Honourable mentions

A few people over the years have asked which plugins / 3D assets I use so I just thought I’d quickly give a shout out to some of the best resources I use from the web.

When looking for 3D models, I head straight to particular sites, depending on what I need. If I’m looking for high quality furniture then I head to Design Connected, Turbosquid or Dimensiva. Design Connected are unique in that all their models are created in-house, meaning they can ensure the highest quality. They are also extremely quick to provide support and on the few occasions I’ve emailed, they’ve got back to me very quickly. Anything to do with vehicles, especially high quality cars, can be found on the excellent Hum3D. You can find pretty much any car ever manufactured so I get all my branded cars for showroom visuals from here. They are not budget but you get what you pay for – they are guaranteed to be very high quality, and completely accurate. They look great – even right next to the camera, so I rarely go anywhere else. Obviously I can’t leave out the huge collections at Evermotion where you can find pretty much anything and build up your own libraries at the same time.

As far as plugins for 3ds Max go, I really only use a few – primarily the excellent offerings from iToo Software – Forest Pack Pro and Railclone Pro. I use the former for all my vegetation and scattering and the latter for anything that can be parametrically defined like railings and kerbs etc, extremely handy.