Playing with 3D Studio Max

Last week was the break week in AM and I used the time to rest and to play a little with 3D Studio Max. Before Maya I had done a small animation in Blender, but it's been a few years and I think it's good knowing at least the basics of other animation software.

I decided to do something really really simple, just to break the ice with 3ds max. I downloaded Max, a free rig lots of people use from this link.

I chose a reference from aniref on vimeo, a cool place to look for (and share) reference.

Here's the video I chose:

And the result of my exercise:

It was interesting and, in a way, simple, after all, the tools used are similar to the ones in Maya. Before starting to animate, I watched the instructional videos that come up when the program is first opened. That helped make me more comfortable with the interface. I found it less friendly than Maya, but part of this is because I'm not used to it.

At one point I didn't know where to find more specific controls like footroll and eyelid movements. Also some general things like navigating and setting materials to locked body parts demanded some getting used to. Well, in the end, I found the answers to my questions in the internet or by pressing buttons and seing what happened :-)

Good book for improving Maya skills

I recently started reading the book "How to cheat in Maya 2010 - Tool and techniques for the Maya Animator". It gives you a lot of "cheats" for working better with Maya. Actually, it mostly talks about tools that are available in the software, but if we don't know about their existence, we obviously can't use them ;-)

The book gives some tips about how you can improve your workspace in Maya, how splines work and how to work better with them, how to make a transparent IK/FK switch, how to use constraints, how to use animation layers, the basics about rendering and assigning materials...well, it's a long list :-)

It's really cool that the chapters are short and objective and you don't have to read them yeah in sequence. There's an exercise for each topic where you can practise what you're learning. And most of the things work for older versions of Maya -  Ah, a maioria das coisas vale para as versões de Maya anteriores também - when I started reading it, i was still using  2009 (actually, this was until this week) and, as far as I know, everything worked for that one too.

Another cool thing is it comes with a DVD with Maya files for almost every chapter, so it's a lot easier to do the exercises, since everything is already prepared ;-) There are also 5 videos about constraints and parenting.

I've been using Maya for a year and a half (I know, it's not that much) and working on animations since then and, though I already knew several things that are covered in the book, I've learned lots of interesting things (and I still have to read the other half!). It seems several of the tricks will speed up my work and others will make it even more fun :-)