Module 4 was about how to use lights and cameras in 3Ds Max. This module I learned how to set up lighting and how to light scenes, with all of the different lights available. Additionally, I learned how to use cameras, another core feature, allowing me to truly learn how to set up and render a scene well. Some things I learned about cameras were: how to use certain types of cameras, the different types of cameras, so on, and so forth. The ability to use cameras and lights together in 3Ds Max means I can truly start to make art, and nice looking photos.

These skills are crucial for animation, so I can create scenes that look good. In animation, lights are important so as to bring attention to what is currently the center of view, and to make scenes look more realistic. Cameras are important because, they're what you see from. Different types of cameras influence how you scene can look, and how you animate, like how target cameras focus on one point, while free cameras look wherever. This all plays into how the scene looks from the view of the watcher, and is crucial for a good animation.

This module I learned how to use and navigate material texturing. This is using the material editor to customize and change materials to make objects that look real. It is an important tool because without it it would be incredibly hard to change things about an object like how light reflects off of it, of how translucent it is. Using this tool can allow your renders to change from just being objects with images on them to being full realistic objects with texture and physics. As I have said, this is important to making renders feel finished and look good to the viewer.

I'm going to apply these skills to my projects in the future, and to my final project where I hope to use them well. These skills will help me make my final project look good, and help my ability to render well in the future. I can use them to make objects in the background like trees look good, and change texture on my objects closer to the camera, making the scene look better. In all, this module was very important for getting down a system to make renders more realistic, and better.

This Module was about how to use the UV mapping service in 3DS Max, and it was quite tedious and hard. UV mapping in general is a way to texture and apply materials by laying a map of the object out on a 2D plane. This creates all sorts of formatting problems which was the main focus of this module, just making it so the mapping will work. It is an important form of mapping so that you can apply images and textures by moving them around and matching the object with the image, which is important for things that have stuff that goes in certain places, like clothes. While this is so much incredibly harder than using the material editor, it is still a very necessary piece for the situations it is needed in. 

In the future i can use UV Mapping to make precise textures and make my models look good. I hope to use this skill in the final project, where I will need to texture thigs on my own, and some textures are going to need to be sized. This might be helpful on things like books, if I want to put titles and pictures on the cover or pages. This is also helpful if I want to make changes to where a material shows up on an object, or changing where a pattern might be. In all, UV mapping will be important for many things in the future, and I hope to use it well on the final project.

This module we learned how to rig and use models in 3DS Max. Rigging is like making bones for models so that you can move and animate them easily, and so that movements look natural and human. Some things that we did this module were things like the "skin" modifier. This modifier allowed the used to easily connect and change a model with bones. Additionally we learned how to use ik chains, which are things that allow you to make sure bones bend naturally and and don't contort weirdly. Really this module was really just learning how to use a skill so that we can animate in the next module.

I can use these skills in the future to make animations and be able to control my models and other things easily. It is incredibly important to animations, being what you move in the studio so that you can change poses without the program contorting strangely. Bones are important so that when the program moves the model to the next keyframe, it does so without contorting unnaturally. I think this is going to be good on the final project, where I can use it to move my objects around. All in all, it is an important, but underappreciated skill, mostly used for animation.

This module I really got into the trenches, with this module being about learning how to animate. Mainly this module we learned how to do the basics, keyframing, and how to export, not getting into more advanced things like motion capture and perspective, things that are of use for more advanced animators. The main area of this module was to learn how to use 3DS Max's keyframing tech, which makes it so that you don't have to animate everything by hand. Keyframes are important poses and moments that the animators mark out, and in between keyframes is the computers work. These are important for making 3D animation move quicker that traditional animation, where every frame is hand made. This streamlines the animation process, and makes it easy for anyone to animate.

I'll be sure to use these skills in the future of my animation career, as this idea of keyframes is what most software use. Things like Blender use keyframes, the most likely option for the future of my animations. This module also shows how to use paths to move things, which is also going to be helpful, as that is how i plan to animate and plan where things are going to move in my scene. Also it was helpful to learn about how to render animations, and output them to my files.

This project was a quick refresher on how to animate, and how to show we did out work. It was pretty simple, the project being to make a car drive around on a little road in a scene we had previously completed. The project helped us learn how to use the follow and bank commands when using a path constraint. These settings allowed an easy way to make the car rotate with the road, and when necessary  adding a bank to make the car appear like it is actually turning. We also learned a little bit more on how to render, and the render output settings.