Watch 26 of Pete Draper’s 3ds Max video tutorials

Using DoF controls with mental ray: one of the Max tutorials now available on Pete Draper’s YouTube channel.

[Originally posted on: 30 November 2012. Scroll down for the update]

Pete Draper has uploaded a sizeable batch of the video tutorials he used to record to accompany his 3ds Max Q&As in 3D World magazine* to YouTube.

At time of posting, there were 10 there, each between 10 and 30 minutes in length, plus a complete two-hour tutorial on simulating a rocket plume. Topics range from procedural modelling to recovering corrupted scene data.

(Note: some of the videos date back a few years, so don’t be surprised to see older versions of Max in there.)

Pete eventually stepped down from Q&A duties (some nonsense or other about being too busy co-founding a successful VFX studio), so the tutorial world’s loss is the movie world’s gain.

Updated 7 January 2012: Pete has uploaded another batch of tutorials, making 26 in total. Most are between 10 and 45 minutes, but there’s a long multi-part video on simulating a tornado that runs to over three hours.

Watch all the tutorials on Pete Draper’s YouTube channel

*Disclaimer: I used to edit 3D World, so this probably counts as some weird form of nepotism.