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REVIEW: 3DS Max 7

Thursday 09 Dec 2004

  • platform PC
  • price £2,695 ;£995 upgrade from version 5/6
  • pros Features Normal Bump Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, and Character Studio 4 is incorporated. There’s an Edit Poly modifier and enhanced modelling tools, plus new viewing tools.
  • cons Still a very steep learning curve, and there’s no major new features in Character Studio or Reactor, and no entry level pricing model.
  • rating 4.5 Best Buy

Discreet is obviously banking on the success of the next generation games consoles to drive software sales for 3DS Max 7, while another key market seems to be character-based film effects. The evidence for this comes from the serious enhancements to character animation as well as a new process for faking depth and 3D detail called Normal Bump Mapping.

There are new modelling tools such as the Edit Poly modifier. Rendering gets a boost with the inclusion of Mental Ray 3.3, and there’s a new way to navigate through your scenes as though you were in a first person shooter.

align=right border=0 />Among many other enhancements in version 7, Discreet has incorporated the excellent Mental Ray 3.3 renderer. The prominent feature here is the SSS Fast Skin shader which provides Sub Surface Scattering, an effect to make materials more translucent and receptive to light diffusion. This is especially effective for realistic skin or deep-water effects. Global Illumination has also been enhanced by the the inclusion of Photometric lighting. </p> <p> Normal Bump Mapping is an enhanced form of bump mapping and another one of the standout features of this release. Driven by the needs of the games industry it allows high-resolution surface detail to be simulated on low-resolution polygonal models. It uses the RGB information of a texture to change the direction of an object’s surface normals and has the added benefit of being able to be viewed in real-time within viewports. The major advantage, however, is that rendered scenes can use less polygons, ensuring faster render times, improved memory usage and speedier scene navigation. </p> <p> Usage is fairly straightforward for such a beneficial effect, involving casting a texture projection, based on the high-res object, onto an adjustable cage surrounding the low-res object to enable correct fitting. A ray-traced texture based on the projection cage is then rendered. </p> <p> Walk Through Viewport Navigation is another boon to games designers and architectural users. As the name suggests, it’s a way to travel through your scene, controlling movement with a key set-up like a first person shooter game. Camera movement, speed or step-size can be adjusted, which is just as well as there is a tendency to fly off the plane when on the default setting. </p> <p> <b>Modelling improvements</b> </p> <p> On the polygon modelling side, the Editable Poly toolset has been enhanced. Editable poly objects are converted objects that are editable at five sub-object levels: vertex, edge, border, polygon and element. If you use an operation on an editable poly, 3DS Max doesn’t insert extra vertices along any invisible edge. </p> <p> Most of the new features in modelling take place on this sub-object level, allowing a much finer level of control. New Command modes include Bridge – which connects borders or polygons, Relax, which helps smooth your model at the sub-object level and Turn, which changes the direction of a diagonal within a poly. Discreet has also added the Edit Poly modifier. Using this you are able to quickly apply new and existing Editable Poly tool effects to model polygon objects, as well as animate the edits. You can do this by setting keyframes or you can use multiple modifiers in sequence to animate different operations. However, Edit Poly lacks Editable Poly’s Subdivision Surface and Subdivision displacement rollouts. </p> <p> Edit Poly modifiers are useful in mesh detailing, especially when used with the new Paint Deformation tools. Based on mesh painting features introduced in version 5, modellers can now quickly detail a mesh by using brush strokes <BR> to deform the surface. </p> <p> Operations available include pushing or pulling vertices on the surface or causing them to relax, while revert uses brush strokes to gradually undo changes. Maya has a similar tool in the form of Artisan. Another new Editable Poly option is Paint Soft Selection, which lets you paint on a soft selection to sub-objects, giving an effect as though a magnetic field was influencing the mesh. Previously you had to set parameters and designate sub-objects for the soft selection effect. An additional option is Blur, which lets you paint to soften the outlines of an existing painted soft selection. </p> <p> The new Skin Wrap modifier is another enhancement in this area. A low-resolution mesh is used to drive the deformation of a high-resolution mesh. The low-res object, known as the control, can be animated and this data used to drive the animation of the high-res mesh object, known as the base. </p> <p> The base can then be modified or added to without affecting the underlying animation. This is particularly useful in building game characters or working with facial animation. </p> <p> <div class=inlineimage><img src= 3DS Max (DAO)

Click image for larger version



border=0 /><p>The new Edit Poly modifier provides a new parametric approach to creating and managing the properties of polygon objects. </p></div> </p> <p> <div class=inlineimage><img src=
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