Part 1, Know the tools

Ok, so you want to animate a model, eh? Unlike what most tutorials say, there's a lot more to animating than pushing the Animate button and moving things around. There are a lot of tools and techniques to use to make your animations move much smoother and more fluently. So what are the tools you need to know about? Well, obviously the Animate button will be the one you'll use the most (for 3DS Max 5 and up users, the "Auto Key" button does exactly the same job) and what this does is automatically set a key at that frame for the object's position, rotation and scale. NOTE: If you move objects without the animate key pressed then it wont animate and could mess up your animation. The key will appear on the time frame just under the viewports. The time frame shows how many frames are in your animation, and has a slider above it to slide the viewports to a certain frame of the animation. The ammount of frames in your animation is set to 100 frames by default, but can be changed in the Time Configuration window. You can get this window by clicking the button circled, and with it you can change the frame rate, number of frames, even the playback settings for gmax. It's all pretty self-explanatory and should always be set before you start your animation. Also shown here are the VCR buttons, at any time you can hit play to preview the animation according to the playback settings, hit play again to stop.

I guess that'll do for now. Now all we need is a model to animate...

Proceed to Part 2