Creating the Animated Intro in 3d Studio Max

I decided to use the Nissan 350z for the platform for our intro as we have used the same car in other areas of the application. The first thing I did was to draw a large plane on the scene in the shape of a road. I then applied a texture to the plane in the form of a bitmap and positioned the car on the road (as shown below).

The next thing i did was to create a long box nex to the road that will represent a row of houses. I again applied a texture of a town house using a bitmap.

Once i had one row of houses, i duplicated them and flipped them round to create two rows, thus a street.
I beleive the scene i have so far created looked really good, however, the background remains a plain white colour. I therefore added a giant plane, positioned it to appear at the end of the street and applied a texture of a city to give the impression the car is driving through the city.

To get some sort of realistic animation i had to add a camera, i decided to position it at road level facing down the road towards the car. The screenshot below shows how it looked.
The next thing i did was add target direct lighting to each headlight, this gave a great effect on the buildings as you will see. I changed some of the settings including the hotspot/beam and the falloff/field.

I then began to animate the care by keyframing the movement towards the camera, i had to take into account the physics of movement, e.g. slowing down and speeding up.

I then keyframed the camera moving from the front of the car to a side view and began to keyframe the car moving with the camera.

I also had to sperately keyframe the wheels moving to make the whole animation look realistic. I am really happy with the final intro and i believe it will make an excellant addition to the flash application. I finally exported the animation as an .swf file using swift 3d max and imported it into flash.