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Features:
3DS Max, meanwhile, is a staple in games design, architectural visualisation, and film and TV work. This is not a product for dabblers and amateurs. The learning curve isn’t so much steep as vertical, and while some basic familiarity with 3D is enough to make a start, the thousands of options, widgets, settings, menus, plug-ins, mappers, shaders and rendering features make it unlikely anyone will start producing high-quality output without a run-up of a month or six.
But is it any good? There are two big differences between this level of product and the budget options. The first is that 3DS Max uses whatever OpenGL or Direct3D features are built into your graphics card to speed up previews. This means that the basic viewport previews can render almost instantly, and makes animation much easier. You’re not limited to wireframe renderings here, as some texture support is included.
The other difference is the overwhelming range of available options and facilities. Basic cone, circle, cube and other primitives are just the start, and there are pre-programmed options for a huge range of more complicated shapes, many of which are soft and folded rather than hard and rigid. Absolutely any parameter can be animated. There’s also a Reactor feature, which models physical reality. This is especially useful when applied to groups of objects. You can, for example, include a pile of items in a box and 3DS Max will calculate realistic individual trajectories and orientations for all of them if you tip over the box and spill them onto simulated ground.
If you’ve ever read a PC gaming magazine, you’ll already be familiar with what 3DS Max can do with game characters. For a long time, these images had a rather plastic look, but recent advances in the product have made lifelike shading and textures much easier to achieve. In capable hands, true photorealistic output is possible, but to get results to this level, you’ll need to spend almost as much money again (beyond the base price) on external plug-ins. These are optimised to control fine details such as skin, hair and clothing. One feature that’s absent in the core product is some form of wizarding or grouping to achieve specific ends. Some of the available plug-ins help with this, but there’s no avoiding the fact that getting the best results takes a lot of time and work.
Existing owners will be impressed by the latest features, which are listed in a small booklet that runs to nearly 100 pages. One of the most significant additions is the inclusion of Character Studio. This used to be a standalone plug-in, but is now part of the main product. It makes and animates figures and shapes, both individually and in groups, and the Mental Ray rendering option has been enhanced to allow for impressive translucency effects. You can now paint, push, prod and poke underlying object meshes with a range of intuitive tools that are less cumbersome than the traditional digital clay model used by most other packages. And for game designers, there’s a walkthrough option that enables you to move through a scene to provide a kind of game preview. While animating, parameters can be grouped to make them easier to work with.
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