It should be there, Physique was in max long before the skin modifier.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

Actually physique is a part of character studio so its only been there since character studio started shipping with max, but that was back in version 4 if I remember correctly. Skin has been there since the beginning I believe. or at least since Max 3. I never used the versions below that.
What is the step (12) that you are having trouble with? Skin and physique do the same things really so you will certainly be able to achieve the goal with skin.

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thanks for the relpies, i got stuck where i now need to tell the biped how to recognise my characters geomtry

in the tutorial it says i need to click the attack to node button but i cant seem to find this with skin, and does skin have a skin initialisation box like phsique?

cheers

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no, with skin you need to add bones to it and then adjust the envelopes.
there are two add buttons one for adding bones the next one adds cross sections to the envelopes.
pressing the add button brings up the select by name dialogue where you can add bones, pick all the bones objects by filtering the list to only show bones objects. You can just add everything with Bip01 by typing the first few letters in the find field but deselect the root node (Bip01) because you dont need an extra envelope at the pelvis.

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ahh ok, thats great thanks for the help!

(Btw I used a biped instead of bones, should i go back and use bones instead of a biped if i am going to use the skin modifier)

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the biped objects are effectively bones. In max there is the bones system for creating rigs but really it just simplifies the process of creating linked hierarchies. the bones are objects that when created are automatically linked together and they have properties like fins and taper so you can see how they are rotating clearly but, you can just as easily use any max object as a bone. Some people prefer to use simple box primitives to build their rigs. sometimes I have seen people use point helpers which are essentially just a pivot point in space linked together with IK. so really what matters is the pivot point of the object. Biped is good for some things and if you haven't ever built a rig before it is a fast way to get a character moving without building a rig from scratch but there are many weird things in character studio that can be quite frustrating when you get down to animating.

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I've spent the last month or so animating with biped and I've actually found it to be pretty good, I haven't really felt restricted by it at all. There are some things it doesn't do as well as a good custom rig, eg you can't move the pelvis independantly of the body, but there are ways of getting around this pretty easily. If you're not confident with rigging, it's a pretty good way to animate.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

yeah once you know how to use it its ok. the planted, free, and sliding key stuff is a bit of stumbling block for people. as is the fact that you can't really adjust curves the same way as you can with standard max besier controllers, but I believe biped was my first go at animation too because it was such a massive learning curve to build my own rig and I just wanted to get in there and animate. back then I didnt really even understand about curves and stuff so it didnt matter to me that they werent there. even now the fact that you can save things like hand shapes and whole poses, mirror arm and leg positions and save and load animation clips makes biped quite a time saver. it just shits me everytime I get used to a max rig or CAT and go back to character studio. I guess everything has its pros and cons.

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Yeh, I hadn't used biped since the mad academy in 2006 and I'd forgotten about planted and sliding keys etc so I struggled at first. Once I found them again I started to get my head around it a bit better. I found that adjusting the TCB values gave me all the control over the animation curves that I wanted - once I got my head around what each one did. There was a bit of randomly adjusting values until it looked right at first. Hopefully I'll be able to post the result soon.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]