From the course: 3ds Max 2024 Essential Training

Using the exercise files - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2024 Essential Training

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Using the exercise files

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If you have access to the exercise files I provided with this course, go ahead and download those and extract them to a convenient location, such as on your desktop. If you don't have access to the exercise files, you can still follow the exercises using your own assets. And even if you aren't following along with the exercises, maybe if you're on a mobile device or don't have 3ds Max installed, you can still learn by observation and note-taking. The Exercise Files folder is a 3ds Max project folder. It stores various different types of assets such as scenes. In the Scenes folder we will see a lot of .max files. These hold the models, materials, lighting, and animation for the various 3D scenes. Generally there is one 3ds Max scene for each exercise. Sometimes there will be no scene file for that movie because we're starting from a blank slate in Max. And sometimes there's a finished example illustrating what that scene would look like at the end of the particular exercise. Usually the scene file is only the primary asset. It usually contains links or references to other files such as textures. For example, inside that scenes folder I've created a subfolder called xrefs. Let's go in there. These are additional .max scene files that are referenced into the primary scene files. The files in the scenes folder may contain references to the files in the xrefs folder. Those xrefs scenes are automatically loaded into the primary scene file. That's to save disk space, especially for some of these that are very large, such as this one, which is almost 130 megabytes in size. If I have 20 different scene files that all require the same 3D model, such as this model of some vines, I can store that model externally as an XRef instead of inside each primary scene. And that way I'd only use up one twentieth of the disk space. OK, back up in the exercise file's root level, Very importantly, in Scene Assets we have some dependent files, especially images. These are textures and environments that are applied within the 3ds Max scenes and they're required for that scene to load properly. That's an overview of the exercise files I provided with this course. In a subsequent movie we'll look at setting up the 3ds Max project in order to point at these exercise files and correctly find all the links between the various files.

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