Oh yah... DUr... sorry that's my bad. Ok, now for the rendering portion of our little tutorial. To render your scene, you can do one of two things, you can do a quick render(which renders according to the settings that you either defined or are defaulted into 3ds, also it only renders out the current frame that you are in without saving it as a picture) and the other is just to render the scene(which brings up a dialog box where you can change all of the different aspects of a renderer). Now, max defaults with a black background and a default renderer at 640x480 resolution(I think, i don't have it right in front of me). To render a scene you want to go up to the main toolbar and click on the render menu, it drops down with a bunch of other menus(Render, Quick Render, Effects, Environment, Video Post etc.). If you're wanting to make a movie out of your animation, click on the Render tab. A menu will come up with alot of different settings. In the Render tab(which is the first one that pops up by default) you've got some settings that you want to change. First off, instead of just rendering a single frame, you want to render the entire animation(or a range if you only want part of the animation). Click on the circle next to Active Segment, this is your entire animation time. Now scroll down until you find the render output dialogue. This dialogue is pretty simple to work with, to save a file for an animation, click file, and name it whatever you want, then choose the file type(a good movie file type is either .mov or .avi)go ahead and choose .mov for the sake of simplicity. Click save and another dialogue will appear prompting you to set the settings of the file, move the quality slider to best and go ahead and click ok, the other default settings should be fine. Since we're done with that, you can click render, that is if you would like to have a black background. Now if you're the kind(like me)who doesn't always like to have a black background, this is how to change it. Go back to the render menu and click on the Environment tab, this dialogue is what you use to add environment elements to the scene, and also to change the background. Up at the top you have your background settings with a black box on the left side(that's you background color swatch). Clicking on this black box gives you the option of changing your background from black to whatever your heart desires. Now this is just giving you a flat base color background to work with, if you don't like that idea and you want to add and picture, look at the Background dialogue, and look at Environment Map. There is a box under it that says NONE, click on it, this brings up a menu that will let you change your background into something other then a plain color. If you want to use an image as your background, double-click on the Bitmap tab. Select the desired location of the bitmap that you would like to use, and there you go, a picture as your background. A word of caution though, make sure that your picture has a somewhat high resolution so that when you render, your picture doesn't turn out all pixelated. Now if you still don't like that, you can make your own 3d background and light it texture it... OH, what about texturing??? Since your native isn't max... then... oh what the hay... ok, to change the material of your objects, you can press "M" by default and that will bring up the material dialogue. In here you'll see a bunch of grey spheres, these are your material swatches, you can click on any of them and change alot of the different settings that go with each one of them(shine,glossiness,diffuse,ambient,refelectiven ess,refraction, you name it, you can probly change it here... unless it's like a diaper or something) Mess with the materials dialogue and the different settings and just have fun with them. Also, you can light you scenes in max, lighting is a very VERY VERY strong and useful tool, but for now, just keep it simple and do ith with the default lighting, sure it may look plain, but trust me, you can't learn max over night, I've been working at it for about 5 years now self taught and I still don't know half of what there is to know about it. So just play around with it, look for basics tutorials and learn the base fundementals and go from there. But I hope that this answered some of the questions that you had/have, if you have any other questions, just let me know... sorry if I kind of babbled at some points, just didn't want to miss anything.
