Hi all,

We are very pleased to finally be able to upload our new design. I hope you all like it as much as we do We also have merged all our sites to 3Dvalley.com, this means that you will find the gallery and downloads of 2Dvalley.com and the models of 3Dnuts.com also here. Please be aware that not everything is working perfect and we’ll be performing maintenance and the finishing touches this weekend.

When you start out with 3D Studio MAX you will likely start with trying out different tools and features and the basics. Something that should be included in those basics, but is often left out, is using hotkeys. As you already know, or will certainly find out soon, creating 3D art is a time-consuming activity. Using hotkeys and the mouse efficiently can save you tons of time. At first you may need to spend some time looking up the hotkey (see printer-friendly version of this tutorial here), but once you memorize them through using them, they will allow you to produce results at least twice as fast. When you modeling for example (moving, scaling, rotating, etc.), with one hand on the mouse, you will have your other hand free to press one of the hotkeys.

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In this detailed tutorial you will learn how to create rims for a sports car by using the Bridge feature for an Editable Poly. This new feature was introduced in 3D Studio MAX version 7 and can save a modeler a lot of work. Not only will you be able to create the wheel in shown in the screenshots on the left, by using the techniques in this tutorial it will be a piece of cake to create your own original wheels. Apart from that, many of the common modeling techniques (Extrude, Bevel, Chamfer, Bridge, Soft Selection) are used in this tutorial, so it can serve as an excellent way to learn some new selection methods and basic poly-modeling skills.

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This 3D Studio MAX video tutorial shows you how you can use various modeling techniques to create a cross-drilled, slotted solid non-ventilated brake rotor. These include using donut, circle, and rectangle shapes, the Array Tool, Bend modifier, basic poly-modeling, smoothing groups and much more.

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This video tutorial shows various quick modeling techniques including Line spline shapes, Lathe modifier, Smooth modifier, Editable Poly, Snap to grid, and more, to create a plunger.

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Modeling and ‘posing’ 3D chains may seem like a tedious job, but actually can be done rather easily by using the Array Tool and treating the links in the chain as bones. In this tutorial, I will show you how you can model a chain, rig it in a couple of simple steps. This allows you to pose and animate the chain in an efficient manner. This tutorial is aimed at the beginner and every step is outlined and displayed in detail, but does assume some basic knowledge of 3D Studio Max.

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There are several tutorials on the web about creating tires and they all use a similar technique in which a small section of the tire is modeled in detail, is duplicated about 50 times and bend. That method allows you to create highly detailed, and high-poly, tires. Another method is using a bump map to for the tire tracks, which is obviously a very low-poly solution. In this video tutorial however, you will learn a fairly quick method to create a fairly detailed tire by using simple extrusion techniques on a cylinder.

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Like most tasks in 3D Studio Max and similar products, rigging robots is easy, if you know how. Depending on the complexity of the robot, some may find it even easier than rigging a human or animal character. This is because most parts of a robot do not deform during movement, with the exception of cabling and other flexible parts, so you don’t have to ‘skin’ it. One of the primary challenges in building a cool robot, which still looks cool when animated, is creating realistic mechanical joints. Although you may prefer a simpler look for your robot, during this tutorial we will assume you want to aim for realism.

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