First, I want to say that I have not been updating my tutorials because I have not been at my apartment where 3DS Max is on that desktop computer. I am currently at my parents dwelling in LA and I do not have the program there.

Since being home, I have done nothing art related but I do have a flier to make now and I have a little under a month to make it. I am making the flier for my organization at San Diego State for an event and basically for next semester. The organization is a Christian organization built around serving San Diego State and its students. Our weekly event is a bible study. The organization is called Ignite Student Ministries. The old flier I created was pretty mediocre but it served the purpose of information. Since my developing process is slow, I am going to take as long as I need to make this flier appealing. The flier is all text besides the logo which is basically text. It is also a grayscale flier which is something to keep in mind. The flier size will also be 5x4.

What I am looking for out of my own creation is:

• Cool and compelling design
• Easy to navigate
• Easy to read
• Something worth handing out
• No edge graphics

My last flier that I created definitely satisfied the easy to read and navigate requirements but it was boring and I really did not feel to confident in the design to hand them out. Everyone was okay with it but personally, I wanted to do something better.

One of the biggest hiccups I have when making these fliers is that there is not a lot of information that is on them. There is no slogan, no events; not much of anything. Our last flier had our name, the bible study, the time/day and the room. Not very much information and not very compelling. We actually did a lot of the verbal compelling but if we did not get a chance to talk to the person, the flier would not accomplish much besides "What is Ignite?"

Now I must decide what I am going to put on the flier...

• What is Ignite Student Ministries?
• Who can join?
• Logo
• Bible Study
• Location
• Time/Day
• Contact (Phone, email, myspace, facebook)

I believe that is it for now. If there is something, I will just have to update this blog. Let's see how this turns out...

Continuing from last lesson, we will look at how to place cameras in a scene and some more viewport options. Pardon any layout issues. I am using Windows Live Writer to post these blogs and I am getting used to the functions. This is a testing period for a lot of things for me.

Introduction: Navigating a Scene Part 2

Points to remember:

• Pan: Allows you to move the camera vertically or horizontally.
• If you want to change how objects are shown in the viewport, right-click the viewport word and choose one of the different options. Most times you will bounce between Smooth + Highlight, Wireframe or the Edged Faces option.  The shortcut option from Wireframe to Smooth + Highlights is F3.
• To find the cameras, go to the Create panel and click on the Cameras tab.

• In this particular lesson, we only worked with one camera, the Target camera. If you want to use that camera, click the Target button and on any viewport, click and drag in the direction you want the camera to look. As a beginner, I tend to create the camera in the top view and adjust in the other views but there could be better ways. How you create them is up to you but I would suggest not creating it in the Perspective viewport. It tends to complicate accuracy.
• Ctrl+D deselects an object.
• If you want to see what your camera is looking at exactly, right-click the viewport word > views and click on the camera you want to look at.

Forgive me about the lack of embedding. Jing does not have very liquid embedding options. I will see what I can do about this in the future. Meaning, hopefully, the next post.

 Introduction: Navigating a Scene Part 1

Points to remember:

1. Very basic but in order to open a 3DS Max file, go to File > Open, then select the file you would like to modify.
2. Viewports are shown as active by a yellow border. If you want to change viewports, the easiest way is to right-click the viewport.
3. Zoom: Allows you to zoom in and out in a selected viewport. The shortcut for the zoom feature is by holding Ctrl+Alt+middle mouse button. If you do not have the middle mouse button active, go to your mouse settings and change it there; unless of course you do not have one at all... The Zoom will close in where the cursor is.
4. Arc Rotate: Allows you to look around the scene on a pivot point (the middle of viewport). You can look in all directions. The shortcut for it is holding the Alt + middle mouse button. For specific up and down or left and right direction, click and hold on one of the x's on the yellow gizmo circle.
5. If you want to return the viewport to the default look, hit Shift+Z.

After having a rough semester, artistically, at SDSU, I am dedicating a blog to my endeavors on trying to improve on my 3D design skills. This past semester, I was not able to do any 3D design because of the type of projects they were and the time constraints were not so lenient. This is why I am starting this.

Since I will be doing tutorials pretty much everyday, I will be posting what I do on here. For now, all the tutorials are from Autodesk's Self-Paced Training PDF files. From there, I will post videos and if needed, little tidbits they did not necessarily say although they will probably be in the video. I do not take any credit for them, I am not getting paid for it and I refuse to accept monies for them. The content and the program is Autodesk's. To help myself out, I will also post written versions of what I did so I can remember. Unfortunately, the videos can only be 5 minutes long (thanks Jing) but it will to keep attention spans from drifting too far. ^_^

LiveJournal did a good job with this Christmas template. Very spiriting. So where is my avatar? I am working on it. This is an art blog. Then again, I guess I do not really need to show that with an avi.

New posts will be coming soon.