M3 Launch - Brisbane - Review

[Justin Hunt]

Last night I attended the M3 launch. M3 being Max9, Maya8 and Motion Builder7.5

 

The SIGRAPH show reel opened the launch. I a must admit I was a little disappointed with that architectural stuff, considering the high quality images and animations in many of the forums on the net there were some that surprised me by their poor quality. Not to take anything away from them as the show reel as a whole is very cool.

 

The demonstrations flowed fairly seamlessly between Max and Maya, to best show how data can be easily and quickly passed between the two programs. Data transfer and character animation in the three packages were the main focus of the event, with a brief look at some new tools in Maya and Max.

 

Adding many new tools to each of the packages has taken a backseat to 64bit implementation and more extensive cleanup of the internal code to achieve significant speed enhancements. For example, many of the operations that were not multi-threaded in Maya now are. Unfortunately the machines they were running were not 64bit so we couldn’t get to see it in action. The Sydney event promises to have 64bit machines with 8gig of ram.

 

I am not going to go into detail about most of the character animation features covered in Motion Builder and Maya improvments, as a non user most of that stuff went over my head. Although the enhancements made to the FBX format and Point cache make it much easier to move models and their rigs between the three packages and other models.

 

Both Max and Maya now have Metal ray 3.5.

 

Final Gather has had a total work over after many users complaining about how slow and difficult it is to use. Most of the issues have been dealt with via presets, ala Vray.

The presets range from Draft all the way up to Very High, negating the need to endlessly tweak settings to get suitable results. FG can now bee seen in the Fame buffer as it is being calculated, making it quicker to see results.

 

The Sun and Sky system is quick and very easy to work with. It builds on the existing sun system, i.e. choosing your location in the world and set the compass to North change the time to suit. These can be animated, making solar studies a breeze.

 

The new Arch and Design material is a development of the Architectural Materials, and are enhanced for Mental Ray. Once again presets are used to make it very quick to set up new materials. The ability to mix presets to achieve different types of finishes such as matt or glossy makes this shader very flexible.

Ambient occlusion is built in to the shader as is the Rounded Corners.

Rounded corners will give sharp edges the appearance of being beveled depending on a radius. Being a material shader it will save a lot on modeling and poly count.

Glossy reflections can be controlled via resolution. If a reflection is very blurred then the reflection map resolution can be dropped, making rendering quicker.

 

The car paint shader is very detailed and I can see many applications for it other than cars.

 

To make it easier to understand and learn these new shaders the tool tips are more descriptive and give suggestions and settings to achieve good results.

 

Proxy maps have been added. A low res proxy of a high res map can be generated so that the proxy displays in view port but renders with the highres map, thus freeing up Ram and speeding up display.

ProBoleens is included. The ability to add as many operands into one modifier makes for a very quick and easier workflow. An other nice feature is the ability to generate a quad output along with the control of the division’s results in a clean mesh and detail where detail is needed.

 

Other features include ACAD2007 imports and choice of virtual or universal paths, which should solve a few network rendering issues of some machine not finding path properly.

 

IN conclusion if you are moving data between Max, Maya and Motion Builder then these upgrades are a must.

It would have been great to see 64bit in action.

Mental Ray3.5 is a huge step forward. It looks like they have been looking very closely at the way VRay works and implemented in MR.

The new A&D shaders are fantastic as is the physical sun and sky.

Despite the lack of a whole bunch of new tools and features that are included are quite impressive. The presentation as done well was and fairly polished as to be expected after doing it 15 times before.

 

I for one am looking forward to upgrading

 

 

JHV

[Nic H]

nice review justin. sounds like some pretty interesting stuff in there,im looking foward to checking it out down here, seeing as though iv never been to one before.

[Justin Hunt]

It was good, and the two hours went quickly. I would have like a q&A session afterwards as I have a few questions with regards to haw Max and revit talk. If you get a chance could you ask if it is possible to link revit file directly into Max or if you have to save out to a dwg2007 file.

 

Enjoy when you get to see it

 

JHV