3D studio custom object & texturing tutorial

[MaxInfinity]

RCT3 Custom Objects With 3D Studio


Ok first off I'm not going to teach you how to use 3D Studio, if you have this
program and do not know how to use it,
Then you have more money than sense as the basic package is around £2500 or you have an illegal copy or possibly a demo, But the demo only lasts 30 days and it Will take you at least that just to grasp the basics of the program.

There are lots of 3d programs that will be adequate for creating custom scenery and I know a few people on the forums are using Milkshape and animator and these would be fine for the task, but this tutorial is for 3D Studio.

The version I'm using is V5 although it should be the same with all versions. This tutorial will go through the process step by step so that anyone should be able to follow them.
As I said before this is not a 3D Studio tutorial but instructions on how to create a piece of custom scenery and install into RCT3.

This is only possible due to the sheer determination and skill of jonwil using his scenery importer, Without which none of this would be possible.

Ok the aim of this tutorial is to create a full height straight wall piece, once you have mastered this you should be able (depending on your modelling skills) to create almost anything.

You will need the following programs for this tutorial
3d Studio Max 5 or higher (process maybe the same for earlier versions of max and also G-Max which is a cut down version
of 3D Studio and is free. However it does not export .ase files so you will need a converter).
jonwils RCT3 Scenery Importer.
A paint program for making your textures. Forget Photoshop, the best program for creating 3d textures is Uleads PhotoImpact (any version will do) I'm not going to tell you how to use it, I may do
a tutorial later if this one doesn’t drive me crazy.

Step 1:
Load 3D Studio (well I did say step by step)

Step 2:
Once loaded you should see 4 windows, top, front, left and perspective. across the top of the screen you should see a drop down menu. Click the customize menu and select Units setup, select Metric then in the list box select meters. Click the system units. setup button and it should read 1 unit = 1.0 meters if it doesn’t do that now, then close the windows.
Click customize again and select grid and snap settings, select the home grid tab, Set grid spacing to 1.0m and click the all viewports checkbox, leave everything else as default, then close the window.
Select the customize menu at the top of the screen, select show UI from the menu,
Click show tab panel.

Step 3:
Just above the front window, you should see a list box with View selected, from the drop down box select world.

Step 4:
Ok now we are ready to create our model. click in thetop viewport, a yellow box should appear around it. From the right hand menu select the create tab, the list box should have Standard primitives selected if not do this now. Click the box button, under creation method select box, select keyboard entry and enter the values Length 3.0m Width 0.2m and Height 4.0m, click the create button. click the generate mapping coords checkbox.

In the bottom right corner of the screen you will see the zoom extents all icon, Click it now. All 4 windows should now be zoomed in on our object.
In the perspective window, you should see a colored object resembling a wall on its side

At the moment this object is made up of 12 polygons (6 sides, 2 polygons per side equalling 12 in total) you can check this by right clicking on the object and selecting properties from the popup menu, It should show 8 vertices and 12
faces or polygons.

Step 5:
Make sure the object is selected, then from the right hand menu, select the Hierarchy tab, Make sure the Pivot button is selected, then select the affect pivot only button and click the center to object button, then click the align to world button, de-select the affect
pivot only button. click the affect object only button, click the align to pivot button, de-select the
affect object only button. the screen should look like the pic.

Above the front window the list box we set earlier may have reset to view, if so re-select world.

If you look at the left window, this displays the front of our wall turned up on its edge (don't worry it will look right in rct3, if it is selected you will see the axis arrows, the Y arrow which should be pointing to the left is pointing to the top of our object, we could rotate the grid so it looked correct but it doesn’t matter, as we will only use the top, front and left windows for aligning.

Step 6:
make sure the select and move icon is selected.
if you look at the bottom middle of the screen you will see 3 listboxes X,Y,Z,
In the Y box type 1.5 (don’t use the spin buttons, type it in) and press return on your keyboard. This will align the bottom of our wall with the ground plane in 3d studio and in rct3, failure to do this will make our wall appear half buried in rct3. In the Z box type 0 and press return, and in the X box, type -0.1 then press return.
Click the zoom extents all icon in the bottom right corner as we did before.
This will center our object in the view ports.
Your object and its pivot will now be correctly aligned in the 3d world and also in the rct3 world.

