Aaron F. Ross, webmaster of Digital Arts Guild, has authored another series of training videos for lynda.com.

In 3ds Max 2011 Essential Training, Aaron demonstrates how to use this top-tier application for digital content creation, widely adopted in diverse industries such as architecture, industrial design, motion pictures, and games and virtual worlds. This course covers modeling with polygons, curves, and subdivision surfaces, defining surface properties with materials and maps, setting up cameras and lights, animating objects, and final output rendering. Exercise files accompany the course.

Topics include:

Getting familiar with the 3ds Max interface
Creating shapes and splines
Modeling Loft objects
Creating motion graphics
Modeling with polygons and subdivisions
Modeling with NURBS
Shading objects with materials and maps
Setting up camera and scene layout
Lighting basic scenes
Animating objects with keyframes
Editing keyframes in the Curve Editor
Constructing and animating hierarchies
Using animation Constraints
Animating particle systems
Rendering animations to disk