I am not going to be too critical of this project or things I did on it. After all it is my first 3ds project in over 15 years. However, I think it important to acknowledge some of the things I learned.
First I learned not to place my lights too soon. The default lights should be just fine for all the modeling. This will save some render time as well since the appearance and behavior of the light won’t have to be calculated.
I also found that I should really consider waiting to apply final materials. While it is fun to get to see the materials and how things are going to look as you go along, they will slow down test renders. And you can really get bogged down in choosing and tweaking the right material.
It turns out that there are a lot of tools in 3ds Max and I need to find a few more tutorials and instructions and learn about them because it will likely make modeling much easier. There were some things that I really did the best way I could figure out at the time even though I knew there had to be a better way to do it.
When it comes to rendering I want and need to learn a bit more about some of the different render passes so I can utilize those to enhance the scene or object that I am creating. I also learned that rendering can take a really long time.
Some one asked if I there was anything I was not satisfied with on this project and I can honestly say no. While I think the scene is a little dark and so not the easiest to see, this was intentional. It helps to really high light the highlights and the candle.
I don’t doubt there are other things that I learned or should have learned from this. These are the big things that come to mind for the moment.