create visual effects for games, movies and TV productions. Why would someone who barely knows how to turn on a computer buy a professional-level 3D application? Answer - they have just downloaded a pirate version of Studio Max from a warez web site.

The book follows Shamms Mortier's standard formula of filling the pages with padding, and hope that the reader is stupid enough not to notice its padding, all the time almost no information is being given out - because the author has no idea how the software works himself.

Avoid all books written by R. Shamms Mortier. The sooner publishers realise this guy has no idea what he's doing, the better. Even the manual that comes with the software is far better than this waste of paper.

This is a great book for getting started in 3DS Max 5. I am almost finished with it and have found it to be a great help in learning the program. Some areas could be explained perhaps a bit better, but I was able to follow those areas and the rest of the book fairly easily.
This book is not for the advanced but is for those with very little experience in the program....like DUMMIES.
A great place to start if you want to learn this program.

MY BACKGROUND: I'm a Project Manager for former division of EDS and like to DirectX program for fun. I previously had never touched any version of 3ds max/Direct Studio (and had never touched any equivalent software for creating 3-d objects).

MY REVIEW: Though this book has been very useful in helping me learn 3ds max 5, too often this book starts listing functions with no examples on how to use them. One example of this is chapter 14 in the NURBS surfaces section and beyond. There are over 40 functions listed with descriptions but there is NOT EVEN ONE example on using them.

Also at times I ended up consulting the 3ds-max-5 user reference to understand how to use a function that they allegedly had step-by-step instructions for; I'd then discover that they left out a very IMPORTANT step.

The biggest benefit of this book is that it DOES come with 3ds max 5 for a 30 day trial for a relatively inexpensive price; adding the fact that there are not many 3ds max 5 books out there, I rated this a 3 since, I must admit, that I've come a long way in learning how to use 3ds max 5, even though I needed to consult the 3ds-max user-reference a little more often than I should have.