Week One: Footsteps
In the first week, you’ll jump right into the animation process and work with footstep animation. You’ll learn how to adjust footstep position and timing, and how to work with the upper body to customize the biped’s walk.

Week Two: Under the Hood
In week two, to get the most from Biped, you will deconstruct a footstep and find out how it’s made. You will also create a custom walk cycle without footsteps and compare the two processes and results.

Week Three: Upper Body Animation
Now that you’ve got the leg animation down, you will work on animating the torso, head, arms, and hands. In week three, you will find out how to automatically balance the Biped when the character bends over, and other tricks for working with the upper body.

Week Four: Sticking and Unsticking
When you push a cart, your hands stay stuck to the handle as your body moves. When you ride a skateboard, your feet stay stuck to a moving object. In week four, you will find out how to stick and unstick the Biped’s hands and feet for climbing a ladder, juggling, and many other animation situations.

Week Five: Motion Mixer
Every Biped animation sequence can be saved as a separate motion file in BIP format. In week five, using the Motion Mixer, you will apply different motion files to various parts of the Biped’s body to create a complete animated sequence.

Week Six: Motion Mixer SFX
In week six, bullet time animation, musical timing, and weighted transitions are just a few of the things you will be able to do with advanced Motion Mixer tools.

Week Seven: Bag of Tricks
Biped has a variety of special-use tricks such as hand anchoring, changing several keys at once, and layering. In week seven, you will learn a mixed bag of tricks for making animation with Biped easier and faster.

Week Eight: Crowd Sequences
In the Final Week, you will create a complex crowd scene automatically with Biped’s Crowd simulation tool. You set up a few basic parameters such as direction and barriers, and the Crowd tool automatically selects a sequence of BIP files to get each Biped moving.

Week Nine: Bonus week
As a bonus, in week nine, students will be introduced to skinning with the Skin Modifier. This will allow students see how their animation comes to life. A character model will be provided if needed.

Level of Ability

This is an Intermediate level class for 3ds Max users only. Experience with 3ds Max basic tools is required, but experience with Biped is not required. This class does not cover rigging, skinning, or scripting. All animation will be done on standard Bipeds which you will create as part of the class.

Other Requirements
Students need to be familiar with web navigation and browsing, as well as email.

Students need to be familiar with using a bulletin board system (such as CGTalk.com).

Software and Hardware Requirements
Students must have access to a machine with the necessary hardware to 3ds Max animations.

A web browser and internet connection is required. Broadband is mandatory as the tutorials will be both video and text based. You will also be uploading animations for Michele to critique.