Workshop Activity

Intro to Animation using Max

Today, based on what you have seen in class on animation techniques, you will get a good intensive but step by step introduction to the animation tools and practises in 3DS MAX. Combined with the lecture on animation princples and the classic techniques of animating a bouncing ball, you should leave today with a good understand of the basic animation techniques foruse in your projects..

Instructions

Today we will use the 3ds Max tutorial and procede through almost all the steps of Tutorial 3: Intro to Animation. We will only do those steps that have been checked off in red in the image below. Stopping at the Squash and Stretch Modifiers. This image corresponds with the tutorial nav bar. To access it, bring up from the Help menu in MAX, the Introductory Tutorials\Intro to Animation section. Remember to periodically save your work and definitely save you final work to your drive. Also make sure you have mapped the 3dsMax tutorial drive first (see below).

Feel free to get creative and expreiment as you get comfortable with the process and if you want render out your final animation for your weblog.You will not be graded on the accuracy of the work, so feel free to do what shows off you animation skills.

3ds MAX tutorials and resources.
We have put the tutorial CD-ROM on a student server for you to use. Whenever max calls for tutorial files, this is where you access them. You access the tutorial disk by mounting \\storage\3dsmax. Best to "map" this to your workstation, so MAX, or other apps, can see it correctly. To map a drive, in Explorer, go to "Tools", "map network drive". Then map \\storage\3dsmax to a drive letter like "Z".

Save you files to your ftp area!