Step 7:
Next we are going to convert the object into a mesh. I tried lots of different methods for this but all were imperfect in Rct3 except for the one I will describe, you can experiment with these yourself later.
In the right hand menu you should see the word box with a grey background, right click on this and select nurbs from the popup menu. You will notice where before it had the word box on the grey background
it now says nurbs surface and in the viewport windows our object has subdivided. If you right click the object and select
properties again, you will notice the
object now has 36 vertices and 24 faces, we will reduce the faces slightly in the next step.

Step 8:
In the right hand menu you will see a listbox displaying modifier list, open this and select optimize. Our object or mesh now has 32 vertices and 20 faces (not a lot I know but every little helps).
In the right hand menu where it says optimize on a grey background, right click and select collapse to, this will add the modifier to the object stack and convert our object into an editable mesh.

Our object is now complete except for the texturing, which will be ready tomorrow.

All the files used in this tutorial and in the texturing tutorial can be downloaded from here tutorial files
The file contains the texture, .ovl, .ase and the .3ds files.

I've edited this post because I made a slight mistake at the beginning of the tutorial. This is now correct.

[WalkingSnake]

I've worked with 3D Studio's demo before. It's an alright program. Worth over a thousand dollars? No..

Nice tutorial, though.

[MaxInfinity]

Not worth it to us I agree but remember Industrial light and magic use it for all there special affects and films, which of coarse make millions so I suppose £2500 or $3500 aint a lot when you think about it. you could try MAYA which goes for over $9000 both maya and 3d studio were used for finding nemo, shrek etc.etc.

also some of the plugins for these programs cost more than the program itself, it could get very expensive.

[wrcousert]

Originally posted by MaxInfinity
[b][size=3][b]
Then you have more money than sense as the basic package is around £2500 or you have an illegal copy or possibly a demo,
But the demo only lasts 30 days and it

The educational version only costs about $300 US and any student is eligible. Not a student? Go to your nearest community college and sign up for a one unit course (probably less than $50) and you can buy all the software you want at up to 90% off.

[MaxInfinity]

thats good news for anyone wanting to use 3d studio.

probably with the exception of maya, though its hard to choose between them 3d studio is the best 3d package you can buy it does however have a steep learning curve so expect to spend a few years mastering it.

[JCat]

Well done, MaxInf - that's a great, handy tutorial - thank you for providing this. I'm looking forward to your texture tutorial - which is the one thing I haven't gotten down yet, as I've been using Milkshape for that process.

[bored_dude02]

Originally posted by MaxInfinity
Our object is now complete except for the texturing, I will post the tutorial for this tomorrow.

Sounds good! I'm sure there are a lot of grateful peeps out there using your tutorials (your doing a fantastic job so far.) I hope you know how to make textures appear brighter 'in game.' Grrrrrrrrr. Just thinking about it makes my blood bubble! :sulk:

This is what I've to 'grrrr' about. lol! (http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums...hreadid=485454)

[MaxInfinity]

Thanx pumper

I'm writing it as we speak. I may need to add pictures to the texturing part to better explain the process so it may take a little longer but what I will do is post the tutorial and add the pictures at a later date if its to confusing without them.

I'm off to work in 30mins but it should be finished about 6pm uk time.

bored dude if you follow my tutorials to the letter they will be perfect in rct3 all the shadows and lighting will reflect properly.

I created over 100 objects over 100 different ways before I got it right.

[wabigbear]

Very nice tutorial, and very useful even if not using 3d Studio

[pucechan]

Thanks for this MaxInfinity,

I'm still having MAJOR texturing issues, I've actually completed 3 Nintendo scenery sets, my Mario set, a Starfox set and an F-Zero set. But they aren't textured yet because no matter what I try I can't get them aligned ingame.

I've tried texturing in Milkshape (which I have no idea why that won't work as Marnetmar and Pumper have detailed how to do it to me exceptionally well ), Maya (Which I achieved semi-success as long as I only wanted flat, thin-plane type objects ) and now I've moved to the demo of 3DSMax (Which I find a lot easier to model with but I've had no luck texturing )

So I eagerly await your texturing tutorial !!!!

I'll be so glad to get that Mario Set OUT OF THE DOOR and if I never see a block again in my life it will be too soon hehe

[MaxInfinity]

RCT3 Custom Object Texturing in 3D Studio

There were a couple of mistakes in the object tutorial, these have
now been corrected.

