Nex Gen Viz

User Interface Refresh
The 3ds Max Design user interface has been updated to allow for task‐based workflows. As a result, key functionality becomes much more accessible when it’s needed most through context sensitive user interface components.

Adobe Photoshop Interoperability
Artists can now assign a Microsoft DirectX software material to an object and reference individual layers in Adobe Photoshop .psd files as a texture input, for enhanced interoperability with Photoshop. Additionally, the Viewport Canvas also offers support for Photoshop blending modes and quick updating of textures on 3ds Max Design models.

Support for Locked Tracks
3ds Max Design 2010 supports the locking of any parameter that can be animated, including those with animation layers. Wires, expressions and scripts will still evaluate when locked, but they will not be editable. Vital for people working in teams, this toolset enables users to prevent team members from editing specific tracks.

Link Constraint
Support for a new Link constraint enables users to quickly animate the links between objects using the standard 3ds Max Design keyframe animation UI. The tool lets them quickly see their constrained frame numbers and access linked keyframes in the Trackbar, Dope Sheet and Curve Editor.

PFlowAdvanced
PFlowAdvanced lets users incorporate sophisticated particle effects into their scenes - perfect for creating water features, fireplaces, or other elements. It includes 14 operators new to 3ds Max Design including new precision Painting tools (for precise particle placement), the Shape Plus operator (for defining the shape of particles) and a wide range of Grouping operators (for creating subsets of particles). It also extends and optimizes the previous PFlow functionality while reducing user interface (UI) complexity, resulting in vastly improved performance and a streamlined, thoroughly 3ds Max Design workflow.

Cloth
A whole new range of cloth effects is now available to 3ds Max Design users. The cloth toolset now supports pressure settings for simulating inflated, enclosed cloth surfaces (e.g. cushions, balloons) and cloth can now be torn with variable strength and timing (e.g. cutting, tearing and unzipping cloth). Collision objects can even be set to cut cloth when they collide. Finally, a new Inherit Velocity tool blends a new simulation with one from previous frames to create a smooth transition for staged simulations.

Hair
The 3ds Max Design Hair toolset has now been enhanced to give visualization specialists more precise control over the styling and animation of hair (often used for grass). A new Spline Deform feature enables them to add splines to a set of hairs which act as control guides so that the hairs can be posed, keyed or assigned a dynamic target - with the hair following.

ProSound
Add a new level of professionalism to presentations by adding musical scores, ambient sound and narration with the new ProSound multi‐track audio system. The new 3ds Max Design ProSound toolset enables users to add up to 100 audio tracks to their scenes and animate the volume of each track. The technology supports both PCM and compressed audio in AVI and WAV format with up to six output channels.

Containers
The addition of the Containers toolset to 3ds Max Design facilitates collaboration and flexible workflows by enabling users to collect multiple objects into a single container when dealing with complex scenes. Related objects (e.g. sections of a city) can be placed in a container and treated as a single element. Opening the container exposes the content while closing the container externalizes the data. Containers can be temporarily unloaded from the scene, toggling data in and out as needed to manage complexity. Such workflows can save memory, increase viewport performance and decrease load and save times. Container nodes can be translated, deleted, copied, or saved - affecting everything in the container. Containers also override object properties - so users can organize scene display using container properties without affecting layer organization (similar to a nested layer workflow). Multiple containers created by others can be referenced into a single scene ‐ enabling users to work in‐context with each other. Accessing and editing each other’s container is managed with permissions on the container - allowing flexible workflows while also imposing constraints on what can be edited.

Enhanced Scene Explorer
With 3ds Max Design 2010, Autodesk continues to expand the functionality of the Scene Explorer and increase its level of integration with the rest of the software. This powerful scene management toolset now works with viewports, Track View, as well as the Material Explorer. Additionally, Scene Explorer now offers improved management tools - making it easier to navigate, inspect and modify the properties of objects in a scene.

