Book excerpt: 3D Studio MAX 3 Professional Animation is the only book that take you extensively through the 3D Studio MAX 3 animation process, showing you the techniques that professional animators use to create everything from simple animated particle effects to complex character animation for Web sites, video, film, and other multimedia formats. Written by a group of top-flight 3D animation professionals, this book features the real deal--real-world applications and advanced tutorials: make bipedal, quadra-pedal, and multipedal characters walk; use Cstudio's Biped and Physique; build and animate a realistic human skeleton using MAX Bones IK; create complex scripting with MAXscript to enhance MAX's capabilities; produce muscle-based, multi-layered facial expressions and lip syncs; create deformable objects and fine-tune them with space warps; display and edit trajectories; and animate cameras, lights, and atmosphere.