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WB's Guide to the Basics of Animating

Getting started on Animating in Max.

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Key Authors
-WildBill-

Category: CS:S > Animating

Tags: animating, basics, start, beginning, beginner, 3d, studio, max, 3ds, animation, anim

Added 1 year ago - last modified 5 months ago

NOTE
This tutorial does not cover modeling, UV mapping, texturing, or compiling. It is only for beginning animators to understand and get comfortable with using 3D Studio Max.

Also, if you ever get confused about what I might be talking about or can't find where a button is then check the screenshot. So many questions can be answered with just that single scrennie, so take a look before posting. Thanks!

INTRO
So you just got 3D Studio Max (we'll just call it Max, for short) and the first thing that you see when it loads up is a huge, scary interface with more buttons and options and junk than you can even comprehend, and if you're anything like me then you're probably thinking that it ain't gonna be easy to learn this. Well, you're right. I will be completely honest with you right now: animating is hard, and you will not get good at it over night, over a week, or even over a month. You must practice and more importantly, you must have a commitment. Animators are a rare and dying breed, and there’s a reason for that. However, I’m going to keep being honest with you: you can animate. Do not let a failed first try discourage you, and don’t stop animating if it’s what you have a passion for. With that said, let us begin.

TERMS TO KNOW
• Scene – The entire file you’re working on, that has all your models and frames and everything in it.
• Viewport – The different “windows” that you view the scene from.
• Frame – A unit of time in animation, where things change slightly so that when played back in rapid succession it gives the effect of motion.
• Key Frame – A frame where you change something specific. Max will then automatically fill in, or “tween” the frames between your two key frames to make the animation smooth.
• Mesh – The group of pieces that make up your model.
• Model – The 3D object as a whole that you generally animate, such as a gun or knife.
• Bone – Basically what it sounds like. It’s an invisible binding that keeps 3D things together. For example, if you’ve got a hands model and you want to move the wrist around, then bones are what keep the fingers attached to the wrist so that they move with the wrist.
• Clipping – When a 3D object passes through another one like a ghost. There will always be some clipping in your animations, but do not make it visible or obvious, and it’s generally best to avoid it if you can.

NAVIGATING IN MAX
If you look in one of your viewport windows, one of them should say “Perspective” at the top left corner. If it doesn’t then right-click on whatever it does say there, and go to View > Perspective.

For people with mouse wheels, hold down the middle mouse button as well as ALT, and drag your mouse around the viewport. You can now magically fly around! Cool, huh? If you let go of ALT and hold down only the middle mouse button then you can pan around.

Also, you can scroll on your mouse wheel to zoom in and out of your scene.

For those of you without a mouse wheel, you can click Arc Rotate button at the bottom of the screen and just click and drag around on your viewport to zoom around like that.

Get comfortable navigating like this. You’ll be doing it a lot. You can also use the other 4 viewports to see your scene from different angles, which is useful especially in modeling. If you don’t like having the tiny view ports to work in then you can click the Maximize Viewport Toggle button at the bottom right corner of the screen and it’ll make your selected viewport (outlined in yellow or red) take up the full screen. Click it again to go back to using 4 smaller ones.

Also, one thing many people underestimate is the keyboard and all the shortcuts in Max. Instead of having to drag your mouse everywhere and click on a million things to get a window to show up, you can simply push a button! Common ones you'll use a lot are P (switches to Perspective view), L B and T (for Left, Bottom, and Top view), and C (for Camera view, which shows you what the animations will look like in-game). Also, sometimes you might accidentally bump keys and your scale tool no longer seems to show up on a selected item, or the rotate tool's sphere doesn't appear on a selected item. You probably pushed X, which toggles that on and off. Push X again to turn it back on.

*Special thanks to Loyen_ for some of the keyboard shortcuts!*

GETTING STARTED
First thing you’ll want to do is go to the DevHub here on FPSB and download one of the many fine models for us to use. I strongly recommend choosing one like this knife that is already UV mapped (meaning it’s already got the 3D surfaces cut up and glued onto a flat 2D image for skinning. You can tell because it’s usually got some gay little colors on it, but that’s beside the point).

