Customer Reviews

3D Studio MAX Design Guide: Everything You Need to Master 3D Modeling and Animation with 3D Studio MAX

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

 

 

This is a 4 stars book, but is outdated now.

I was kinda disappointed with the book. First of all, it's labelled "design guide", but is really just a bunch of tutorials. The introduction says "this book is not a tutorial on learning every button and menu of Max....its a fast-paced, project oriented guide on doing cool stuff with an awesome package". First off, project oriented = tutorials, so you would assume cool stuff making the tutorials-- but some of them don't work! The beginning of each chapter shows you a nice picture of the "completed project", only they show you how to get there 1/2 way! Its like 'here's a picture, do it yourself'. The tutorials also fail to tell you why things happen. They give you steps, like a recipe. Clik that button, set this value, press enter, click here, type 2.1, draw this, click Enter, done, thank you, have a nice day. That's the quality of the tutorials. But then again, its "fast-paced" book, so its assumed you spend time to do whatever steps are missing and fool around with the numbers to understand what they do.

I purchased book on:14-Nov-2003, Listing ID:0922A885308.
I received book on 12-3-03.
The book was suppose to have the cd unopened.
The cd was missing.
Shipped by : damonsmyers@cox.net
Harold Scogin
1783 cord 53
Wadley, Al 36276

this book is alright but the thing that i hated was that it says "go to snap settings" and it took me over 20 minutes to find it. It doesn't tell you where to find stuff. It took me over 2 hours to do some projects because i was exploring to find settings and boxes i had to check. dont buy it.

Being a new Max user, I found that this book confused me...the instructions it gave were quite vague and sometimes did not work. It leaves out areas of importance which you should know when you create the scenes in the book.

This book could have used a technical editor to proof its tutorials. Just about every page in this book has an error. For someone attempting to expand their Max capabilities beyond the tutorials that come with Max, some of these errors are simply annoying since they are obviously wrong and can be quickly corrected. However, many errors are so egregious they may prevent you from completing many of the tutorials. Further, each tutorial starts with a screen shot, presumably of the finished animation. However, many (most?) of the tutorials stop far short of creating the depicted scene. So even after you've struggled to complete a buggy tutorial, you're left feeling cheated that the author didn't take you to where he originally promised he would. The included CD is missing nearly all of the necessary files, such as surface textures, you need to complete the tutorials. What files it does have are sloppily generated. Did anyone at Coriolis even bother to look at this book and the CD's contents before publishing it? Doesn't look like it. Too bad because the tutorials it purports to explain would have been interesting and educational had they actually been included. Caveat emptor on this one.