So I’m going to be teaching an hour and a half introduction workshop for 3ds Max at my school. Monday. And I have no idea what I could do with a bunch of complete beginners with that little time.
Any ideas?
EDIT: Right now I’m thinking of teaching them how to make an ultra low-poly hand. I would make the thumb, index finger and wrist and tell them to make the rest on their own, all using some hand sketches I found online.
If they’re complete beginners, I’d show them where everything is, how it can be used etc. It should take you even more than 90 minutes to explain everything. And it’ll be a lot more useful than showing them how to make a hand.
The problems with that is, because they’ll only be going to a single lesson and won’t be taking follow up lessons, I have to try to make the class really interesting with a fun product. Not to mention I don’t know anywhere near all the features in 3ds max so I wouldn’t be able to show them much very effectively.
It’ll be a learning experience for ya both imo. Do what you’re going to do with the low-poly hand and just go from there. Depending how old the people are, I’d ask for their opinion. Lecture or just straight up letting them try it themselves with some guidance.
Maybe a mix of both if you’ve got a projector and a machine that can handle it (schools in general tend to have shitty machines…)
The workshop was a bring your own laptop thing. It went decently. In the end I went with teaching them (or at least trying to) how to make a sword based off of a random google image I found when searching sword. I had already made the whole thing myself so I just had them use a combination of the wireframe of the sword I made and the reference image to make their own.
I planned to run them through making the blade without the crosspiece or hilt. Unfortunately just introducing them to the interface and basic toolset took around 40 minutes and only starting the sword’s blade took the rest of my time so they didn’t get very far. However I’m fairly happy with how things went because they seemed to grasp the toolset well enough and I still had enough time to teach them the methodology behind working with a reference image.
Here is my .max file of the sword if anyone wants to take a look. There’s two copies, one without smoothing and the symmetry modifiers intact, and the other with smoothing but the modifiers collapsed. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to have smoothing and symmetry modifiers without the polys on the seams of the reflections sharing the same smoothing group, a problem for something like a blade. If there’s problems with my sword, and there likely are, I’d love to get some feedback.
Here’s a picture of the sword model:
And here’s the reference image I grabbed off google:
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