Then you'll also need to download the model for the hands (link). This .zip file includes 2 hand rigs: one by the infamous Jennifer!! and the other by the ever-awesome DaEllum67 (also known as Xander). I personally like Jenn’s rig because it’s got a built-in camera that shows you exactly what your animations will look like in Counter-Strike: Source. I think DaEllum’s might also have it, but I forget. His are also very useful, though, so try both out and see what you like.

When you find a rig you like, open it in Max and you should see the hands kind of floating there. You will then want to go to File > Merge and find the file of the knife model we downloaded a minute ago. A box should pop up with a list of all the components that make up the knife. Select them all, then click OK. If it’s huge then use the scale tool to scale it down. Remember to use the inner-most yellow triangle when scaling things down, because it scales the selection as a whole instead of just on two dimensions. Get it to about the right size so that it would fit in the hands you’ve got on your stage.

If your knife model is a blank white texture, then press M on your keyboard and a window with some weird spheres should pop up. Find the UV map file of the knife (usually a .jpg or something) and drag that image file from whatever folder it is in directly onto on of those spheres. The sphere should now be covered with that image file. Then just drag the sphere onto the model, and with a little luck the model should now magically have the UV map texture applied to it. If you’re having trouble then let me know specifically what you’re doing.

LEARN FROM THE PROS
Honestly, there is little point in me actually typing out a tutorial on how to animate. You need to actually see how it’s done, and to do that you need to download either DaEllum’s VTMs (here) or Jennifer!!’s VTMs (here). DaEllum is for users with a little more experience navigating in Max and assumes that the viewer knows a few things beforehand. Jenn’s are not as thorough but are great for beginners. Plus they’re hilarious, so I strongly recommend watching Jenn’s VTMs first, then going to DaEllum’s.

On a side-note, you’ll need the .SMD Exporter tool for 3DS Max for when you’re all finished and ready to prepare your awesome new animations for compiling. If you have Max 9 or higher then you will want to get this exporter from WunderBoy, and if you have any versions previous to Max 9 then you will want to get this exporter by CannonFodder instead.

THE TIMELINE
The timeline is the bar beneath the viewport(s) that looks a bit like a ruler with some numbers on it. It shows you all the frames in your animation, and shows you the key frames for each object you have selected. When an object is only rotated between two key frames then you get a green key frame. If it gets moved (up, down, left right, forward, backward, diagonally, whatever) then the key frame is filled red. If an object is both rotated and moved in the same frame then the key frame will be half red and half green. If an object gets scaled (made bigger or smaller) then the key frame turns blue. If an object has all three transformations applied to it on the same key frame then the key frame will have red, blue, and green parts.

It’s important to note that transformations can occur between multiple key frames. What I mean is that if on a key frame on frame 1 you have a box, then frame 10 is a key frame where the box gets moved up a bit, so that frames 2-9 show the tween of the box moving up, and then on frame 20 you do not move the box but rotate the box 90º then it will start rotating from the first frame even though frame 10 is a key frame because frame 10 only acts as a key frame for an objects position, not rotation or scale. Make sense? Well don’t worry, it will eventually.

You can also change around some settings in your timeline, like how many frames there are and how fast they play, but clicking on the Time Configuration button next to the timeline.

DOs
When I animate, I like to have the Auto Key option selected (the button turns red and the bar above the timeline turns red too). This means that when you make a change on a frame, it automatically makes that frame a key frame and only changes what’s on that frame. If Auto Key was not selected then if I rotated something in frame 10, it would rotate it the same amount in every frame.

I also like to animate by changing things every five or ten frames, and let Max fill in the gaps with its smooth tweens. This way you get a nice and fluid animation. If you tried to make a key frame on every single frame and animate each individual frame that way then you’d get a very choppy animation, plus you’d spend ten times as long doing it. Let Max do the work for you, trust me.

