After buiding my characters, fully rigging them, it was time to develop my scene.

A couple friends and I came up with a story line for me to work with in my animation. The ideas had to work with the two characters I had created, a fearless/realively mindless skeleton warrior (which I named Bones) and a rock monster with anger management issues (which I named Rocky).

Storyline:

1. Introduce Bones - running through a canyon
2. Start an earthquake in the canyon while Bones is running
3. Bones almost reaches the exit of the canyon but the earthquake causes a landslide which blocks Bones' exit.
4. Rocky emerges from the ground behind Bones who now cannot run (not that he would, he is mindless)
5. Rocky roars at Bones (just to make it obvious that he's not a particularly happy rock)
6. Bones charges at Rocky
7. Rocky owns Bones
8. The end

This required for me to learn more about a few key tools in 3ds max for this animation, among other things:

• Reactor physics engine
• Biped animation
• Morpher modifier - for facial expressions
• Mental Ray sunlight
• Procutter (I didn't have time to learn enough maxScript to create better fractures)