OBJ Import Improvements
Improved OBJ plug‐in performance and expanded support for the OBJ file format facilitate the importing and exporting of model data between Mudbox software and 3ds Max Design - as well as other third‐party 3D digital sculpting applications. Users will now be able to see if their OBJ files contain texture coordinates and smoothing groups. They will also have options for triangulating polygons on import, choosing how normals are imported and for saving presets for normal and polygon import, for future use.

Flight Studio Support
A new 3ds Max Design plug‐in enables users to import and export OpenFlight format scenes (FLT files). Users can now load, edit and export OpenFlight scene graphs and databases from within 3ds Max Design - while retaining scene graph structure and attributes. Instead of translating and losing data, 3ds Max Design can be used as an OpenFlight editor.

Real‐Time Photometric Lighting and Viewport Exposure Control
For the architect who wishes to experiment with advanced lighting effects in their viewport, 3ds Max Design 2010 delivers real-time photometric lighting and exposure control. Not only do these features support timesaving, iterative workflows, exposure control can improve the accuracy of final renderings.

Support for High Resolution Render Output
Enhancements to the 3ds Max Design automatic memory management feature enables architects and designers to render out large, print resolution images with 32-bit systems.

Multi‐Map Shader: mental ray
A new 3ds Max Design Multi‐Map Shader for mental ray lets users purposely assign specific color variations to a set of objects that otherwise share the same material. It can also be used to quickly randomize or assign colors to multiple objects/maps based on object IDs or Material IDs. This new capability could be used to randomize the colors of trees, leaves, crowds, or anything repetitive that could benefit from a degree of color variation.

Animation Flicker Reduction: mental ray
3ds Max Design 2010 enables users to render animation sequences in mental ray with indirect illumination calculations (Final Gather), greatly reducing or eliminating traditional flickering issues. The ability to use the Final Gather cache, and render animation sequences faster has also been improved.

Final Gather Progressive Rendering
Progressive feedback has now been added for mental ray Final Gather, helping artists to more quickly evaluate their rendering results.

Render Surface Map
3ds Max Design 2010 enables architects and designers to generate bitmaps based on the surface of the geometry (Density maps, Dust maps, SubSurface maps, and Cavity maps) that can be used as masks to blend textures. Maps can also be generated from subobject selections and wrapped textures that are generated automatically with blended seams. These provide a good starting point for painting or layering details in bitmaps. For example, an architect might generate a Cavity grayscale bitmap where the crevices on the object are darkest, use this as a mask to blend dirt, rust, or emphasize contours with shading.

Linear Color Space Workflow
Gamma correction has been improved to correctly handle images and textures for a physically accurate rendering workflow where color consistency is critical. Gamma settings now load correctly with files and propagate correctly on network rendering solutions.

mental mill/MetaSL Support
3ds Max Design 2010 is the first animation package to integrate the mental images powerful mental mill technology. This means that 3ds Max Design users will be able to develop, test and maintain shaders and complex shader graphs for hardware and software rendering with real‐time visual feedback - no programming skills required. MetaSL shaders can be created using the included mental mill Artist Edition software. These shaders are completely hardware agnostic, meaning they do not need to be re-authored for different target platforms. mental mill supports CgFX, HLSL, and GLSL, as well as C++ for mental ray technology and RealityServer; plus, the mental mill application programming interface (API) enables third parties to develop back‐end plug-ins for other targets, including special purpose processors and other software renderers.

Review Enhancements
Representing a major leap forward in viewport display, Review 3 helps take the guesswork out of rendering. It offers support for ambient occlusion, HDRI-based lighting, soft shadows, hardware anti-aliasing, interactive exposure control, and the revolutionary mental mill shader technology from mental images. Combined with prior abilities for textures, bump maps and photometric area lights - viewports give you live feedback like never before. The Viewport menu system has also been re-designed to significantly improve the user experience. For example, you can now take advantage of the Layer Manager to control groups of lights (light banks) to quickly turn on and off lights in the viewport, similar to what you can do with the 3ds Max Design software renderer.

