Product Description

3D Studio MAX 3 Professional Animation is the only book that take you extensively through the 3D Studio MAX 3 animation process, showing you the techniques that professional animators use to create everything from simple animated particle effects to complex character animation for Web sites, video, film, and other multimedia formats. Written by a group of top-flight 3D animation professionals, this book features the real deal--real-world applications and advanced tutorials: make bipedal, quadra-pedal, and multipedal characters walk; use Cstudio's Biped and Physique; build and animate a realistic human skeleton using MAX Bones IK; create complex scripting with MAXscript to enhance MAX's capabilities; produce muscle-based, multi-layered facial expressions and lip syncs; create deformable objects and fine-tune them with space warps; display and edit trajectories; and animate cameras, lights, and atmosphere.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #892794 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Textbook Binding
• 672 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In the right hands, any tool can produce great work, but first one must understand how to use the tool itself. 3D Studio Max 3 Professional Animation offers insight and tutorials on Max 3 for creating professional-level, character animation.

The book focuses on using Max for character animation. It assumes the reader has some experience with Max, and it does not pause to measure your skills. Budding animators still honing their model-making skills will find Max project files (including the models used in the book) on the accompanying CD. The human skeleton shown in the chapter on "Basic Character and Creature Set-up" is a finely built character and worth having in any model library.

The lion's share of the book covers techniques for character animation, starting with Max's basic deformation tools in Chapter 1, "Animating with Multiple Modifiers", to more advanced tools like Maxscript, sliders, adjusting spring-back values for joints, and creating constraints to control bone movement. Wonderful examples demonstrate rigging characters for movement, controlling and constraining movement, and working around such problems as gimbal lock.

Skeletal animation can only take you so far: Chapter 5, "Facial Animation", deftly describes not only Max morphing techniques for animating things like lips, eyes, and cheeks, but explains the principles and reasons behind such movement (you could probably do without the Latin names for facial muscles). A key section in this chapter, with a discussion and short tutorial on importing and reading a dialogue track, may only occupy a few pages, but its information should not be taken lightly. Learning to read tracks and converting what you hear into movement is a fundamental skill in character animation. Kudos to the authors for writing about it, but it would have been preferable to see this earlier.

The last third of the book, "Animating The Environment", concentrates on other types of non-character animation. This includes things like controlling the camera, animating lights, and adding and animation effects such as particles systems to create smoke and dust.

When practising professionals in a given field take the time to share their experience, it is a generous gesture that benefits everyone in that field. 3D Studio Max 3 Professional Animation, concisely written and clearly illustrated by several experienced animators, is a good example of such benevolent generosity. --Mike Caputo, amazon.com

Review
"With subtle information on what makes a successful animation, this is one of the best 3ds max tutorials on the market."Computer Arts - Animation Special, Issue 19

From the Back Cover

3D Studio MAX 3 Professional Animation is the only book that take you extensively through the 3D Studio MAX 3 animation process, showing you the techniques that professional animators use to create everything from simple animated particle effects to complex character animation for Web sites, video, film, and other multimedia formats. Written by a group of top-flight 3D animation professionals, this book features the real deal--real-world applications and advanced tutorials: make bipedal, quadra-pedal, and multipedal characters walk; use Cstudio's Biped and Physique; build and animate a realistic human skeleton using MAX Bones IK; create complex scripting with MAXscript to enhance MAX's capabilities; produce muscle-based, multi-layered facial expressions and lip syncs; create deformable objects and fine-tune them with space warps; display and edit trajectories; and animate cameras, lights, and atmosphere.

Customer Reviews

Best book about animation of characters in 3D Studio Max
I must wreally congrat Mrs Jones and Mr Bonney and all the other authors of this brilliant book. I was quiet surprised that for once not only character creation and animation was discussed regularly but this time specially for 3D Studio Max. Showing some very good examples how to use regular tools in Max for creating wondefull animations. And the most surprising part of this book is the chapter about character studio plug-in that shows for once in a book the correct use of it and all its posibilities. The last few chapters are a perfect add-on for cameras and modifiers animation. I just say a good book for the educated and the professional. Newbies in Max should check one of the "in depht max r3" books before they work with this book. Thanks very much to the autors and New Riders for a new and wonderfull resource in the GC-Development

Character animation and IK for MAX that works!
At last a book that actually gives you a bipedal IK set up that works. No more funny chicken attempts at an IK walk cycle now, just the tutorials to help you get the job done. Well done Angie Jones. Chapter two: basic character and creature set-up and chapter four: animating a walk, are worth the cost of the book alone with every mouse click and drag covered, don't get me wrong it's not a book for absolute MAX novices, but at the same time it doesn't insult users with some experience who just what to learn and progress with the stuff thats really useful. Plus, don't be put off by the 'Release 3' title I'm still using release 2.5 and haven't hit a problem yet. There are still some typical NewRiders text errors but not as bad as usual and nothing I haven't been able to work through and I'm thick! So, If you're still trying to get your characters to walk without the FK slip, buy this book.

Very Decent Book
The Book is well written, users for the newer version of max may find their Help files some what similar to the material in this book and may have second thoughts. But nonetheless it is great if you want to learn at your own pace. But be sure to be familiar with the Max interface before you commit your self and this book has tips on animation and not modelling. Again, money well spent if you are serious about learning character animation in MAX. :)