From the course: 3ds Max: Cinematography for Visualization

Using the exercise files

- [Instructor] This is an intermediate level course on 3ds Max Cinematography focusing on camera animation. It's assumed that you have some experience with 3ds Max, specifically in simple animation and in camera operation, if you don't have that experience then I recommend you take a look at one of our other courses such as 3ds Max Essential Training. If you have access to the exercise files for this course go ahead and download those, extract them and place them in a convenient location, I've got them here on my desktop. If you don't have access to the exercise files you can still follow the video exercises, you'll just need to use your own assets and models. If you don't have 3ds Max in front of you or you're on a mobile device you can still learn by observation. Let's take a quick look at what is included with the exercise files, primarily in the exercise files project folder, you'll see in the scenes folder a bunch of 3ds Max scene files, and there's usually one per movie, sometimes there will be a finished example of what the exercise should look like after the end of the movie, but usually the scene file corresponds to a beginning state for that particular movie, and sometimes the scene files follow a sequence according to the steps in the movies. Additionally there's a folder for x-refs, these are external references that are linked in to these master scenes. If we go in to x-ref folder we'll see that there are a bunch of scene files and these are linked in to the master scenes in order to save disk space. Additionally there's a scene assets folder and inside there is an images folder and these are the textures that are required to open up those scenes, and additionally in scene assets there's also a substance folder and these are back ups of the alatherythnic substance files required to open up the scene. Let's now set up 3ds Max project folders. If you don't have the exercise files then you can create your own project folder, I would recommend creating that folder outside of 3ds Max. I can right click on my desktop and go to new, folder, and give that a name, I'll just call it cinema, and then open up 3ds Max, and if we don't have the exercise files we'll want to create a new project folder, on the caption bar at the top of the interface is a folder icon, if you hover your mouse over that you should get a tool tip that tells you what your current project folder is, and currently it's the default current user documents 3ds Max, you can click on that folder button to create a new project or to point to an existing one, you can also do the same thing from the menu, click on the application button and go in to manage, set project folder, either way you'll get to the browse for folder dialog box, and you'll want to navigate, and you'll want in this case to go in to the desktop and select that empty folder named cinema, and click ok, and now the requisite project folder structure has been created, we can check in on that, I'll minimize 3ds Max, go in to that cinema folder, double click it, and we've got all of the project folders required for 3ds Max to operate. If you have the exercise files you can just point at the existing project folder, so I'll go back to 3ds Max, go back to the project folder icon on the caption bar, click that, and simply choose the exercise files folder, make sure that you select the top level and not one of the sub folders. Click ok and now 3ds Max is pointing at that project folder, if we go to the file menu and choose open, we're taken to desktop, exercise files, scenes, and here are all the scene files for the course, and that's how to set up 3ds Max project folders, whether you have the exercise files or not.

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