Just saw MAX 3.0 at GDC. Bitchin.
Michael Duffy
Kinetix was showing off MAX 3 at their booth in the Expo. Holy cow!
Let's just say that I saw it Tuesday night for the first time, and when
I woke up Wednesday morning I realized that I had been dreaming about
using MAX 3. Get Out Of My Head Kinetix!!! (^_^)
Note that everything that follows is what I've heard or seen, and none
of it is to be taken as the absolute word on anything. If there are
errors below, don't blame me, use at your own risk, etc. etc.
Release date is May 28th (though one of the employees at the booth
thought it would be later than that, two others said it would be May
28th). Upgrade price is around $700.
Highlights include:
Surface Tools built in. Also the addition of 5 sided patches to Surface
Tools means a lot less seam from those silly three sided patches. All
the complex character modeling I saw at the booth was done with this new
ST, and no one was using NURBS. That's fine, because IMHO Surface Tools
works better than NURBS.
Morpher is the new weighted morph element of MAX. Morpher works with
all the different types of geometry (mesh, spline patches, etc.) Looked
really easy to use, and had some good integration with the tree view.
MeshSmooth has been enhanced so that when it smooths it doesn't screw up
the UVW coordinates like it used to. Coolness!
Build your own interface. Too many changes to the interface for me to
really explain well. Basically MAX is now set up so you can work full
time in Expert Mode and use your entire screen for modeling purposes.
Lots of stuff is accessed through right click menus and popup menus (the
entire right hand panel window has become a toggled popup window). Lots
of customizability built into the interface now.
There is a track view that shows keys for the current object along the
bottom of the screen under the scrub bar. Very cool.
Glow, Lens effects, and several other things that used to be in Video
Post have been pulled out of there and put in a section called Render
Effects. Makes them easier to use now, and it looks like they can thus
be accessed with MAX Script now. Very nice.
They apparently completely pulled the renderer apart and rewrote it.
More new controls than you can shake a stick at. This has made the
renderer more powerful, but I have a feeling it will take quite a while
before everyone figures out how to use the new power best.
LOTS of new stuff designed to make RT3D level editing easier, both in
the interface and at the SDK level.
Unwrap UVW has been improved in several ways. Very cool, especially if
you are doing low poly work.
You can now BEVEL INDIVIDUAL EDGES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Great rejoicing
was heard in the streets!!!! You can also bevel points and faces
easily.
And this of course is only scratching the surface of the new features.
Very, very cool stuff. I'm not happy about the price of the upgrade
(then again, who likes spending another $700 per seat), but the new
features make it worth it and I'll be upgrading our copies as soon as it
becomes available. (I guess I'll have to upgrade through the new
stricter dealer policy. Time to find out who my local authorized dealer
actually is. Crap.)
Anyways, in short MAX 3 looks really awesome. Also, everyone from
Kinetix I talked to at the booth was really cool. I even got a free pin
from them. Now if only they would give away some T-shirts, but without
that stupid dancing baby on them....
Later,
Michael Duffy
Studio Blue
mdu...@ionet.net
Brandon
upgrades, availability?
Brandon
DanMan
(but still no deforming bones, eh?)
it's bloody shame I won't be
upgrading my copy of MAX2 to MAX3.
Anyone out there wanna donate me $700? :)
Smeggy
--
Smeggy
Better Smeg than dead :]
www.3dluvr.com/smeggy
GWB3d - Freelance 3d artist for hire.
For Tutorials, Plugins, Scripts, Maps and Meshes....follow the links below.
http://gfxcentral.com/bobo/
http://www.3dcafe.com/asp/default.asp
http://hem1.passagen.se/oos3d/frametutorialssvart1.html
DanMan <Juh...@netcom.ca> wrote in message
news:36F47BE7...@netcom.ca...
game
3.0 or they will be obsolete like what happen when merging from 1.0 to 2.0.
game
game
game
game
game
Angu...@hotmail.com
> Surface Tools built in. Also the addition of 5 sided patches to Surface
> Tools means a lot less seam from those silly three sided patches. All
> the complex character modeling I saw at the booth was done with this new
> ST, and no one was using NURBS. That's fine, because IMHO Surface Tools
> works better than NURBS.
>
nurbs. I agree, I think Surface tools (and HASH splines) are a joy to use and
a logical way to work to boot. I find nurbs are fine until you try and blend
curves on objects that need to be animated, then the troubles kick in. Spline
patches animated beautifully, use few control points, etc.
Thanks to Peter Watje...
A.
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Michael Duffy
DanMan wrote:
> amazing...
> (but still no deforming bones, eh?)
>
> it's bloody shame I won't be
> upgrading my copy of MAX2 to MAX3.
> Anyone out there wanna donate me $700? :)
>
Awww.. nuts! I knew I forgot to include something! (^_^) Yes, MAX 3 now has
deforming bones. There is a modifier called "Skin" I believe, which looks to
be a scaled down version of Physique. Skin uses envelopes for deformation,
but I don't think that you can assign specific weighting to individual
vertices.
Two other cool features I forgot to mention (now that I'm looking at my notes)
are Soft Select and Flex. Soft Select allows you to select several vertices,
and have the surrounding vertices "partially" selected according to a falloff
value. This allows you to have modifiers affect different vertices by
different amounts. So the selected vertices will be 100% affected by the next
modifier, the ones next to it might be 80% affected, etc.
Flex is kinda like a lite version of HyperMatter from what I could see.
Vertices affected by Flex lag during an animation so things like ears or hair
could be made to "wiggle" a bit the object moves.
Later,
Michael Duffy
mdu...@ionet.net
Michael Duffy
since the reason plugins needed to be recompiled from 1.0 to 2.0 had to do with
the fact that Kinetix went from using MSVC 4.2 to 5.0 thus causing a binary
level change in the code. I don't know this for a fact though.
Later,
Michael Duffy
mdu...@ionet.net
Kreg
Craig
Meme-X Inc.
Michael Duffy wrote in message <36F56100...@ionet.net>...
stephen gilbert
i'm going to be a first time max artist in april so i can't wait to get this
app!
currently i use inspire (lw lite)
stee+catz
Angu...@hotmail.com wrote in message <7d37eh$lk9$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>...
Jim Pollock
I saw it there also, and I agree, MAX 3 looks very exciting. But
according to the literature that I picked up at GDC the update price
from MAX 2.x will list for $795. I guess we will just have to see if
that translates into a lesser street price or not.
-Jim Pollock
Michael Duffy wrote:
>
> I just got back in town from the Game Developer's Conference, and
> Kinetix was showing off MAX 3 at their booth in the Expo. Holy cow!
> Let's just say that I saw it Tuesday night for the first time, and when
> I woke up Wednesday morning I realized that I had been dreaming about
> using MAX 3. Get Out Of My Head Kinetix!!! (^_^)
>
> Note that everything that follows is what I've heard or seen, and none
> of it is to be taken as the absolute word on anything. If there are
> errors below, don't blame me, use at your own risk, etc. etc.
>
> Release date is May 28th (though one of the employees at the booth
> thought it would be later than that, two others said it would be May
> 28th). Upgrade price is around $700.
>
> Highlights include:
>
> Surface Tools built in. Also the addition of 5 sided patches to Surface
> Tools means a lot less seam from those silly three sided patches. All
> the complex character modeling I saw at the booth was done with this new
> ST, and no one was using NURBS. That's fine, because IMHO Surface Tools
> works better than NURBS.
>