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Edit Integrate Review — Autodesk 3ds Max 7

Jun 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Frank McMahon

New improvements address high-end 3D design and rendering.

One good thing about Autodesk's updates to its 3D design and rendering program 3ds Max 7 is that you know exactly what has been improved. The company always provides a full-color, detailed guidebook that walks you through all the major changes, showing screenshots and descriptive text that outline specific uses for the new tools. In fact, you can even grab a PDF version of the 100-page book off the company's website. In the case of version 7, the improvements are fairly extensive, touching many areas of the program. Some are large improvements, and others are small, handy new features.

One of the best additions is that Character Studio is now part of the 3ds Max program. No longer available separately as a plug-in, this excellent animation tool rocks at creating character rigs. If you are doing any animation involving any sort of character, this element allows an amazing amount of control, especially over crowd scenes. For example, you can set 10 or 1,000 characters running, all with natural attributes like turning and stopping, and all without running into one another (of course, you can do collisions as well). The speed of Character Studio has also been improved; it's now up to 10X faster in design mode — especially handy for heavily populated scenes.

Autodesk (formerly known as Discreet) made several changes to the main interface. I like the fact that there is now a toolbar for clicking pre-assigned rendering presets. You could always go into the rendering panel and change adjustments, but now you can easily toggle among a few different render modes right from the main screen. There is a new walkthrough mode in which you can literally walk through your 3D scene and examine it to see if everything looks the way it should. Cut and paste has been expanded to include colors, bitmaps, maps, and materials. You could always drag-and-drop these elements, but now you can swap them around via cut and paste.

Array previewing has been revamped and improved via Display Culling and Adaptive Degradation. Arrays are large, typically symmetrical groups of objects. The problem with spinning your scene around to view arrays and other detailed groups of objects is that the processing responsiveness can take a substantial hit. 3ds Max now allows you to toggle display modes, and when you start moving around in your scene, the program displays as much of the scene as it can in whatever view mode you are in. Those items that it can't display, it shows as a box. All of this happens on the fly and really helps with very complex scenes.

A new viewport shading method, which I think is fairly handy, is called Flat. This mode ignores all lights, but instead of darkness it renders all objects with their base color. I find this useful for working with various color schemes or to speed up viewing when checking on object orientation.

Poly editing has also improved. A new bridge option takes two object borders or polygons and joins them automatically. Taper, smooth, and bias allow fine-tuning of the bridge part for just the right fit.

New painting tools are included, such as Paint Deformation and Paint Soft selection. Paint Deformation uses brush strokes as a sculpting tool to push, pull, and change vertices. Paint Soft works similarly; however, there are additional options to set the paint influence, allowing for more precise control over how the brush interacts with the vertices of the model. Both of these tools work well not only for intricate retouching and sculpting, but also for creating organic complex shapes from very simple objects.

You can now easily animate a mesh in version 7. This allows really cool organic growth, such as with a tree growing from a seed and sprouting branches.

Normal Maps are a new functionality that goes way beyond what traditional surface mapping can achieve. Typically, if you wanted to create a bumpy texture — for example, bark on a tree — you would incorporate a bump map into your surface. A bump map would be a grayscale version of the texture, where the brightness of the pixels would designate on the object where the height bumps were. Normal Maps take this a step further by using full RGB information instead of just gray, leading to much more detailed texture height, shading, and angularity while at the same time dramatically reducing the need for polygons. Basically, now you can have a simpler object and make it more complex texturally by using a Normal Map, which is how video games create detailed worlds with fewer polygons and object vertices. This is a great advance, and 3ds Max implements it quite well.

3ds Max 7 includes many additional features. MPEG is now supported as an input file; you can map a movie or place it anywhere you can currently place a bitmap file. You can resize many of the dialog boxes for easier browsing. Also, a new clone and align tool lets you copy objects and align them automatically to line up with other objects in the scene. The excellent Mental Ray shader offers improved photometric lights (self-illuminated objects), improved workflow due to restructured interface changes, motion blur lights, and transparent multi-colored shadows.

Along with the aforementioned MPEG support is M3G file support. M3G? Yes, mobile 3D graphics. The included JSR-184 exporter now can save out to an .m3g format file, so you can move scenes to your mobile phone. There is even a standalone player, so you can view and test your mobile scenes.

3ds Max 7 just keeps getting better and better. Some new releases have a few major features, but this new version has tons of new tools and smaller features that give so much control over object creation and rendering. It is obvious that Autodesk is completely focused on advancing the product and workflow — and because the 3D market is especially competitive now, the company needs to be focused.

If you already have Max, you'll most likely get this update, but what if you want to give the program a try for the first time? The price prohibits impulse buying, but you can take it for a test run by downloading the 3ds Max 7 demo off the company website. Chances are you will be a little overwhelmed at first because of the dizzying array of features, so be prepared to dig in and learn. For simple logos and such, there are certainly many cheaper and easier programs. But if your shop wants to offer the best in high-end animation to your customers, then 3ds Max will easily pay for itself after one client invoice.

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BOTTOM LINE

Company: Autodesk
Montreal, Quebec
(514) 393-1616
www.autodesk.com

Product: 3ds Max 7

Assets: Extensive array of new features and tools allow close control over object creation and rendering.

Caveats: Potentially overwhelming to new users.

Demographic: Pro users seeking a complete high-end animation program.
Price: $3,495, $795 (upgrade)

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.