Realistic movement sequences gmax

[Verdun]

Hi. Using Gmax and have been animating models for about 7 month now but the only ones I get slightly acceptable animations (from my point of view) are mechanical models that don't have to look that 'alive' anyway (however almost no animation so far looked the way I planned it).

In short my question is how many key positions do you need in one humanoid animation like attack or stand, so far I always had 1.beginning, 2.right in the middle and 3.end looking as much as the beginning as possible. However, all my models so far look like epileptic robots.

...
Oh and on that occasion, my models tend to do other crazy things like 360° rotating arms and starting the sequence already looking like the middle key and not like the beginning key, how do you prevent that

 

[BlinkBoy]

1ºyour answer is zero. Only the Bone_Root gets position keys.

The rest is done through rotations.

2º Rotate about 180º and then rotate again about 180º. You could also try 120º-120º-120º or 90º-90º-90º-90º.

 

[Verdun]

keys and intervals

I guess I'm having problems with the basic notions here.
To me a key is made when you mess around with a bone while in 'Animate' mode, it appears as a blue rectangle in the time bar. Now what exactly is a 'position key', so far I have been using 'key' and 'position key' as synonymes. In the tutorial by Magos it is written "If you create a position key the bone will move to that key from the position key before it". Now is the position key actually something else than the regular key? What I got out of BlinkBoy's response was that a position key is done by actually moving the bone around, while other keys are done by rotation or scale. So basically my updated questions are:

-What is the Bone_Root? I thought that in Gmax bones can't have names. I improvised by creating a 'skeleton' starting with one single bone that served as an "anchor". All movements of the model were then done exclusively by rotating around that first bone.

-If I want the arm to swing up and down, do I simply rotate it up in the middle of the animation, and pull it back down at the end, or do I have to touch it at the beginning of the interval as well to create a first key? (even though it looks like it was in the good position anyway).
In short, what exactly has to be at the beginning and at the end of every interval? Is there maybe a key needed for every bone (no matter if that bone will be used in the interval or not, just so the interval "knows" that it is starting there)?

-It is not very helping that every interval is influenced by the intervals before it, at least in gmax it kinda looks like one single uninterupted animation. It is hard to visualize the whole thing if during the attack animation the model is already collapsing in anticipation of the death anim. Is that normal?

As for my first model attempts, whenever something looks (almost) fine, it is just luck (when something is wrong I don't know what I did wrong and when something looks "right" I don't know what I did right)

 

[BlinkBoy]

okay let me speak of keys. A key is any registry of any transformation done to an object during an specific time. Keys store a time and a value. Keys can be of different types, they can transform rotations, position, scale or even a parameter, like visibility or emission rate in a particle emitter.

It's true that animations are all sum up into one long interval. However, there exists something called start and ending keys. These eliminate influences from the rest of the interval.

I suggest you to look at my animation tutorial: http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/...2/in-depth-animation-tutorial-3ds-max-123520/

Gmax users could follow the 4th part of it without any trouble, just make sure to make the rigging and the skin on your own.