Try going through the motions yourself and observe how things move naturally before you start animating it.

Pay attention to all the details, big and small. Especially details like individual finger placement and pose.

DON’Ts
Do not scale your hands. The bones are unbreakable, and if you scale them then the mesh will still stay the same size and it will make the hands and arms look like they belong to an anorexic person or something.

Do not try to move the fingers with the Move Tool. Again, the bones are unbreakable, so you should only use the rotation tool on the fingers. You can, however, use the move tool on the wrist and shoulder bones.

Do not animate the whole thing together. Instead, break it down into the draw animation, the reload animation, the fire animation, etcetera, and save them as individual .max files.

Do not stop animating even if you get confused or frustrated. It is difficult, but it can be done, and you’ve got everything you need right in front of you. All that’s left is your commitment.

FINAL WORDS
This tutorial was just to help those who want to learn to animate get off to a decent start. Don’t cry about how “oh, it’s too simple” or “like omg dewds, he dusn’t knew wut hees talkeeng aboot omg omg omg” because you’re missing the point of it entirely, and more importantly, I don’t care.

I hope this cleared up some questions people had. And with this tutorial, I hope to see some new quality animations on FPSB real soon. However, animations are a lot like skins in that your first attempt probably won’t be great or perfect, so please don’t submit it. Just put it up as a WiP, get some feedback on how it can be improved and perfected, and then only submit something when you’re confident it’s perfect and there is no possible way to make it better.

With all that said, good luck, have fun, and don’t ever stop trying! :D

Feedback

Page of 10 1 2 3 4 ... 8 9 10

2 months ago

garlix

Tnx for this tutorial i finnaly found somewhere where i can read something xD i tried watching some vidios but they were doing it so fast and i couldn't catch anything xD.

Bananite

2 months ago

rockrebel

I use 3DsMax 10 and I cant find File... I alredy looked at the screenshot ! Nothing !

Whatz Up?

4 months ago

Deazralei

Haha, thanks, I'll ask him then. ^^.

Thanks for replying.

Posted by -WildBill-

Posted by Deazralei

Hmm, can you use the already skinned models and animated ones? I want to animate Twinke's AK-47 (AK-Fortyawesome). The one you also animated. :D

And yes I'm asking if I can use that model for new anims?

it's actually better to use models that are already skinned, and i encourage you to do so.

as for the ak-fortyawesome, that model was made by Twinke Masta so you'll probably want to ask him for permission to use it before you animate and release it.

if you go to the 586 Studio's page and click on the Resources button at the top it'll take you to a page with a couple links to places where you can find plenty of UV mapped models in .max format, many of which also have skins that can be found here on fpsb

hope that helps :)

Back to my Command Center.

4 months ago

want realism? then dont play videogames

4 months ago

Deazralei

Hmm, can you use the already skinned models and animated ones? I want to animate Twinke's AK-47 (AK-Fortyawesome). The one you also animated. :D

And yes I'm asking if I can use that model for new anims?

Please reply. I know I'm a noob here. =)

Back to my Command Center.

4 months ago

The best thing to do for navigation is get 3ds max 2009 because i had the viewcube which is amazing. its so good, you only need one viewport to do the whole thing.

WE FUCKING PUNCHED 186 FUCKING ALIENS

5 months ago

Spec ops Grunt

Awesome tut. And yes this is difficult. Hopefully this ought to help.

SO MANY BUTTONS!

.033 kdr ftw

8 months ago

BashinTheBass

I need some help hwo can i set EVERYTHING back to deafault i cant rotate it rly sucks and its slowying me down

Cat 4 lunch

8 months ago

Posted by Echo Four-One

And....where should the magazine go when you do the reload animation??

it goes into the gun, silly

want realism? then dont play videogames

8 months ago

Infantry24364

And....where should the magazine go when you do the reload animation??

Infantry

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