Land Planning with 3Ds max

This tutorial asks the question, What if Frank Lloyd Wright had access to design visualization software? How could he have used it in his design process?

In this tutorial, you will construct a design for a specific site, the Marin County Civic Center. You will pretend you are the famous architect, creating the design for the Library, Hall of Justice, and Administration buildings. You will create a virtual model of your design including the terrain of the site, and then add lighting and animate a flyaround of your design

You will start by importing a 2D AutoCAD drawing of contour lines. You will use the terrain object to generate a virtual 3D model of the site. You will then build a conceptual design model of the proposed building and fly a virtual camera above and around it.

Skill level: Beginner to intermediate

Time to complete: 2 hours

Features Covered in This Tutorial
After completing this tutorial, you should be able to:

• Import a 2D AutoCAD file.
• Create a contour model using Terrain objects.
• Apply materials to the terrain.
• Model a massing study using primitive objects.
• Animate a fly-around of the design.

Tutorial Files
All the necessary files to do the tutorials can be found on the Tutorial And Sample Files CD, in the \tutorials\land folder, unless otherwise specified. Before doing the tutorials, copy the \tutorials directory from the CD to your \3dsmax6 local installation.

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