CompuServe Messages

Planet Studio? You have to be kidding……… One appeared in my mailbox today and for 8 pages of seemingless useless junk, they want $16.66 an issue? Oh wait ….$9.99 if I act now. I have recieved better newsletter layouts from user groups. My suggestion….. pick up one of Steve and Greg's books, and use the rest of your money to get a subscription to a real magazine. Or wait… it looks like there's a new book that Steve is putting together, just buy both books. Here's 10 of the million tips that every novice 3DS user should have: (MOst tutorials and reference guides don't tell you these) 1.) Always keep your work modular. You can easily reuse pieces for other projects. 2.) Always logically name your various items. Alot of people fail to do this and end up wasting most of their time searching for that file they know they have somewhere. 3.) Never let an evening go by where your machines are sitting idle. Set up things so that you can render every minute you're not modelling. Even if it's just a test sequence of something, it'll increase your productivity to use all idle machine time. 4.) Always keep a set of Overhead Projector Pens by your monitor. For complex keyframing, there's nothing quite like drawing a line directly on the monitor. The pens won't affect the monitor, and the ink cleans up quickly with water or windex. 5.) Stay aware of how various aspects of your scenes affect rendering time. Make it a point to experiment with and have knowledge of how various aspects of a scene will affect the calculation time. It's amazing how many people have no idea why there scene is taking days to render. 6.) Whenever possible, use multi-lightsources. 3 work extremely well. Yellow, White and pale blue will help objects look more realistic. If you have to use one, make sure you vary the RGB components. 7.) Keep your system clean, regularly compress drives and weed through misc [>> Continued in next msg]