[.uk] 3ds Max Animation with Biped (ISBN 0321375726)

good for begineer only:
I had a little biped experience before reading this book and have learnt nothing new from it. Only buy if you are a complete beginner. Nicely laid out, clear and well explained.

3ds Max Animation with Biped:
This is by far the best book covering Biped. 3ds Max Animation with Biped is for the beginner who wants to learn how to use Biped. Few books cover the Biped in any detail. The examples are straight forward and well explained. The authors know "How to Teach". Very few books about 3ds Max are well written. Most leave details out and confuse the reader. I have purchased almost all the books written about 3ds Max and have been greatly disappointed by most. Michele Bousquet and Michale McCarthy have done an excellent job in writing this book.

Great, but just Technical Info...:
This book was exactly what I was looking for. It had detailed instructions for how to perform nearly every task in Character Studio (now just called the biped system in 3DS MAX). It's not going to have anything conceptual in it. If you want a comprehensive animation guide, you need to get the animation bible (The Animator's Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles, and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion, and Internet Animators) in addition to this. Make sure you know everything about squash and stretch, anticipation, etc. Come to think of it, start with the book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (you can find a lot of this info online, because it's so old, but it's good to have it when you're not on the interwebs as well). Actually, you can start with whatever excites you most, but you won't get anywhere interesting without the foundational concepts in these two other books. They apply to even the realistic kinds of animation you see in action movies. In fact if you're going to Mo-Cap everything you ever do, you should still know them.

Good for Learning the Basics of Character Studio:
If you've looked around for books on learning Character Studio, you've undoubtedly noticed there's not much of a selection. 3ds Max Animation with Biped is probably as good a book on the basics as you're going to find. Also addresses some of the more advanced features of CS including combining mo cap files in Motion Mixer and building multiple Biped crowds. Michele Bousquet does a good job breaking things down into easy to understand terms. If you're wanting to learn a few things about Max's 'other' Bone system...get the book.