Randi L. Derakhshani - Autodesk 3ds Max 2014 Essentials: Autodesk Official Press

Acquisitions Editor: Mariann Barsolo

Development Editor: Tom Cirtin

Technical Editor: Jon McFarland

Production Editor: Rachel Gunn

Copy Editor: Judy Flynn

Editorial Manager: Pete Gaughan

Production Manager: Tim Tate

Vice President and Executive Group Publisher: Richard Swadley

Vice President and Publisher: Neil Edde

Book Designer: Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Compositor: Craig W. Johnson, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Proofreader: Candace Cunningham

Indexer: Nancy Guenther

Project Coordinator, Cover: Katherine Crocker

Cover Designer: Ryan Sneed

Cover Image: Randi L. Derakhshani

Copyright 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-1-118-57514-7

ISBN: 978-1-118-72366-1 (ebk.)

ISBN: 978-1-118-75025-4 (ebk.)

ISBN: 978-1-1187-2364-7 (ebk.)

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Dear Reader,

Thank you for choosing Autodesk 3ds Max 2014 Essentials. This book is part of a family of premium-quality Sybex books, all of which are written by outstanding authors who combine practical experience with a gift for teaching.

Sybex was founded in 1976. More than 30 years later, were still committed to producing consistently exceptional books. With each of our titles, were working hard to set a new standard for the industry. From the paper we print on, to the authors we work with, our goal is to bring you the best books available.

I hope you see all that reflected in these pages. Id be very interested to hear your comments and get your feedback on how were doing. Feel free to let me know what you think about this or any other Sybex book by sending me an email at nedde@wiley.com . If you think youve found a technical error in this book, please visit http://sybex.custhelp.com . Customer feedback is critical to our efforts at Sybex.

Best regards,

Neil Edde

Vice President and Publisher

Sybex, an Imprint of Wiley

To Max Henry

We are thrilled to be a part of the team working to publish Autodesk 3ds Max 2014 Essentials , a complete update and style change to our previous Introducing Autodesk 3ds Max series. Education is an all-important goal in life and should always be approached with eagerness and earnestness. We would like to show appreciation to the teachers who inspired us; you can always remember the teachers who touched your life, and to them we say thanks. We would also like to thank all of our students, who taught us a lot during the course of our many combined academic years.

Special thanks go to Mariann Barsolo, Thomas Cirtin, Rachel Gunn, and Pete Gaughan, our editors at Sybex who have been professional, courteous, and ever patient. Our appreciation also goes to technical editor Jon McFarland, who worked hard to make sure this book is of the utmost quality. We could not have done this revision without their help.

In addition, thanks to Dariushs mother and brother for their love and support, not to mention the life-saving babysitting services.

Having a good computer system is important with this type of work, so a special thank you goes to HP for keeping us on the cutting edge of workstation hardware by providing us with a fully decked-out EliteBook 8760w, which was our primary computer in writing this book. What struck us about the laptop was that it was not only portable, making it easy for a writing team to collaborate; it was also powerful enough to run truly demanding tasks. It takes a special machine to run graphics-intensive applications, such as Autodesk 3ds Max, and we were thrilled to write this book on the HP EliteBook.

Running an Intel i7 CPU alongside 16 GB of RAM and an Nvidia Quadro 5010M (with a whopping 6 GB of memory) gave us the muscle we needed to run multiple applications alongside 3ds Max splendidly. Dual 320 GB hard drives gave us plenty of space for Windows 7 Professional and its applications and still left lots of room for renders. We opted out of the RAID option to mirror the drives (you can also stripe them for performance), but that doesnt mean we neglected our backup duties with this machine! The 8760w was easily integrated into a Gigabit network in the home office, and on fast Wi-Fi everywhere else, so we had constant access to the home network and the hundreds upon hundreds of files necessary to write this book (and all their backups!).