3Ds Max 6 Animation With Character Studio 4 and Plug-Ins

By Boris Kulagin

Demonstrating how to animate a character with perfect anatomy, this guide for advanced animators covers the newest release of the 3DS max animation software. Described are techniques for modelling and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931769311
• ISBN13: 9781931769310
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: A-List Pub
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 0.5" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Great book

Wonderful book, tis fast pased and gets deep into chacter animation. its worth it.

Character studio

This book is rather short, and quite expensive considering the length. Still, it contains alot of information. It spends the most time covering character studio, which was what i was looking for. Also, it goes over a few plugins, so if you want to use that part of the book, make sure you have the plugins. Overall, it was a pretty good book.

other ways

I agree with what the other reviewers say, and will add that the content is truely "short and sweet." You'll get some thoughts on modeling and texturing, but the majority of it is on character studio. This book is extremely short weighting in at under 200 pages, but in this author's case it does not much matter. In my opinion, he offers the best 3ds max information available in book form on a routine basis. Good information on skin modifier for character rigging, as well as character studio animation features and methods you might not know all that well. If you have 3ds max 7.5, you can do the cloth fx tutorial, or if you have the cloth fx plugin. In the end, if you have previously read other character studio books, then you should get this one, but if you need to learn character studio, get something else first. There is also some hair generator tutorials that you can work if you have the plug-in. If it was longer, it would get 5 stars.

For the right person extremely useful, but ...

The word "esoteric" comes to mind while composing this review. This is not a book for a beginner and it also won't add much to someone with considerable experience with rigging and animating in Max. For the right person, however, the book will be a nice tool. The authors are from Ariorh studio and their work with Panzar studio is, without doubt, among the best Max work currently being done by a small shop. The CD included with the book has a few short movie clips of their work and I've never seen better use of reactor and ClothFx (Stitch) in Max. Back to my main point: If you are using biped rather than bones to animate your characters, and if you are relatively new at the process (but not an absolute tyro) this book will be useful to you. It's a thin book that hits highlights without extensive discussion but it does have 3D character files to work with on the included CD. The authors make the point that they almost always animate their own characters with bones and NOT biped, but this book is limited to biped-based animations. Hopefully, at some point they will produce a deeper treatment of character animation based on the extraordinary work they have been doing on their Chaos project. I give this book 4 stars for the user who meets the criteria stated above. If you're a rank novice or an advanced user I would turn to other resources. However, if you're just beginning to rig your own characters with biped skeletons I think you'll find this to be a nice companion that will point you in the right direction in several areas.