3ds general concept is....

[Chris]

You've got several types of Primitives that you can create. You can then further do paremetric modifiers on them like bend, taper, noise etc to create simple geometric objects. The beauty of the stack is you can go back at any time & change for example the bend angle & everything else above will dynamically change because of that.

There are also several 'base' object types in Max. Patches, Nurbs, Poly objects & Mesh objects. You can convert to & from most of them (stay away from Nurbs - they can cause health problems).

Mesh objects are the fastest to work with in the viewport, wheras Poly objects are the most 'advanced' objects with some very cool editing tools (you can get to a base objects editing tools by expanding the bottom level of the stack to open 'sub object' mode - this is where you can edit the vertices, edges, loops, borders & polygons)

I tend to model everything from poly objects (except for planets, christmas balls, basketballs, soccer balls, marbles etc) :) To counteract the viewport speed drop when modelling complex poly objects, you can utilise the stack. If you put a 'mesh select' modifier on top of your poly object, it essentially converts the object to a mesh (which are the fastest objects to work with) but still you have access tothe more advanced modelling tools at the base level.

[BrandonD]

MAX's creation/modification paradigm is built around semi-linear proceduralism. The Modifier Stack is there if you want to use it. It's a very non-linear way of working. For example when you're modeling you can store certain modeling operations in modifiers (like a few EditMesh modifiers). This allows you to non-linearly jump up and down the creation pipe and change things non-destructively.

MAX's animation paradigm is similar in that it's based on animation controllers. Basically any parameter that can be animated (that's almost all) can be controlled in various ways. For example, you can define the radius of a sphere with a bezier track that you can keyframe. You can modify this track with several more tracks, either using more keyframes (different kinds too) or using procedural controllers like Noise, Waveform, Script. All of these can reference or be instanced from other tracks or portions of tracks and in the end it all can be blended non-uniformly with weighting.

Pretty powerful way to work and often ignored.

[tjbeseda]

you guys are great. im beginning to get it! thanks a lot!

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