Exposure Lighting Analysis Improvements
Simulate the lighting in your designs with confidence - Exposure lighting analysis technology has been validated by the National Research Council Canada (NRC), Canada’s leading organization for scientific research and development, and the same organization that has conducted validation studies on Radiance for lighting simulation. A feature unique to 3ds Max Design 2010, Exposure enables you to achieve more sustainable designs by analyzing how sun, sky, and artificial lighting interact with your design and exploring direct lighting effects right in the viewport. Load complex designs and watch lighting levels adjust in the scene as colors.

Interactive Lighting Analysis
A unique and new feature of 3ds Max Design 2010 lets you analytically explore direct lighting effects with interactive results right in the viewport using the new real‐time pseudo‐color exposure control. You can use the exposure control to establish color gradations for different light levels and then interactively adjust your lights until they give the necessary coverage. You can then use Exposure to validate the results and to factor in the impact of indirect lighting effects.

Global Quality Knobs: mental ray
Architects familiar with Revit will appreciate the addition of global quality knobs to the 3ds Max Design mental ray toolset. This new feature can be used to quickly dial up or down quality settings for shadows, glossy refractions and reflections along with image antialiasing and indirect illumination quality.

Graphite Modeling Tools
3ds Max Design 2010 takes its polygon modeling tools to a whole new level. With at least 100 new tools for freeform design and advanced polygonal modeling, the Graphite modeling tools facilitate creativity and artistic freedom. Additionally, the Graphite tools are displayed in one central location, making it easier to find the tool you need for the job. Moreover, users can customize the tool display or hide the command panel and model in Expert Mode. In addition to the many modeling and mapping tools available in previous versions of the software, the Graphite toolkit includes anumber of completely new tools for such operations as:
o Sculpting with assorted brushes
o Quick re‐topologizing
o Granular polygon editing
o Locking transforms to any surface
o Freeform creation of vertices
o Modifying and creating smart selections
o Quick drawing of surfaces and shapes
o Quick transformations

Material Explorer
The Material Explorer revolutionizes the way artists interact with objects and materials. Users can now quickly browse all materials in the scene, and view material properties and relationships. The Material Explorer also enables them to replace materials - making it much easier to manage even highly complex scenes.

xView Mesh Analyzer
Validate your 3D models prior to export or rendering using the new xView mesh analyzer technology. Get an interactive view of where problems may lie to help you make crucial decisions. This key new tool makes testing of models and maps significantly faster and more efficient. Users can test or query for flipped faces, overlapping faces and unwelded vertices. They can also add their own specific tests and queries.

Viewport Canvas
New in 3ds Max Design 2010 is the ability for artists to paint on a 3D model directly in the Viewport. This means artists will be able to quickly create new maps or extend existing maps using brushes, blend modes, fill, clone and erase. The Viewport also provides quick updates for changes to textures made in Adobe Photoshop software.

ProBooleans Enhancements
A new Quadify modifier has been added to the 3ds Max Design ProBooleans toolset that enables modelers to clean up triangles in model for better subdivision and smoothing. A new Merge Boolean operation has also been added which lets them attach an object (or multiple objects) to another while maintaining the transforms, topology and modifier stacks of each object.

UVW Unwrap Enhancements
Manipulating UV maps in the Viewport is now as easy as modeling in the Viewport thanks to a significantly expanded 3ds Max Design UVW Unwrap toolset. New features include such UV Selection tools as Growing/Shrinking Rings and Loops, and quick editing tools for aligning, spacing, and stitching UVs.

