You found the Sig at least
🙂Help, Help and more Help
😛Anything you don't quite "get", look it up in the help. The tutorials are to get you started not to teach everything there is to know about Max. That's an (almost) impossible job, but the Help does describe what pretty much everything does. So, searching the help for "blend material" (it's about 4th in the returned list) will get you everything I said and then some.
Tip. The tutorials for Max 2009 are not (sadly) as comprehensive as those for earlier versions - you can (fortunately) still obtain the ones for Max 9 from
here.
Easy way for the text. Create the text in one of the Orthographic viewports, front is probably easiest. Create a free camera and position it so that it is facing the text (use the ortho vewports for moving / rotating it). Select the perspective viewport and press "C" so you can see what the camera sees.
Make sure the rotation of the camera is lined up with the world axes - it will then be perfectly "flat on" to the text (which is automatically created flat on the X axis. Adjust the size of the text and move it so it's positioned appropriately. Make sure you don't rotate anything at this stage. Use the Select and Link (on the main toolbar) to link from the text to the camera. Now, whatever you do to the camera, move or rotate it, the text will always follow and should stay perfectly aligned. Note that changing the lens diameter WILL make the text appear to move in relation to what the camera sees so avoid that if possible.
Extrude, Bevel and Bevel Profile can all be used to give some shape and depth to your text, however I should warn you that because of the way the text is constructed you will find your polygon count and memory usage going through the roof if you're not careful. Read
this thread carefully then decide whether you really need all that extra detail.
You could always do what I did and just apply a Edit Poly modifier - result is flat filled-in text which is less resource hungry than the other methods. Or you could just convert it to Editabale poly, but then you lose the ability to change the text, the size etc etc.
(again with the help, sorry) If you search for "text" in the help the Bevel modifier is in the list - a ways down, admittedly, but it is there. Knowing which modifier to use for a specific job is something which comes from experience rather than from tutorials (though they can help).
Max 2016 (SP1/EXT1)
Win7Pro x64 (SP1). i5-3570K @ 4.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX11.
nVidia GTX760 (2GB) (Driver 430.86).