I would start by calling Character Studio 3 (CS3) the essential 3D Studio Max plug-in…however, referring to it as a mere plug-in is a major understatement. So I'll put it like this - doing character animation in Max without CS3 is like building a condo without power tools. CS3 really will make your work that much easier by adding four very important things to Max: a biped animation system, a non-linear animation mixer, a crowd and behavior toolset, and a skin-to-bone deformation system.

Biped is the name of the biped animation system (makes sense) and has been the core of Character Studio since version 1. The word biped is also used to refer to the collection of objects that make up a special skeleton. You have a lot of control over the makeup of the skeleton from the number of spine elements to the new ponytails. The proportions and rotation of the elements and things like balance can be changed to better represent the creature you are trying to create, even some that technically aren't bipeds. The structure can be changed at any time and the software will make the necessary changes to the animation. You can even save your bipeds and animation separately and mix and match them. With a few clicks (no need to change the animation at all) you can make your new tyrannosaurus biped dance the ballet routine you made for an earlier project.

A biped character in Character Studio 3.

So now we have a biped ready to be animated. For that we can use any mixture of footsteps, freeform IK/FK key framing, and motion capture. Footstep based animation is as simple as laying down some footsteps and letting the software calculate a complete walk to match them. By complete I mean that it animates the whole body - right down to the swaying of the hips and arm movement. The basic footsteps can be easily expanded to include running and jumping steps. Now computer generated walk cycles, while mathematically correct still need a human's creative touch. This is where the freeform animation comes into play. At any time you can adjust any part of the skeleton to make the landing of a jump look better, or have the character wave. To help you out CS3 includes tools like pose cut and paste. Since this is a biped tool the paste can be applied flipped; so you could pose one arm then copy and paste the pose correctly to the other arm. CS3 also includes some new key tools to help you make planted or sliding keys and great IK pivot control that allows the pivot points to be animated. To help you sort the changes you are making to your biped CS3 has animation layers. Another improvement CS3 brings is Track operations, which essentially let you copy and paste entire tracks of animation from one body part to another. Finally, to help your biped interact with other objects, there are animatable anchors and attachments. Using these your biped can pick up and carry a briefcase or swing from a rope.

In many cases motion-capture is the ideal way to generate complex or personable animation data. CS3 includes tools dedicated to working with motion capture data. The software can use the data directly, but you will likely want to filter the data to reduce the number of keys or calculate CS3 footsteps. I found the filters fast and surprisingly capable. There will often still be times where manual tweaking is necessary and to help with that you can have CS3 display a skeleton using the raw data along with a skeleton using the filtered data. With the two moving together you can easily spot the differences. The team at Discreet obviously put a lot of effort into making working with mo-cap as painless as possible…and it shows. Being able to generate footsteps from the data allows it to be easily integrated with other CS3 animation.