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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com 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-quality character animation.
The book 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-ROM. 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 also explains the principles of and reasons for such movement (though you could probably do without the Latin names of facial muscles). A key section in this chapter, with a discussion and short tutorial on importing and reading a dialog 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 noncharacter animation. This includes controlling the camera, animating lights, and adding animation effects such as particle systems to create smoke and dust.
When practicing 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
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
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cannonball of Information,
By A Customer
This review is from: 3D Studio MAX 3(r) Professional Animation (Textbook Binding)
The entire book is a well-conceived construction of diverse and interesting approaches to the sometimes frustrating world of graphics animation. In particular, and most helpful to me, has been the film references. This has been an eye-opening development in my own thoughts on gaming. The mediums of film and gaming are so close and mirror one another in ways I hadn't considered before, for they are both cinematic, kinetic visual forces. The techniques described in the chapter on camera movements and lighting have been tremendously helpful. And the hand-drawn illustrations of film scenes by Mr. Bonney (in particular one of my all-time favorites, PLANET OF THE APES) are wonderful. It helps to have a book like this that makes it clear just what can be accomplished with imagination and the technical know-how to back it up.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally a book that doesn't insult our intelligence...,
By "jimcoldt" (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: 3D Studio MAX 3(r) Professional Animation (Textbook Binding)
I want to express my gratitude toward the authors of 3dStudio Max Professional Animation. This is the first book I have found that truly enhanced my skills and knowledge--not only of 3d Studio Max, but of 3d animation in general. As a teacher of 3d animation, I am always looking for information that gives me the skills to answer any questions my students can throw at me. While I haven't really noticed any errors or typos in particular, I find that because the book is not simply a list of steps to follow, and because it explains in detail WHY the steps are to be taken, this helps to clear up any misunderstanding of the steps themselves. These lengthy explanations are packed with helpful information and are essential for understanding the material. This is not a book for those who like to blindly follow tutorials. Finally, I must say that I trust the information in the book. This is not only because of the authors' qualifications and experience, but because my own work has improved significantly. Once again, this book is an invaluable addition to any professional animator's library.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Worthy Goal, dismal execution,
This review is from: 3D Studio MAX 3(r) Professional Animation (Textbook Binding)
I must say that I was really excited when I got this book since learning MAX character animation has been a goal for a long time. Imagine my frustration when I started doing the exercises and I could make nothing in the first two chapters behave as described when following the instructions to the letter. There are so many glaring mistakes in the first two chapters I dont even have the patience to hammer through it. While New Riders books have been satsifying in the past, this one is a failure and I wish to express my extreme dissatisfaction to the authors and New Riders for not even bothering to issue an errata list to help people out who are having problems following the examples.This is not a cheap book, and the extreme technicality of the subject requires accuracy in writing and proofing. I am sure that nobody in the proofing team ever tried these exercises since as written they are impossible to execute.
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