Discreet 3ds max 6

Two issues ago we ran an exclusive preview of 3ds max 6. Since then our 3D experts have been testing the full version of the final release, and we can now give definitive answers to your questions – namely what’s new, what’s impressive, and what’s our verdict?

Delving straight into the app, the first thing to tell you is that scene management is a simpler business in version 6. Scenes are getting bigger – there’s no doubt about it. With PCs getting faster, viewers demand more going on on-screen, and more detail in animations and models; scenes can easily get out of control, with dozens of models, and objects to deal with. Scene management is vital, and Discreet’s response to this is the new Layers Manager.

This window offers you a list of everything in your scene, and lets you show, hide, or render each object, or group of objects as you wish. This is incredibly useful on a large scene. You don’t want to waste time rendering background objects when you’re refining a single model, or suffer the impact on viewport updating that your complex main models cause, when all you want to do is tweak the position of a prop or the keyframes of an animation.

The Schematic view has also been upgraded. It’s been a bit of a minority tool until now, with many users finding it unfamiliar, but it’s now a lot clearer and easier to navigate. The schematic view presents each object in your scene as a box, and uses connecting wires to indicate how objects relate to each other. You can arrange the schematic as a projection of one of the viewports; in other words, if you’ve got a character with arms, legs, hands and fingers, the schematic can be arranged to look like that character – it’s much easier to see what goes where, and how your hierarchy works.

With architects and other users of Autodesk Viz being identified as an expanding market for 3ds max, Discreet has also added extra compatibility between the two products in the form of the new Architectural Material. This is effectively a material type which lets you import scenes complete with surface textures directly from Viz into max. The Architectural Material is also useful for max users – it’s a quick and easy material type to use, and there’s a massive library of exterior and interior materials supplied with it.

Built-in plug-ins
3ds max’s particle system has always been okay. It started as a simple spray, and as the versions progressed more options have been added, culminating in six particle system types covering a wide range of useful, but basically dumb particles. Well version 6 adds another, far more flexible particle type to the stable: Particle Flow.

Particle Flow was introduced as a plug-in to max 5, but it’s now free with max 6. It’s a completely new departure for max particles, which uses a flowchart view to construct complex relationships and behaviours. What you can do with particles has been greatly expanded by this addition, but it would have been nice to have been able to load and save setups from within the Particle Flow window, and a few presets would have been handy, too.

In the last release, max introduced a couple of very useful new rendering options. Light tracing and radiosity completely revolutionised the kind of rendering that max users were able to produce. With max 6, Discreet has done it again – this time by bringing mental ray into the product. mental ray has always been one of the top rendering engines on the market, offering unsurpassed control over the way your image is produced.

Dynamics are now a strong theme in max, and compare well with its competitors. With Reactor thoroughly established within the package, soft and rigid-body dynamics are both well represented. The improvements in version 6 offer a real-time window in which you can preview your dynamics world, picking up objects and throwing them around to see how they react to the rest of the scene. As a way of testing things out before you start the complex process of animation, it’s both useful and fun.

Reactor also improves virtual stunt-work, supplying automatic suspension for vehicles, and a script which helps out dynamics on bones systems. This last feature means that if you create an animated human, then hit it with a solid block, it will fly through the air and collapse in a (relatively) realistic pile of jointed limbs.

Vertex painting
So onto the last bunch of improvements in the box. Dynamics will probably be used by game designers for intro sequences or to test out ideas, but for real-time 3D gaming (and Internet 3D for that matter) the improvements to vertex painting will be useful. You can now paint more specifically and with more control using an improved set of refining tools like symmetrical painting, pressure sensitivity, soft selection, and painting modes like those in Photoshop. But you can also create an unlimited number of layers, so you could have one for shadow, one for transparency, one for flickering light, or even use vertex painting to define areas for other elements of the game.

Getting a character model to move realistically when its bones are animated has always been a problem, and there isn’t a package on the market that has an effective solution to it – which is why 3ds max users will be glad to hear that the app’s skinning tools have been enhanced. This time, there’s a new tool to simplify the attachment of similar (but not identical) models. For example, say you’ve got three characters, each with two arms and two legs, but with different features, proportions, clothes and details, and you want to animate them all. Now you can skin one of them, then as long as you have the same-shaped skeleton for the other two, you can copy the skinning data across to the others – even though the models themselves are different.

Our verdict on this release of max? mental ray and Particle Flow really are major additions, and the improvements in rendering, schematics and scene management will aid workflow. This upgrade may not be bursting to the seams with new functionality, but it offers two things that most users hope for with each release: an improved toolset and more value for money.