Tutorials
3ds Max : Animation Tutorials
Animation
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3DS MAX Tutorial Animate Book Pages
3DS MAX Tutorial on Animating a Book by Jacquelin Vanderwood
Character Animation:: Principles and Practice
Character animation. The phrase can conjure up a multitiude of images,
from walking broomsticks and talking mice, to dancing bugs and toys
that can fly. It should also make us aware of long hours spent planning,
drawing, revising, and practicing, practicing, and more practicing,
a difficult, but rewarding art.
With the advent of computers, many more people have become exposed
to the magical quality and tools for creating high quality CG character
animation. However, high quality, does not mean, easy to master.
Many top notch animators have spent literally years practicing and
learning their craft. Out of all the fields of computer graphics
and art, animation is probably one of the most difficult.
The animator must not only have the technical ability to draw or
pose characters, but also have a keen sense of timing, of observation,
mannerisms, and movement. In addition one must also be an actor,
have a sense of what makes something alive and natural. Bringing
these somewhat diverse fields of study together, the animator can
achieve something magical...the sense of bringing an inanimate character
to life.
What follows, are principles that many of the traditional masters
of animation have learned and discovered in their journey to learn
their art. These principles are equally applicable to both traditional
forms of character animation (i.e.: cel, stop motion etc...) as
well as computer animation. In addition to some of the basic principles,
I am also including some new variations and combinations of these
principles, thanks to some friends on the CG-Char list. (See the
Special Thanks section).
Each of these principles is defined and explained with both text,
and an actual animation sample. The goal is to not only define what
the principle is, but also to show how, and where, one might utilize
it in a real scenario. In and of themselves, these are just guides,
rules to learn, practice, and understand. Used in conjunction with
a sense of acting, they will help to create realistic and entertaining
character animation.
3D Studio MAX 3.1 tutorials
This assignment will introduce you to animation hierarchies and forward
kinematics. I will not be giving you as explicit instructions as before,
so to some extent you will have to figure out how to accomplish these
tasks yourself.
3D Studio MAX New IK Setup By Michael B. Comet
This tutorial explains how to create a working leg setup with 3D Studio
MAX r2.5 and its "New IK" system. After going through this article
you should be able to take the same principles here and apply them to
other setups such as arms, antennas, or anything else you might want to
create (such as animated flying dachsunds). A basic working knowledge
of MAX is assumed
Acceleration & Deceleration
I've always hated jerky exact computer movement, keyframe animation
is a fantastic way to animate but can leave the movement all too unnatural.
Proper keyframing will improve this, but with track-view animation editing
you can achieve this with out too much hassle.
Advanced IK Setups
This tutorial is for advanced users. Before reading this, please have
a working knowledge of 3Dstudio Max's "New IK", or IK in general.
In this tutorial you will be using 3D-Studio Max's "New IK",
and Expressions to create 2 advanced setups.
This setup can be done in any package, including: Alias/Wavefront's Maya,
and Softimage|3D. The tools are different, but the idea isnt.
Animatable sky backgrounds
This is a quick tutorial on how to make sky backgrounds in 3D Studio
MAX. As standard, MAX has the possibility to add environmental maps, meaning
move and rotate as the camera moves and rotates. This is however not a
very impressive effect, since making a background with this is very hard
to look real. Very often, you get seems where them map's borders meet,
and the map also needs to be huge to not look fuzzy, unless you use some
kind of tiling, which isn't good for much more than star backgrounds.
Animating With Bones The Easy Way
To start off with, create five boxes to form toes, the foot, lower leg,
upper leg and hip...
Blinking Lights
In this tutorial I'll show you how to make lights struggle to stay on.
I assume that you know some basic knowledge of 3D Studio Max 2.5 which
is the one I'm using.
Boom Box Animation
The goal of this tutorial is too create a speaker, with a speaker cone
that vibrates/moves too match the beat of the assigned sound file, without
manual tedious keyframing.
Bouncing Ball Part 1 - Basic Keyframing
This tutorial will introduce you to basic keyframe animation in 3D Studio
MAX.
Bouncing Ball Part 2 - Function Curves
This tutorial will introduce you to keyframe animation using Function
Curves and Track View. You will also light and render your first animation
in 3D Studio MAX.
Building a Company Logo
The following tutorials will show the steps followed to create the One
Cage logo animation.
Bullet Time
This Tutorial is based on The Matrix key effect "Bullet Time."
By using Keyframes it is relatively easy to set up the shot, however if
you want to use the effect without Keyframes (e.g. Particles), you would
have to do it traditionally. For this project, the idea is to render three
separate shots, one for the effect and two others for the start and end
animation. By deleting the key frames, you can pause time and animate
a camera along a motion path.
CHARACTER ANIMATION
The object of this tutorial, is to learn you how to make a human walk
with Character Studio. I assume that you are familiar with 3dstudioMAX.
The 2nd part of the tutorial also which will include useful tips about
Character Studio and more about realistic walking, running, jumping
Company Logo Animation
The following tutorials will show the steps followed to create the One
Cage logo animation shown above. On the left is the original logo supplied
to me by my client. The thumbnails on the right are from the finished
animation. These tutorials are intended as a review for my animation students,
but the techniques presented will be useful to anyone using 3d Studio
MAX.
CREATING A LATHED NURBS SURFACE
This simple tutorial will show you how to create a lathed NURBS surface
and make it morph to another surface.
Creating a Walkthrough
This tutorial shows how to create an animated walkthrough of your AutoCAD
3D model using 3D Studio VIZ. All you need to start is an AutoCAD drawing
with some 3D content. The end result will be a .AVI file which can be
viewed on any Windows PC. AVI files can also be embedded within PowerPoint
presentations along with text and other graphics to really demonstrate
your design proposals.
EXPRESSION CONTROLLERS PRIMER
Expression controllers are powerful tools that you can use to control
animation. To learn them, it is necessary to start simply and learn the
basics. That is what this tutorial is for.
In this tutorial, you'll animate a sphere's radius, then use an Expression
Controller to make a cylinder's height always be equal to the sphere's
radius, no matter what it is. To do this tutorial, you need to know how
to create a sphere and a cylinder, and how to move objects onscreen.
EXPRESSIONAL EYEBALLS
The concept of this tutorial is to understand XForms and the benefits
gained by using them. We will make eyeballs to show this concept.
We will begin by looking at two simple spheres and then move on
to making the eyeballs.
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