From the course: 3ds Max: Rendering with Arnold

Using the exercise files - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max: Rendering with Arnold

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Using the exercise files

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- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files that I've provided with this course, then go ahead and download those and extract them to a convenient location such as your desktop. If you don't have access to the exercise files you can still follow the demonstrations using your own assets. And even if you don't have 3DS Max in front of you, for example, if you're on a mobile device, you can still learn simply by observation. Let's take a look at what I've included with the exercise files. It's a standard 3DS Max project folder structure. Inside the scenes folder are a bunch of 3DS Max .max scene files. Usually, there's one scene file per movie, and that represents the beginning state for that movie. However, sometimes there's also a finished example which of course, corresponds to the ending state for that movie. If there isn't a finished example, then generally, the next file in the sequence will be the end state. Or to put it another way, for example, I've got 04_02_quad_parameters. That of course is the begin state for that movie but it's also the ending state for the previous movie, 04_01_quad_light. These are pretty heavy scenes. We can see that each one of them is 10 megabytes. But in fact, they would be even heavier if I hadn't employed Xrefs. There's a sub folder here, xrefs. If we go in there we'll see a bunch of external reference files. If we select all of those, we can see they total 171 mb. And so if I hadn't used the external references, then each scene file would've been 180-something megabytes. Be aware that these scenes are kind of heavy and they make take a little bit of time to load. So don't panic if you try to open the scene file and it seems to hang. It's just taking a little while to load. I've also included some scene assets, particularly in the Images folder. They're a bunch of textures applied on to surfaces. And also in the renderoutput folder I've got some examples of finished renderings. To use the exercise files, you'll need to point 3DS Max at the project folder structure. If you don't have the exercise files I recommend creating your own project folder. We can create a new folder here on the desktop. Right click and choose New, Folder. Let's call it 3DS Max Arnold. And then open up 3DS Max, I've already got it running here. And we want to create a new project folder. We can do that using the Project toolbar. And I've got it up here, on the upper right. I can select that and drag it out so we can see the entire toolbar. And if you're not seeing that toolbar, you can right click on any textured bar of any toolbar or panel, and enable the Projects toolbar. Once you can see it, you can determine what your current project folder is. And you can create a new project folder. To create a project with a default folder structure, click on the icon Create Default and then navigate to your project folder that you've created. And I've got it here on my desktop, 3DS Max Arnold. And click Select. And now that's going to be the new root for our project. We can see it listed here now. And if we go to the File menu and choose Open, we're taken to that new project folder. Okay, that's if you're using your own assets. If you're using the exercise files, you want to set to the existing project folder, and we've got a button for that, Set Active Project. Click on that and then navigate to the exercise files folder. It's here on my desktop, Exercise Files. Select Folder. And now that's listed, and we go into the File menu and choose Open. We're now taken to the exercise files and the scenes within that. That's how to set up the exercise files for the course.

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