Ok here we go again with part 2 of the tutorial.
I will have to make this in 2 parts because there's to many images for 1 post.
If you did not follow the steps in the first part of this tutorial the chances are
your textures will not look right in rct3, I have experimented a great deal with
objects and textures in rct3 and if the object is not created right or aligned
correctly in 3d studio, they will not look right in rct3 so follow the first
tutorial to the letter, there are probably lots of ways of creating and texturing
that will work but so far this is the only one I've found that works and I have
tried 100's.

Step 1:
Load 3D Studio and load the object you created in the previous tutorial (you did save it didn’t you).

Step 2:
Click the rendering tab, select the material editor icon,

Select the first map window in the editor, if a popup of that window appears just close it. With the first map window selected, click the standard button just below the map windows.

Click the rendering tab in 3d studio, then click on the material editor icon just below the tabs at the top of the screen. Select the first window in the editor, a white box should appear around it. Scroll down and open the maps section of the editor. Click the none button corosponding to the diffuse color. Double click bitmap and load the tutorial texture.Just under the map windows in the editor you will see a line of icons, click the go to parent icon.

you should now be back to where you set the diffuse color map. If you want your texture to have a bit of depth you can add a bump map to your texture. Look at your texture in the
editor. Make sure the show map in viewport icon is selected.

Our texture is now ready to apply to our object/mesh.

****************************************************
You can skip this part if you don’t want to add a bump map
In the listbox next to bump which should have a value of 30 in it set it to 100, You can adjust this to soften the bump later if you wish, now click the none button corosponding to the bump section, double click bitmap and load the tutorial texture again.
Now look at your texture in the editor you will notice it has a 3d effect, this may or may not look right depending on the type of texture your using, it looks great on brick and tile textures and makes them look much more realistic.
****************************************************

Step 3:
Move the mouse over the first map window with our texture in, left click on it and hold the left mouse button down. Drag the mouse over our object in the perspective window, when your over our object/mesh the mouse icon should change from the no
entry type icon to a rectangle shape icon, now release the left mouse button to apply the texture to our object. if the texture doesn’t appear on our object/mesh In the perspective window, do 1 or all of the following. Check the show map in viewport icon, in the material editor is selected. In the perspective window, right click over the word perspective in the top left corner of the window and select smooth & highlights, right click perspective again and select texture correction, infact you can set smooth & highlights and texture correction in all 4 viewports, do this now.
If the texture still does not appear, it maybe that you did not generate mapping coords when we created the object. But don't worry it will appear when we map our texture.

Step 4:
If you look at the texture in the perspective window, you will notice it’s the wrong way round.

We will now correct this with Unwrap UVW. Before we continue
I’ll just give you a little info on the wonders of Unwrap UVW.
Say you had an object that required more than 1 texture, lets say you needed a different texture for each side of our wall, so thats 6 different maps or textures. Instead of having 6 different texture files, you could create all 6 textures in 1 windows bitmap .bmp file and map different parts of the combined texture to different surfaces on our object or mesh using Unwrap UVW.

Step 5:
Ok enough of that on with the mapping
You can close the material editor now, as we don't need it anymore for this tutorial. From the right hand menu which should still be open on the modifier tab select the modifier list listbox, from the listbox scroll down until you find Unwrap UVW,
Double click it, now in the window below the list box you should have editable mesh and above that you should have unwrap UVW. Scroll down the right hand menu to parameters and if its not open, open it and click the edit button. you should now
see a popup window of our texture with some of the faces of our object, we'll refer to this as the mapping window.

Step 6:
From the menu at the top of the mapping window select mapping, click flatten mapping And in the popup just click ok without changing any values. Our mapping window will
now contain the 6 sides of our object all separated, the 2 large squares are the front and back, the others are the top, bottom and left & right sides, of course if your object is a different shape from the one were using in this tutorial, they will look different.

Step 7:
Make sure the move icon is selected at the top of the mapping window. Holding down the left mouse button drag a box around all but one of the sides of our object in the mapping window, all the vertices should turn red, left click on one of these red
dots and hold the mouse button down, while still holding down the mouse button drag the selected sides outside the thick blue lined square, which from now on will be known as the texture square, you may need to zoom out a bit for this, you can do
this from the mapping window menu or use the mouse wheel if you have one. I dragged the top 5 sides in the mapping window just leaving the bottom one which is either the front or the back, so we'll say its the front.

