The world's most popular professional 3D animation package, 3ds max by discreet, just got an upgrade. Rather than being a major overhaul, this seems an effort to bridge gaps between 3ds max and some of the industry's leading 3d applications in several areas. However, 3ds max6 is not just upward expansion reaching higher in 3D visual effects, it is also broadening to encompass a wider scope of different industry disciplines.
Reflecting the Autodesk (discreet's parent company) orientation is greater support for standard architectural modeling, lighting, material and rendering formats. Autodesk VIZ 4 files, all of its tools and VIZ render files (DRF format) from Autodesk Architectural Desktop 2004 imports are now fully supported and available in 3ds max6. Thus, everything that VIZ can do, 3ds max6 can do too. AutoCAD 2004 products, DWG and DXF file formats now all receive better support. Hence, architectural structures and groups can be taken into max and animated with its superior tools.
New Architectural Material types can be used to quickly replicate real world surfaces for buildings, rooms and interior/exterior design environments, automating the once complex process of raytraced reflections, radiosity and global illumination (G.I.) lighting.
Atmospherics, like fog, fire and water, can be added to the scene, along with volumetric lighting, lens effects, and the whole assembly then photo realistically rendered out using max's various render engines. These include the traditional scanline system (fast), the G.I. and radiosity Lightscape renderer, (quick realistic interior and exterior lighting environments) or the newly integrated Mental Ray render engine (complex world-leading photo realistic lighting, photonic caustics and rendering). Along with parametric trees, plants, stairs, railings, walls, doors and windows and support for HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) files, scenes can quickly look fully realistic as well as satisfying architectural precision. These tools actually do reduce a lot of the effort and time normally put into creating 3D man-made environments manually, very useful for architects as well as film and TV visual artists.
Discreet tend to buy-up licenses for third party plug-ins for their software applications and then include them within the latest version, such as Reactor, Shockwave 3D Exporter and Mental Ray. This is also true for 3ds max5's $800 per year subscription system. The Print Size Wizard and Particle Flow are two examples. The first is a simple convenience, which via the Render menu, enables images to be rendered for any specified print resolution, paper size and dpi setting. Since illustration artists and the publishing industry are utilising 3D more these days, this is a useful little addition.
Particle Flow, however, is a massive inclusion within 3ds max6, going way beyond the existing particle systems, bringing rapid calculation and display of ultra-complex, event-driven interdependent particle entities. The result can be the birth of millions of new particles all created from one original emitter that spawns other particle Events and Flows. Using the Particle View window multiple drag-n-drop Actions can be connected together in a schematic view with icons defining particle behaviours, life spans, trajectories, collisions, imposing forces and spawning, which are visually programmed to create all manner of complex simulations. For example particles from a gun (bullets) are told to spawn trails of smoke particles behind them, under the influence of their initial speed, gravity and drag and then produce further emitters upon contact with a water surface, which produce different particles again (splashes), each of which also produce further particle events as they splash down into the water-even material changes are programmed in. The natural-looking effects of these procedural particle systems are near impossible to create using the standard max system. Particle Flow allows the sub-object selection of some of the particles from an emitter so that only those selected can then be told to behave in a different way at some point in time, such as a death event, so these ones disappear. Or particles can swarm or follow other objects and flow along surfaces or pathways as defined by moving objects. Overall, a fantastic addition to 3ds max, perhaps rivalling the stunning particle systems in Maya or Houdini.
Particle Flow combined with the new Reactor2 can produce very realistic rigid body dynamic simulations. The Ragdoll system (used in many of today's 3D games) allows a character's 'body', with limbs and joint constraints to be used within the dynamics collision system (the 'physics engine'). Thus entire characters can be thrown around, dangled on ropes or pushed down the stairs, dynamically reacting to objects they bump into. Fracture can simulate objects breaking apart when they collide, (for instance), with a Ragdoll character, and Particle Flow can spawn multiple fragments as these pieces hit others or even have blood spurt out upon impacts with the character. Cool!
New modelling features include BlobMesh meta-ball objects or particles which blob together organically, also useful for liquid effects. The Shell modifier gives objects thickness, making mech-looking modelling a breeze and improved spline modelling enables lines to be cloned and reconnected back to the cage automatically as well as copy-paste functions for vertex Bezier tangent handles.
Overall, some great convenience tools that really speed work flow and some very powerful professional additions to 3ds max's already deep tool set.