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 modeling and texturing, applying the new features of Character Studio 4, and using the Stitch plug-in and a plug-in for styling hair. Advanced biped posing and freeform walk cycles and animation are covered, and tips on skinning with Standard Skin and Physique are also provided. With the methods detailed for using the MoCap files, animators will be able to create believable characters, and an overview of the Reactor Cloth, ClothReyes, SimCloth, and Kelseus Cloth plug-ins explains the advanced features of the software. The CS capabilities for nonlinear animation are explained through the use of Motion Mixer, and additional capabilities such as Biped and 3ds max Bones, Crowd, and Motion Flow are presented.

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.

good to read on the metro

There are certain books that you read and you will spend many days going through the examples step by step. And other books that you just read and pick up some ideas.

This book skims over some ideas and leaves it up to you to find more.

So if you already have a couple max books then this one is nice and only if you are intermediate level

To complex for beginners who need to get the BIBLE or max 6 FOUNDATIONS

All advanced users will already know everything in this book

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.