New features for 3ds Max

Plus an overview of how you make games with it

The world that 3D animators live in scares me. There, I said it.

It’s a complex art that produces beautiful work. Sometimes, especially in film, the goal is for your work to be understated; to appear to be so natural that the audience just runs with the distorted reality you create like it never happened.

Thus, I have a great deal of respect for animators, and gleefully attended Autodesk’s unveiling of a few updated tools -- most interestingly 3ds Max. There were other products there for CAD and engineering work, but 3ds Max is used for game and film production.

Those of you who know very little about the process are about to be treated with an overview of how game production works, and those who do will be able to find a quick change log of the new features in 3ds Max further below.

XKCD, eat your heart out.

When you’re building a game, you need to plot out how your characters’ movements are going to be displayed. You start off with a basic skeleton which you map control points to. Then you can assign movements like walk cycles and the many, many nuisances of your character.

Your character still needs a skin, so you export an ‘unwrapped’ 2D wireframe that you can work on in Photoshop. There are various techniques for adding some sort of texture to this image, like taking photographs of a person’s face from all angles and laying it out flat on top of your wireframe. Import this back into your modelling program and you’ve got yourself a character.

Once you’ve exported the lot, you plug them into your game engine and watch as the player moves around the game world. The engine seamlessly blends the multiple movement actions together in real time to create your masterpiece.

And that’s the theory.

Light analysis. One principle comprised of many, many, many principles that you need to understand to make your models look beautiful

Now, the 3ds Max changelog for the heavies.

3ds Max Design 2009 has a new lighting analysis feature, which we saw being used to model the lights on a film set so that CGI shots would mimic the shadows and characteristics of the footage it was being composited with.

There’s a new rendering system called Reveal that accelerates iterative workflows by providing control over what exactly is rendered in a scene, as well as a bigger materials library for texturing. And on the interoperability side of things, 3ds Max can now import geometry, materials, lights and cameras from Revit.

There’s even a few cool new navigation widgets that let you survey your scene that are being standardised across a large chunk of Autodesk’s software. They look like big buttons based on glorified jog dials that have been sectioned off into commonly used navigation tools, and are hugely intuitive for newbies -- one of them will even follow your mouse. And if it’s easy for newbies, it should also make it easier for CAD people to look around your models, and you to look around the CAD visualisations.

Of course, you should flip that last bit around if you’re a CAD-using designer looking at a model in 3ds Max.