Path Animation and Curve Editing

The next task was two things, animation along a path and IPO (Interpolation Psomething Osomething [Curve Editor in Max]). I found a pretty good tutorial for path animation in Max at http://billysalisbury.com/Learn_Max/chapters/lecture9a.htm. I spent a short time fiddling with the Curve Editor and got familiar with the basics but I spent most of my time on the path animation.
I started off making a plane (flat one, not the flying one yet) for the ground and then some random rectangular boxes as buildings to fly in between. I thought I would then add a nice, grey material to them all to make them more building like but it ended up making them all blend in to each other and you couldn't really differentiate between them. I was then astonished that there was no easy way to remove a material from an object! After a bit of searching I found that typing 'Geometry.material = undefined' into the MaxScript Listener (F11) removes all materials from all objects in the scene. A useful thing to know I guess but not really necessary as you can just replace the material with another. Anyway, I now had a nice colourful city to fly through, I just needed the plane. I made a (very) simple model of a plane and then drew a fairly windy line around the buildings [Note: Click for straight lines and sharp corners, click and drag for curves] and went through the necessary steps to animate the plane along the path (the tutorial talks about going to the motion panel and doing something in there but I couldn't follow it so I found out that it can be done by selecting the plane and going to Animation>Constraints>Path Constraint and then selecting the line). Adding a camera was just the same to constrain it along the path but I decided to differ from the tutorial and make a target camera as there were lots of quite sharp corners.
After experimenting with the % along path, the banking and the smoothness options, I finally rendered it:

There were two problems I noticed after rendering and watching it back.
The first was the lighting. In some places it goes quite dark and you can't really see. I was just using the default light source, I hadn't added any myself. Next time... next time, I will have to find out how to add light sources :S
The second was the banking. I don't really understand how the banking was done. I thought at first it would just bank into every curve (eg. in a left turn, bank left and in a right turn bank right) but in a couple places where there was a left then right turn (or right then left turn) the plane banks into the first turn but then doesn't bank into the second. Not a huge problem right now but definately something to check out if I use banking in my final animation.