CompuServe Messages

Wow, that's IS a lot – I'm not sure that I could afford my CI$ bill answering all those!<g>! They are actually very legit. questions that deserve some answers though. Lighting, anmimation, perspective, color, composition – these are all subjects that are important to 3DS but hardly unique to it. I don't mean to seem glib but your best resource for learning these subjects is studying the fields that have employed them for ever (art, sculpture, stage, cinema). The lessons learned from these are directly applicable to 3DS. Actually that's the beauty of it – 3DS was designed to work in a manner that pulled together the techniques of many arts. For the computereze side (NURBS, rendering modes, etc.) there are several books on general computer graphics and some new ones on 3DS specifically. Your best learning tool is the program itself – take simple situations and study the effects of basic, incremental changes (it is not a "spectator sport" <g>). My writing partner (Steven Elliott) and I have tried to put down on paper much of what your asking about and it will be available soon from New Riders Publishing in the book "Inside 3D Studio". You may want to take a look a it when it becomes available (iin early Feb.) and see if it is answering any of your questions to your satisfaction (there are chapters dedicated to basic theory – color, light, motion, composition and the program is discussed in terms of how it works and is used rather than command syntax). Hope this was of some help, – Phil