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| Radiosity (Click image for larger view) |
So far the toolsets for animation and modeling have been enhanced a lot, and to some degree on the rendering side as well.
A new Advanced Lighting tool has been added to the rendering menu, offering two different Global Illumination systems. One is the Radiosity solution that was previously available in 3ds Viz 4, and based on the Lightscape engine but enhanced to support adaptive sampling for regathering, a method to refine the radiosity solution, and multi threading. Light Tracer, though is a completely new GI solution better suited for outdoor scenes in conjunction with the new Skylight.
The radiosity engine is based on the facecount of your scene as it stores the lighting information in each vertex. So you need a fairly dense mesh to get an accurate lighting simulation. The advantage, though, is that after the calculation is done, it shows you all the light bounces and shadows inside the viewport, where you can rotate your view around and see the lighting effect from all angles in realtime. It also doesn’t need to recalculate the solution for every frame if nothing moves or changes except the camera. This is great for architectural walkthroughs.
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| Image courtesy of Chris Pember (click to enlarge). |
With the tools to simulate real world lights by defining the color temperature and distribution type and by importing IES files, it is now possible to do accurate lighting analysis.
Photometric Lights should only be used in combination with radiosity as they both require a proper scene scale.
Light Tracer works completely differently, as it doesn’t need a specifically designed scene. It is based on rays that are shot from the camera to sample points and light bounces in your scene. Image-based lighting can also be done through the use of floating point TIFF files, which can be loaded but not saved. Various controls for color bleeding and adaptive undersampling make it fairly flexible, though not nearly as advanced as third-party renderers such as Brazil, Vray or FinalRender. Light Tracer is nice to get an introduction to the world of GI, but using it in normal production scenes results in painfully slow rendertimes mainly because it is still based on the 3ds max scanline renderer instead of being a completely new solution with better efficiency in memory usage. It is a bit sad that discreet tries to compete with other third-party renderers, instead of improving essential tools for production use such as better motion blur, better memory usage for large scenes, advanced shadow maps such as deep shadows or perspective shadows, etc.
There are two new shadow types, though, which were previously available as freeware from the Blurbeta site. The Advanced raytrace shadow type is able to blur the shadow edges and handles large scenes much better than the old raytrace shadow. Area shadows should be used to create realistic soft shadows that remain crisp close to the object and become blurrier depending on the size of the area and the distance to the object.
Both require more rendertime, as they need a lot of samples to achieve a smooth soft shadow.
Render to Texture
The Render to Texture tool is also one of the more interesting new features in 3ds max 5.
This technique is also known as texture baking and describes the way to render the lighting and shadows into the textures of the object and reusing them without the need to recalculate the whole lighting process. Radiosity and GI actually become very useful with this tool and game developers as well as architects should be very pleased to see it integrated. After the baking, you can find your original and the baked texture in a Shell Material, a new container type material that just carries two materials for the viewport and renderer.
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| Ink and Paint (Click for larger view) |
Several materials have been added and enhanced to create toon style renderings or to control indirect lighting.
Ink and Paint
The Ink and Paint material is an advanced interface to achieve cartoon and illustrative style effects. Controls for paint levels, over and underlapping of ink lines, outline, variable line width and separation for smoothing groups and material IDs makes it very easy to achieve a variety of stylized effects. The ability to apply a map to each control makes it even more flexible.
Some users may remember the Ink and Paint engine when it was also available as freeware from Blurbeta.
Advanced Lighting Override
When using radiosity, the Advanced Lighting Override material enables access to local control of physical properties for indirect lighting behaviors such as color bleeding or light emission power. It is mainly used to increase or decrease the indirect light energy in dark or bright areas of your scene.
Enhanced Raytrace material
And, last but not least, the Raytrace material finally has been updated to support the Oren Nayar shading model and Anisotropic highlights.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, 3ds max 5 is a very intense update, as it features enhancements in almost every part of the program. There are features here and there that haven’t been covered in this review, such as Backburner, the new network rendering manager, or the option to receive an email if a network render job is finished, the lasso selection tool, the simple but extendable layer system, etc. But probably a lot of people will be happy to see how much access they have through maxscript.
And also congratulations to discreet for allowing any max 4 plugin to run in max 5 without a recompile, so a transition can be very seamless.
Beside the fact that the renderer hasn’t been changed in the more important areas for production usage and that the particles are basically still the same as in 3ds max 2, it is definitely worth the upgrade price, even if just for Reactor.
Irfan Celik is an animator at Blur Studio in Venice, Calif. His personal website is www.3dluvr.com/ic-art.
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