Mastering Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010

Chapter 3. Creating Shapes with Splines

In the previous chapter, you learned about 3ds Max's geometry primitives and how they can be shaped by parameters and modifiers into an infinite variety of forms. In this chapter, you'll continue your introduction to primitives with an exploration of splines. Splines are a type of primitive, and they are classified as shapes in 3ds Max. In a way, shapes are even more primitive than the geometry primitives you looked at in Chapter 2. You can create more varied forms with splines than you can with the geometry primitives, but they require a bit more work to use.

In general, you can think of splines as objects composed of straight-line or curved-line segments. Splines can be two- or three-dimensional; however, ...