Step 8:
The picture/map/pattern inside the texture square represents your whole texture, Outside this square its just tiled/repeated a few times. For this tutorial were going to map the whole texture to the front of our object. Left click and drag a box around the front face in the mapping window it’s the one we left behind when we dragged the others out of the way. Now left click 1 of the red dots and drag it to the top left corner and align it with the texture square, left click and hold the mouse button and drag a box around the bottom 2 corners, now left click and hold the mouse button over one of the red dots and drag down and align with the bottom line of the texture square, now select the top right corner and the bottom right corner you can do this by either dragging a box around as we did before or click one corner hold down ctrl key on your keyboard and select the other corner, drag those 2 points over to the right and align with that side of the texture square. Your front face should now be the same size as the texture square,

if you look in the perspective viewport your texture should now look correct, you may have to rotate the object in the perspective window depending on which side your mapping. If your texture is the wrong way round or upside down use the rotate +90 or mirror horizontal gadgets in the mapping window.

Your wall should now look like this in the perspective viewport.

In the perspective window, you may have to rotate it so it looks like the pic. Remember in 3d studio your wall is standing up on one of its edges in left and perspective windows in association to 3d studio's ground plane but providing you aligned the object/mesh and pivot points correctly in the first tutorial they will
be right in rct3, you could make them look right in 3d studio but I’m not going to get into that at the moment.

Step 9:
Ok we have now mapped the front of our object, we will now do the same for the back. move over to where you dragged the other faces earlier in the tutorial. we now want the back face, which is the other large white square, to make things easier we can hide the ones were not working with, at the bottom of the mapping window you will see a listbox with all IDs selected, open this up and select the numbers one at a time until only the back face of our object is showing in the mapping window. As you have probably worked out each number represents 1 side of our object and as we have 6 sides you will see the numbers 1 to 6 in no particular order in the list. Now you have found the back face (in my case its ID 1 yours should be the same but may be different) repeat step 8 which you did for the front face. You could now select all IDs again in the listbox to make it easier to align with the front face you mapped earlier. If you look at the texture inside the texture square the top left corner of the texture starts with a green half brick while the bottom left corner is a red full brick. Look at our object in the perspective window and rotate the object. Make sure the texture is the same on the front and back, we don’t want 1 side of the wall to have a full brick in the corner and the other side to have half a brick, if this is the case use the rotate +90 or mirror horizontal gadgets in the mapping window on either the front or back faces so they are the same.

Step 10:
Ok now we have the front and back of our object mapped.
Now we will map the top and bottom of our object. Select one of the long thin rectangles we dragged out the way earlier, it doesn’t matter which one as were going to map the same area for the top as the bottom. Here we are just going to map 1 row of the bricks from our texture to the top and bottom faces. With your top or bottom face selected, drag it over to the far left
of our texture square, select all IDs and align it with the left edge of the faces we have already mapped, select the top and bottom right corners and drag them to the right and align them with the right side of the faces we have already mapped. If you look in the
perspective window while moving the face in the mapping window you will see which side your working with, as the texture will move in the perspective window aswell. If you set smooth & highlights in all the viewports this will help, for instance, you will see from the perspective window if its the top/bottom or left/right faces your editing, if you look at the direction/axis arrows in any view port they will tell you what part your looking at. Look at the perspective window, the Y axis is pointing to the top of your object so obviously the other end is the bottom. So now I know the face I have selected in the mapping window is the top of our object. Now look at the front or back face in the perspective window and notice the first row of bricks at the top of the texture, the row starts and finishes with a green half brick
so we need to find a part of our texture in the mapping window that matches. The first row in the mapping window does then every other 1 also does so drag your selected faces to one of these rows, does not matter which one and center it vertically over the row,

look at the results in the perspective window it should be aligned
properly. Do the same for the bottom face except if you look at the bottom row of bricks, it starts with a red full brick and ends with a blue full brick, so when you align in the mapping window make sure you center it vertically over a matching row.

[MaxInfinity]

Step 11:
Just the sides to do now (soon be finished "good coz I'm getting bored now")
Select one of the sides in the mapping window and drag to the middle of the texture square, with it selected click rotate +90 in the bottom right corner of the mapping editor, align it with the top of the texture, now select the bottom left and right corners and drag down to the bottom of the texture, align with the bottom line of the texture square. Now align it horizontally so that the cement lines around the bricks only go horizontally through the selected face and that the colors match the front and back texture colors for the side your mapping.

