Product Description

3ds max 6: Animation and Visual Effects Techniques has been thoroughly updated to cover the enhancements and new features of version 6. The book provides an organized and thorough process for integrating the features of 3ds max 6 into your own projects. Everything taught throughout the book is based on the creation of a film project that was done completely with max, including all of the visual effects and animation techniques. Beginning with a review of the essentials, you’ll learn the key features used in animation and visual effects. You’ll learn about the fundamentals of animated filmmaking, and you’ll work through detailed tutorials covering modeling of buildings, environments, humans, and aliens. Once you’ve created the models, the animation techniques are explored, including character setup with bones, lip sync, facial expression, and walk cycles. From there the process moves to scene animation, visual effects, materials and textures, and lighting and rendering. The book ends with detailed chapters on character studio® 4 and combustion® 3, and the Shag Hair plug-in.

Highlights!
* Uses the latest features of 3ds max 6 to teach particle effects, including rain and Hollywood explosions and details the changes from version 5 to 6
* Teaches how to use character studio 4 to animate crowds of people, and how to do physics- based animation using reactor 2
* Explains facial animation and how to record dialog and sound effects
* Details lighting and rendering features, including
* Radiosity and Global Illumination, Skylight and Light Tracer, visual effects lighting, and network rendering

On the CD
* Original, full size figures from the book
* All the files needed to complete the tutorials from the book
* Extras folders that contain color images, animations, 3ds max materials libraries, and texture maps
* An animated scene from Homing Instinct, the movie used to illustrate the techniques in the book

First Edition User Comments

"Up-to-date sprung to mind when I skipped through this book…Finally someone has added a FULL tutorial on how to model a human from scratch! The effects chapters are amazing too, thick, Hollywood explosion techniques! …this book is aimed at someone who has used Max for quite sometime and knows a little about modeling. But I recommend this book to anyone that has Max!"
"I love this book! It makes sense of things in 3ds max that I couldn’t quite grasp before. I’m finally getting over the learning curve for lots of stuff in Max!…"

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Minimum Requirements: 3ds max 6, IBM-compatible PC, 800 MHz processor, 256MB RAM, Video Display with 32MB RAM, free HD space 600MB; Recommended System Requirements: 3ds max 6, IBM-Compatible PC, 2.0 GHz processor, 1GB or more RAM memory, Video Display with 64 or 128MB RAM, free HD space 4 GB.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1392800 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-24
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 550 pages

About the Author
Sanford Kennedy (Los Angeles, CA) is an author, animator, and designer. He has worked in Hollywood special effects since 1977, and computer animation since 1994. He has worked on 54 movies and numerous commercials, and recently began working on games, including Graystoke: The Temple of Ultimate Evil. He has written over 100 articles and co-authored a variety of books on 3D computer animation.

Customer Reviews

Great!
Up-to-date sprung to my mind when I skipped through this book. It follows the paradigm of building a short animated film from scratch using all the latest features of 3ds Max 5.1 and Character Studio 4. It even has a chapter devoted to Combustion 2.1. Some of the chapters I was most impressed with were the human body modelling chapters. Finally someone has added a FULL tutorial on how to model a human body from scratch! The effects chapters are amazing too, thick, hollywood explosion techniques! Woohoo! I would say this book is aimed for someone who has used Max for quite sometime and knows a little about modelling. But I recommend this book to anyone that has Max!

A great book if you aspire to make cheesey renderings and FX
This book presents a good overview of the CG industry, with a few topics I've not found elsewhere. However, it is discouraging to work through a book that is filled with cheesey looking renderings. That's right, horrible. I don't mean to flame or be destructive in my criticism, but if you could only see the color plates contained in this book, you would treat the author with skepticism at best. I still can't understand how someone who obviously knows the tools he uses very well, i.e. MAX and Combustion, can turn out such B-rated models and renderings. This book is a good example that no matter how much technical knowledge you have, computer software, no matter how advanced, will never make up for an utter lack of artistic talent. Sanford Kennedy is very technically knowledgeable but his artistic skills are virtually noexistant. Try checking his website for an example of the 'great' renderings you can aspire to if you buy this book. 90% of the pages aren't even up, or have been under construction since 2001. www.sanfordkennedy.com

Appalling...
This is appalling, the models are terrible, the animation amateurish, and the texturing ugly (horrible misuse of procedural textures). Avoid if you can, there are many fine books on Max, this is NOT one of them.