From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

Using the exercise files - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2025 Essential Training

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Using the exercise files

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- [Instructor] 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. And 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 in designated folders such as "scenes." In the scenes folder, we'll see a lot of .max files. These hold the models, materials, lighting, and animation for the various 3D scenes. Generally, there's 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 sub folder 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 root level of the scenes folder may contain references to the files in the xrefs sub folder. Those Xrefs scenes are automatically loaded into the primary scene file. That's to save disc space primarily, especially for some of these files that are pretty large. If I have 20 different scene files that all require the same 3D model, I can store that model externally just once as an Xref instead of multiple times inside every single primary scene, and that way, I'd only use up 1/20 of the disc space. Okay, back in the exercise files root level. Very importantly, inside 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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