Do exactly the same with the remaining face, remember one side will have a green and red face as in the pic above and the other will have a blue and green face, so make sure you align the faces over the right colored bricks. the mapping window should now look like this.

you may have to rotate or mirror the faces in the mapping editor or adjust there sizes to get things to line up properly.

Ok 1 more thing then were finished. close the mapping window, in the right hand menu Right click the unwrap UVW just above editable mesh and select collapse to. your object should now look like this.

Now save your object.
You can also now export your object as an .ase file, ready for importing with jonwils scenery importer.
Select file from the top menu, select export, type a name for your file and save as type ASCII scenery export [*.ase] use the settings in the pic.


And that as they say is that
Remember if you don’t align your object and pivot points as described in the first tutorial, you'll be wasting your time with this texturing tutorial.

Check out Klinns tutorial for using jonwils scenery importer.

Use the std brickwall 3h sids file when importing.

[JCat]

(claps with full force). Well done, MaxInfinity - I'm sure this will come in handy for many of us. By the way, after texturing, will these turn out ok in RCT3 as far as not having that shadow problem or that annoying lamp issue where an object doesn't light up when a lamp is placed right by it (I haven't read through it yet as I am at work so forgive me if it was mentioned)? Those were the main problems I had with Max.

Thanks again for your hard work on this -

[MaxInfinity]

Thanx Pumper

yes the shadows and lighting are correct. if you download the tutorial files in the first thread, there is the completed object after its been through jonwils importer so just drag this folder to your rct3/style/themed folder and load rct3 and you can check the object out without doing the tutorials. the .3ds, .ovl, and .ase files are there as well.

[Disfan1]

Thank you so much maxinfinity!!!

I too have 3DS MAX and had been getting an error when i imported stuff into the game. The lights would react with the scenery. meaning the scenery would remain dak, even if i places a light next to it.

But now it's all fixed!



Thanks so Much!!!

[MaxInfinity]

Originally posted by Disfan1
Thank you so much maxinfinity!!!

I too have 3DS MAX and had been getting an error when i imported stuff into the game. The lights would react with the scenery. meaning the scenery would remain dak, even if i places a light next to it.

But now it's all fixed!

Thanks so Much!!!

No worries glad I could help.


[EDIT] Have now found a way to reduce the polygons from 20 to 12 which is the lowest you can have for wall pieces.
The shadows and lighting still work properly on the reduced poly objects. will post how when I get up. I'm off to work now.

[bored_dude02]

Thank you so much MaxInfinity, I can't wait to try this out. One quick question though, can somebody give me a link to a program that converts P3D files to ASE? I've done a search on google and I can't find one......

[Klinn]

Excellent job, MaxInfinity! This will be an extremely useful tutorial, and the illustrations you added make it even clearer than before.

Thanks very much for taking the time to put this together and share it with your fellow enthusiasts! More thumbs up...

[MaxInfinity]

Thanx guys

I would'nt have known where to start without your Importer tutorial Klinn, so thank you.

And thank you jonwil without whom none of this would be possible

I',m gonna thank him every time I post, I think I have in most lol

oh that rhymes.

[MaxInfinity]

some people have been asking if pivot alignment makes any difference to the look of objects in rct3.

I replied I'm 99% sure that rct3 uses this data for shadowing/lighting etc.

Earlier today I set out to prove one way or another if this was right.

and I'm pleased to say I now know the answer and will let you know sometime.

Only kidding








The answer is as I thought, below are a couple of pics to prove this.

In this pic the pivot point axis on the curved wall piece is not aligned correctly.



In this pic the pivot point axis on the curved wall piece is correctly aligned.



Just thought I'd better mention each pic contains 4 curved wall pieces joined together. just incase anyone thought it was a single piece, although looking at the first pic its easy to tell so I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you, but hey, I've started so I'll finish.

Please also remember my tutorials are for 3d studio, don't try to follow them with a different program and expect them to work.

[composerboy]

First, Thanks you so much for these tutorials. Finding them made me want to play RCT3 again, knowing I could make pretty much whatever I want - given enough time. I do have one question - please direct me to the answer if I've missed it, but how did you get the poly count back down to 12 for the finished wall pieces?

