3ds max 6
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| Blobmesh (click for larger view) |
Blobs (sometimes called metaballs) are separate pieces of geometry that either coalesce together to form one, or pull apart to form more. A real world demonstration of this concept is the behavior of mercury. Usually, this effect is associated with particle systems where each particle represents an individual blobby sphere. 3ds max has this feature, as it has since V1, but now you can have the blobs position dictated by the vertices on a surface. As the diameters of the blobs grow they will connect into a contiguous surface. Soft selection can be used to taper the size of the spheres along the edges of the selected vertices. This added feature gives a new sense of control to an affect that has really been restricted to particle systems – a rather chaotic method at best.
Nutshell: Cool feature. I haven’t thought of a very practical use for it yet. Inherently, the process is slow when you approach a usable resolution. But, who knows, a project may come along that needs fluid uniformly oozing from a surface, or a creature made of water. But when it comes, we’ll have a tool to do it.
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LAYER MANAGER
The layer manager is provided to give you control of a scene in much broader strokes, allowing objects to be hidden, frozen, or rendered based on their layer. They have presumably overhauled this from the last version, and the functionality seems to have improved. However, it falls short of the scripted tool, The Onion, which actually uses max’s internal layering system as its base. Both systems allow full control over the visibility of the layers, freezing the objects, etc. max’s Layer Manager lacks incredibly helpful Onion tools such as the ability to create alternate properties and materials, which allows the user to toggle between, say, a diffuse and a matte material without reassigning the shaders.
It would be nice to be able to save render states of a particular scene and have them tied into the layer manager. Example: A ball on a floor. You want to render the floor, the ball, and the shadow of the ball. Each as a different file. Fine. Ball is on one layer. Floor is on another. To get the ball pass, you change your file output and hide the floor. Render. Now the floor. You change your file output, show the floor, and then hide the ball. Render. Finally, you need the shadow. Change your file output AGAIN, assign a matte/shadow to the floor, unhide the ball, toggle the “visible to camera” properties for the ball, and render. Everything looks good. Terrific. Now the client wants the floor to be tiled, the ball to be a basket ball and the light to come from the other side. Time to repeat all the steps above. Simple enough right? Now do it with a file that has 25 different passes. Sure, you could do it by saving 25 different iterations of the same file. But what if that file is 180 megs. Your scene now takes up 4 gigs of space. I would like to be able to simply change the state of my object properties, layer visibility, lights, renderer, and file output – and be able to recall those settings when I need to re-render.Oh wait. The Render Elements script which works in conjunction with The Onion does this. If I were discreet, I would pay attention to the scripts that its user base is writing and begin to incorporate those into max itself. It would avoid redundant tools.
Nutshell: Layer Manager – useful tool, not enough functionality. Please refer to The Onion for guidelines. Don’t feel bad though, Maya’s layer manager is not much better.
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| RagDoll (click for larger view) |
Reactor was purchased by discreet a few years ago from a nice company across the Atlantic in order to incorporate a robust dynamic system into 3ds max which was sorely lacking up to that point. Discreet incorporated it, but it was available as an additional system at an additional cost. At this point, you get Reactor bundled up with 3ds max 6. Perhaps this was a reaction to Alias dropping its Maya cost down enough so that you probably receive a copy when you open a bank account – but this could be cynical speculation on my part. Whatever it is, we now have a dandy dynamic system that will handle most problems. All of the different capabilities and features of Reactor are beyond the scope of this review – which is already to the point of being substantial.
However, a few of the newer features are Hinge, RagDoll, and Car-Wheel. Of these tools, I feel that Car-Wheel is going to be the most valuable to production. With an axis and suspension controls, this constraint will save tons of setup time developing expressions and systems to drive the wheels on vehicles. The utility of this is followed closely by Hinge, which provides a constraint around a hinge – surprisingly enough.
Last is RagDoll, a human simulation that emulated a lifeless body. Presumably, this is so you can throw people off buildings or down stairs and the body will behave according to the laws of falling bodies. In my brief time working with the system, I could not get an effective simulation that looked like a real person. The result was more like Super Dave Osborne.
Nutshell: Powerful dynamic system for max. I’m very glad that it is now an integral part of it. Should be good for most requirements. I’ve personally had problems trying to simulate very small or very large systems – like keys swinging on a keyring for instance. I have a suspicion that this is a limitation based on how many decimal places 3ds max (or Reactor) will round off to. This is a similar limitation I found between Maya for Linux and Maya for Irix. Sometimes there just simply aren’t enough zeros. The solution is to change the scale of the system to something more managable and then scaling back to the proper size after the bake.
SKIN MODIFIER: MIRROR MODE
The skin modifier has been with us for a couple of iterations providing an internal method of rigging characters with bone structures. This time around, the tool has been expanded with a way to mirror the skin envelope and vertice settings across a plane to make rigging symmetrical characters much easier.
Nutshell: The above is a brief description of a feature that will save riggers time and save companies money. I would say that you are going to see the same time saved that you saw when modelers figured out that they could model one side of a symmetric object and mirror it to get the other half.
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