Need Autodesk Help!!!

[Setsanto]

Hi,
My nameis Nicholas Miles, I am on Team 1334, Oakville Trafalgar Robotics. Though my team itself is not a rookie team, I am, and another guy on my team and I have decided to re-create our animation team. Sadly, we have absolutely no experience with Autodesk. Basically we can make things move and create rough sketches of people. If anyone out there can help us at all, please do so.

Nicholas Miles/1334

EDIT: We're completely stuck with hair if anyone can help

[RoboJedi75]

As always, you should take a look at the 3ds max tutorials. My team and others have tutorials as well. My team's can be found here:
http://www.roboraiders.com/WORKSHOP/index.php (I'm working on expanding this, so it's a work in progress).

As for Hair, it's rather simple. You need to create an object and under the Modifiers menu, select Modifiers - Hair and Fur, then Hair and Fur (WSM). You can change the options in the Command Panel. This includes count and styling...

[BuddyB309]

3ds max and 3d animation in general is very very complex. Your not going to learn it overnight. Its very common to be intimidated by the program at first, but like with anything, keep working at it and you'll start to understand it. My sugesstion, stay away from hair and fur. It is too complex for you right now (I dont even understand it) start simple and work your way from there. If you jump in and try to create hair and fur, its going to be easy for you to get discoraged. I have been working with animation for over two years now and I still dont know everything about the program or what it can do.

[Setsanto]

Ok, thanks. Two other things though. First of all, is it at all possible to make the animation a .avi or other movie file? Secondly, is it a better idea to start with a sphere or a box as a base for the head?

[Setsanto]

Alright, I've made an extremely simple animation on 3DS. It took me about 30 minutes, not including time it took me to figure out the problem itself. If you can make any suggestions, obviously quite basic ones, it would be much appreciated.
Video

Thanks alot to everyone that has replied so far

[lukevanoort]

Originally Posted by Setsanto

Alright, I've made an extremely simple animation on 3DS. It took me about 30 minutes, not including time it took me to figure out the problem itself. If you can make any suggestions, obviously quite basic ones, it would be much appreciated.
Video

Thanks alot to everyone that has replied so far

I would suggest staying away from falling objects in animations, unless you're prepared to use 3DS MAX's physics engine (which is quite cool BTW) or to put in a lot of precise keyframes. The reason is that in real life objects accelerate, but when just a couple of keyframes are used the object travels at a steady speed, which has a huge impact on how real a scene appears. Actually, this applies to all moving objects, but isn't as noticeable with things like an arm that accelerate pretty quickly to a steady speed. Another thing to remember when you are working on your animation, textures and bump maps are your best friend. A decent texture with a good bump map (often can just be the original image filtered and modified in an image editing program, I'd use IrfanView or the GIMP) often makes a huge impact on how good an animation looks without bogging down rendering with a bunch of polys or requiring huge expenditures of time. I like the animation, when we decided to try our hand at animation again with a brand new, totally inexperienced team we never would have dreamed of trying people. Speaking of which, if you decide to use people in your final animation, watch some videos of people walking, when you walk you make a lot of motions and weight shifts you don't normally notice, but without them an animation looks fake. Congratulations on a good start.

[BuddyB309]

if this is your very first time working with 3ds max your doing great! It took me longer to figure out 3ds max and you seem to be picking it up. Looking at your animation I can see you quite havent figured out the material editor yet. Press "M" in 3ds to bring up the material. Then press "F1" for the user refference to pop up User Reference is your biggest friends use it often I cannot stress how important this thing is. Keep working at it and sooner or later you'll be on top.

[Setsanto]

Ok thanks alot everyone.