3ds max 6

Product Review: Page (2) of 5 - 12/29/03

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3ds max 6 Latest upgrade incorporates advances across the board for the entire user base

Schematic view (click for larger view)

SCHEMATIC VIEW
In previous versions of max, the Schematic View was basically a pretty way to look at your scene. I?ve never known anyone in the circles where I run to use this feature to any great extent. I feel that modifications by discreet will change that if people aren?t afraid to tread those waters.

The new schematic view is becoming Maya?s hypergraph. max allows you access to the properties, parameters, and relationships between the nodes in your scene. You have the ability to link hierarchies together, connect wire parameters, and even establish light exclusion links. This vastly increases the utility of the tool.

On top of the actual functionality, max allows you to place a bitmap into the background.

Schematic view (click for larger view)

This may sound like fluff, but it will allow the user to visualize the scene in relationship to the nodes, which are essentially non-descript blocks. For character rigging, for example, you can render out an image of the character, bring the image in as your background, and position the nodes to correlate to the body parts. Not only can you use this to see one view of your scene, but you can save MANY versions of the scene. Bookmarking the view saves the node setup and the image. You then bring in another image ? say, a closeup of the hand. Reorganize the nodes. Shrink the nodes for the rest of the body down to small circles, and allow just the hand nodes to be full size. Now you can focus on just the rigging around the hands. Save that view. Open the previous one, and you have restored the schematic to the original view.

Click for larger view

This approach will make anyone migrating from Maya happy to be able to view their scene in this fashion. For veteran max users? It?ll take some getting used to, but once you?re in it you are going to ask yourself how you managed to get by without it. Much like cell phones. Or clip-on ties.

Nutshell: Good advancement for this once shy-near-useless feature. Only problem will be getting veteran digital artists to use it.

CHANNEL INFO
The Channel Info Utility is a handy feature giving the user (more than likely a technical director) the ability to access vertex selections, mapping channels, and other surface characteristics. This is really useful when you receive a model from another studio or artist and the mapping has been collapsed. With the utility, you can see what maps have been assigned to what channels. The number of vertices and faces that are affected by the channel as well as the amount of memory that the channel utilizes are included in the spreadsheet-type layout. This is a boon for game developers who are constantly trying to save memory. Because you can rearrange, copy, paste, and delete channels, you can eliminate extraneous information taking up precious space.

There are a couple new modifiers that have been thrown in that parse the channel data making it available for manipulation. For instance, multiple vertex selections can be accessed through the ?Select By Channel? modifier and then manipulated by an xForm or a push. You can control numerous vertices with numerous modifiers creating affects like growing boils on a demon?s face, or footsteps pushed in the snow. In earlier versions, you would have to set up a bunch of morph targets, or set up a heavy stack of modifiers to select different vertices, manipulate, select, manipulate.

Digging further into the utility, you find controls for the color, illumination and opacity for vertices. Through the vertex color map accessed through the material editor, the subchannel data can be controlled allowing vertex colors to be blended from selection set to selection set.

Nutshell: Anything that allows us techy guys to get a hold of the data and manipulate it is a good thing in my book. I need to use this feature in a more real-world setting to assess the drawbacks of it, but the theory is sound and logical.

Shockwave preview (click for larger view)

SHOCKWAVE 3D
As a visual effects supervisor for film and television, I don?t have much experience developing assets for the Web, so I am somewhat unqualified to comment much on Shockwave. However, I can mention that this technology was not supported in previous versions of the raw 3ds max environment. There were numerous plugins to supply this functionality, however. Discreet had made the step to incorporate the ability to create 3D Shockwave files and has seemingly provided numerous tools to control the optimization of the animation. As most of us know, the Web functions much more effectively with small files than with large, despite the advent of Broadband. The Shockwave tools give the user control over the file size and quality.

Nutshell: Don?t have a lot of experience with Shockwave, but it?s nice to know that the tools are there without having to turn to external plugins.

VERTEX PAINT MODIFIER
Vertex Paint modifier works in conjunction with the Vertex Color Map and the new Channel Info Utility to provide game developers with an extended palette of tools to color models without the overhead of maps. The colored verts are used in the game engines to tint the surfaces with lighting, shadows, etc. Discreet has provided a fairly extensive set of tools. To be completely honest, I cannot give an accurate assessment of these tools because I am not as up to date on gaming technologies. To give you an overview though, 3ds max recognizes pressure-sensitive inputs, provides the ability to paint on layers with transfer selections like screen, multiply, lighten, darken, hue, saturation, and color. Brush controls with curve profiles give you full control over how the paint is applied. Soft selections allow control over where it is applied.

Nutshell: The tool seems powerful, but by discreet?s own recommendation, this tool is meant to be used for real-time game engines and should not be used as a replacement for materials that will be rendered in the software. With this restriction, there will be very few circumstances that I will use this.

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