Thanks again

[MaxInfinity]

1st off sorry I aint been around, I wont go into why as I've already explained in another post.

2nd Mods please merge this with my 3d studio thread as I did'nt want to ressurect a thread over 30 days old.


ok a few people have asked about imported objects appearing upside down or on their side when imported into rct3.

the easiest way to align your object is as follows (in 3d studio)

use the left view, your object should appear on its side in this view (its just because of the differences between 3d studio worl and rct3's world)

once your object appears correct in the left view (i.e. on its side)
you then need to align the objects axis (read the tutorial to find out how important this is)

if you look at the menu bar along the top of the screen you will see a list box, which says something like axis align (3d studio is not installed on my pc at the mo so i'm not sure of the exact wording) make sure world is selected in this list box.

select hierarchy from the right hand menu, and select affect pivot point only and align to world if your objects axis marker moves, then your objects axis is not aligned to the world axis.

if your objects axis marker is the same as the axis markers in the view windows, then your object is aligned properly and providing its in the right position on the 3d grid, it will appear correct in rct3.

if your object is not aligned then do the following.

first make sure the object itself is showing correctly in the left window (i.e. on its side)
click the perspective view to activate that window.
select objects from the top menu bar and create a box 1x1x1
make sure the box is not touching your original object in any way.
now with your new box selected go to hierarchy, click affect pivot point only, then while watching the box's axis point in the perspective window, click align to world, you should find the box's axis marker does not move, indicating the box is aligned correctly with 3d studio's world.

make sure the box is still selected and select boolean from the top menu. in the right hand menu you should now see the boolean options, click the select other object button, and then click your object to select it as the second object, then select remove a from b, the box will dissapear leaving your original object correctly aligned.

you can now test if your object is aligned by doing what you did earlier i.e. select hierarchy from the right hand menu, and select affect pivot point only and align to world, your objects axis marker should not move, if it did, you did something wrong.

make sure that the list box on the top menu always displays world.

[TheSkipper]

Merged at your request, but just so you know in the Exchange, 30 day restriction has been removed

[MaxInfinity]

nice one thanx skipper. I know you got a few doubters but, I like the new layout better, it seems a lot easier to find things.

(edit)

Originally posted by composerboy
First, Thanks you so much for these tutorials. Finding them made me want to play RCT3 again, knowing I could make pretty much whatever I want - given enough time. I do have one question - please direct me to the answer if I've missed it, but how did you get the poly count back down to 12 for the finished wall pieces?

Thanks again

thanx composerboy
sorry for the late reply the answer to your question is as follows.

when you create your wall piece 4x3x0.2 then you convert to nurbs and optimise, you end up with a mesh with 20 poly's/faces. To get this down to 12, create your object with a size of 4x3x4, then convert to nurbs, and then optimise. Your object will now be 12 poly's/faces, now just resize using the points of your object, use the transform typein tool instead of dragging the points, that way you'll get the size exact.

hope that helps, I know its a bit vague, I'll explain better when I get more time.

[Justin556]

can you tell me web site i want to try it out

[RCT-Spanky]

Just an idea ... what do you think about a blank set of wall- and roof-objects for 3Dmax.

Walls - height 1, 2, 3 and 4 meters.
Roofs - height 1.5, 2, 3 and 4 meters

Also curved walls and rooftypes.

This set should also contain a texturemap with some standard-textures.

Anyone who had 3Dmax or a similar program can use this basic-set for his own first scenery. Apart from that the different scenery pieces wil match in size and can be combined.

As I wrote at the beginning ... it's just an idea.

[Guybrush_47]

I'm having the problems with the shadowing, what did you do to the pivot to make the shadows behave correctly on the walls? Did you have to split the object up and centre the pivot to the centre of the object?

I'm creating a simple 3 angled curved wall for reference.

[EDIT]

Nevermind, i spent 3 hours messing with pivots and texturing only to realise it was a bad model, redid the model and worked first time. Jeez.

[MaxInfinity]

Glad you got it sorted

[Eagle001]

I wouldn't mind using this; but I haven't found out where I can buy the program.

Does anyone know?

[Phil]

Eagle001, here is a trial and purchase page.

Autodesk 3ds max

You can buy online if you wish. Remember this is a multi-thousand dollar program, :P Try the trial first.