3DS Max Help thread

[BuddyB309]

Well now that the animation season is underway I figure its time to start the official 2009 help thread.

Some tips I would like to share with all the teams. These will help you produce a good animation.

1. Planning I cannot stress this enough. This goes way beyond deciding what you are gonna do. Plan out your camera shots, plan out your composition, plan out EVERYTHING. Oh and Write or draw your ideas down on paper! So many people think "I've got it in my head." is a planning step. No it is not, normally your first idea is your worst and most obvious idea. You need to get through these ideas and by reworking them until you have something perfect. This will save you tons of time in the long run. Because if you have a shot showing a complex machine put you've already planed out the shot and know that your only gonna see the right side of it. Then you don't have to model whats not in the view of the camera. This also brings me to my next tip.

2. Camera Movement Slow and steady camera movements are the way to go. If you plan out your shots like you should have, then you will have nice compositions. And when you have nice compositions, your animation will look more professional because its easily to follow and pleasing to the eye. And when your animation looks more professional, you will get nice shinny trophies for your team.
I've seen so many teams go completely nuts with the camera and end up with "Excessive Camera movement." No body likes Excessive Camera Movement. I don't like it, Ted Boardman doesn't like it, and I assume that most of the judges on the Judging panel don't like it either. The nicest camera shots I've seen the camera only has two keys, one for the beginning frame and one for the end frame.

3. Planning Planning is that important. I put it in twice.

4. Naming convention Name your Objects! Name your Lights, Name your materials, Name your test render, Name EVERYTHING! I've had scenes that had over 20,000 objects in them. I had to use the list selecting tool to access some of them. Imagine they were all named "Box 01"

5. Thinking differently This goes along with planning. When your thinking about your animation you should try to predict what everyone else is going to do then go with the complete opposite. You will stand out more.

Base on the theme this year this is was 80% of the teams will do.

Shot one: show a (bug, tree, rabbit, rino, whale, etx.) in an enviroment doing what it normally does. Camera zooms up to the part of interest cross fade into shot02.

shot02: show the mechanical part on a robot that is (helping elderly, helping man walk, scoring points in a game, feeding the hungry, making the world a better place, etc.) 360 degree shot to show the entire environment.

Shot03: now shows kids in FIRST (working on their robot, scoring points, winning trophies, jumping up and down, high fiving, getting awards, saying "Yay!", ect.) normally we see the game field.

with a mono tone voice over everything.

Think of something that you believe no one else will think of.

6. Rendering This catches teams off guard. Rendering takes a long time. Be sure to leave a week for rendering and sound mixing.

7. Sound Now this some teams have better equipment than others to have good sound quality. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to it. Sound its just important if not more than video. I have seen people pay attention to the worlds worst quality videos only because the sound is awesome.

thats all i want to say for now. Please feel free to add comments or ask questions went you run into trouble. GOOD LUCK TEAMS!

[XYZdimentia]

Yeah! Planning is essential! If you have a spot on storyboard, everything else will fall into place.

Another good tip is dividing the work or outsourcing. If you look at any big animation company. (i.e Pixar, Dreamworks, or Laika) the compnay is divided into sections, and each section is a team devoted to workin on one sole part, whether it be modeling, lighting, textures, or animating. This might explain why their credits always appear longer than their actual movie. Another thing they do is outsourcing to different companies, often times out of the country. I'm not saying anyone should go THAT far, but if you know someone whose in video production, or is really good at soundmixing, go ahead and ask them even if they're not on the team.

Believe me, you're killing yourself if you keep this a one-man project. Collaboration is best.

[BuddyB309]

Oh yes I almost forgot. When you have a question about 3Ds max. Press the F1 key to bring up the user help menu. Its is your very best friend. Your next best friend is google. Just type in anything you want to know and "3ds max tutorials" after it. For example. Lets say I want to make a person with Sub Surface Scattering on the mesh. So I would type in "Sub Surface Scattering 3ds max Tutorials" in google and viola!! my knowledge grows!