- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files
I provided with this course,
go ahead and download those
and extract them to a convenient location,
such as on your desktop.
If you don't have access to the exercise files,
you can still follow the exercises using your own assets,
and even if you aren't following along with the exercises,
maybe if you on a mobile device
or don't have 3ds Max installed,
you can still learn by observation and note-taking.
The exercise files folder is a 3ds Max project folder.
It stores various different types of assets, such as scenes.
In the scenes folder, we'll see a lot of .max Max files.
These hold the models, materials, lighting and animation
for the various 3d scenes.
Generally, there's one 3ds Max scene for each exercise.
Sometimes there will be no scene file for that movie,
because we're starting from a blank slate in Max.
And sometimes there's a finished example
illustrating what that scene would look like at the end
of the particular exercise.
Usually, the scene file is only the primary asset.
It usually contains links or references
to other files, such as textures.
For example, inside that scenes folder
I've created a sub folder called Xrefs.
Let's go in there.
These are additional .max scene files that are referenced
into the primary scene files.
The files in the scenes folder may contain references
to the files in the Xrefs folder.
Those Xref scenes are auto loaded
into the primary scene file.
That's to save disc space,
especially for some of these that are very large
such as this one, which is almost 130 megabytes in size.
If I have 20 different scene files that all
require the same 3d model, such as this model of some vines,
I can store that model externally an Xref
instead of inside each primary scene,
and that way I'd only use up one 20th of the disc space.
Okay, back up in the exercise files root level,
very importantly, in scene assets
we have some dependent files, especially images.
These are textures and environments
that are applied within the 3ds Max scenes
and they're required for that scene to load properly.
That's an overview of the exercise files
I've provided with this course.
In a subsequent movie, we'll look at setting up
the 3ds Max project in order to point
at these exercise files and correctly find
all the links between the various files.