New to animating (3DS Max). My animations look like shit, but

Without having seen your animations, I can't tell what you need to do to improve, so here's everything that's just generally recommended to beginners.

>Important book
https://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Williams/dp/0571202284

>Exercises
http://www.animatorisland.com/51-great-animation-exercises-to-master/

>12 principles of animation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haa7n3UGyDc

I'm reading this right now. It goes pretty in depth, but probably best that you read it after the animator's survival kit.
https://www.amazon.com/Timing-Animation-Harold-Whitaker/dp/0240517148

Above all else you need to practice. You can go as deep into animation as you want through reading, but it won't help you unless you actually practice.

>>553309
Animators Survival Kit makes me want to throw up. 50% of the book is the author boasting about his career or discussing peculiarities that are not nearly as important for 3d, like breaking limbs and animating on 2's. Just start with Timing for Animation. It's not that hard and is by far more useful for 3d.

>>553305

From what I can see it looks dinky/10.

But where are the shadows to start off with?

go wild with the detail if its an animation.
get some better lightning for f** sake

>>553335
Principles like breaking limbs are still important in 3D, the principle itself applies when doing silhouettes in general, regardless of art direction or rig. Realistic animation still can have elbows breaking joint convention for certain actions. Animating on 2s is kinda situational, for me it helped because I couldn't get a grasp of timing without preview (animation ending up too fast or slow), since he uses it as a baseline for his entire book, it helped cement how many frames certain things took usually and it could easily be applied to 3D, I don't understand how you'd think otherwise since the timeslider is literally no different from calculating 2D frames.

I never really felt he was boasting, I think if you noticed that you're either coerced into watching his video lectures in full, or paying way too much attention to the unimportant bits in the book.

I don't know, at the end of the day it worked for me