ProOptimizer
The new 3ds Max Design ProOptimizer technology is ideal for quickly and intelligently optimizing high‐poly count 3D models. It enables users to precisely control the number of faces or points their scene/model has; useful faces are removed last, so that a selection can be reduced up to 75% without loss of detail. Scenes can be optimized in real time, or batch optimized. ProOptimizer technology maintains UV texture channel information and vertex color channel information, respects the symmetry of symmetrical models, preserves explicit normals, and gives users the option to protect or exclude object borders.

Some of the new features of 3ds max Design 2010 include:

• New Graphite modeling tools represent a modern approach to 3D modeling - over 100 tools for freeform sculpting, texture painting, and advanced polygonal modeling, unified in an new user interface.

• Create powerful referencing workflows to organize complex scenes easily by treating multiple objects and scenes as a single Container object. Set rules for the Container to control access to its content in collaborative environments. Fast loading and unloading of containers helps you improve performance and reduce memory requirements.

• The third generation of Review technology represents a major leap forward in viewport display, helping take the guesswork out of final renders. It offers support for ambient occlusion, High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) based lighting, soft shadows, hardware anti-aliasing, interactive exposure control, and the revolutionary mental mill shader technology.

• The new Material Explorer simplifies the way artists and designers interact with objects and materials. Navigate all rendering-related assets in the scene, perform operations on multiple objects, or inspect individual materials. The Material Explorer also lets you replace materials - making iterations much easier, even in highly complex scenes.

Software Requirements

3ds Max Design 2010 requires one of the following 32‐bit or 64‐bit operating systems:
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2 or higher)
• Microsoft Windows Vista (Business, Premium and Ultimate)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64
• Microsoft Windows Vista 64 bit (Business, Premium and Ultimate)

3ds Max Design 2010 requires the following internet browser:
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or higher

3ds Max Design 2010 requires the following supplemental software:
• DirectX 9.0c* (required), OpenGL (optional)

* Some features of 3ds Max Design 2010 are only enabled when used with graphics hardware that supports Shader Model 3.0 (Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 3.0). Check with your manufacturer to determine if your hardware supports Shader Model 3.0.

Hardware Requirements

At a minimum, 3ds Max Design 2010 32‐bit software requires a system with the following:
• Intel Pentium 4 or higher, AMD Athlon 64 or higher, or AMD Opteron processor
• 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
• 2 GB hard disk space
• 1 GB swap space (2 GB recommended)
• Direct3D 10, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL‐capable graphics card with minimum 128 MB RAM
• Three‐button mouse with mouse driver software
• DVD‐ROM drive

Note: Apple computers based on Intel processors and running Microsoft operating systems are supported using Apple’s Boot Camp.

At a minimum, 3ds Max Design 2010 64‐bit software requires a system with the following:
• Intel EM64T, AMD Athlon 64 or higher, AMD Opteron processor
• 1 GB RAM (4 GB recommended)
• 2 GB hard disk space
• 1 GB swap space (2 GB recommended)
• Direct3D 10, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL‐capable graphics card with minimum 128 MB RAM
• Three‐button mouse with mouse driver software
• DVD‐ROM drive

Autodesk has announced the release of 3ds Max 2010 and 3ds max Design 2010.

Information has been posted at the Autodesk Press Room at http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=11268974

When using the mental ray rendering engine in 3ds Max 2009, distributed bucket rendering can be used for speeding up the rendering of single images as you work. Especially when rendering high-resolution still images, you can get much faster results with distributed bucket rendering. This type of rendering uses the processors from other machines on your network to speed up the rendering time on your machine.

Rendering menu/main toolbar > Render Setup > Render Setup dialog > Processing panel > Distributed Bucket Rendering rollout

Note: The Processing panel appears only when the mental ray renderer is the currently active renderer.

Controls on this rollout are for setting up and managed distributed bucket rendering. With distributed rendering, multiple networked systems can all work on a mental ray rendering. Buckets are assigned to systems as they become available.

TIPS:
When you use distributed bucket rendering, be sure to:
Turn on Use Placeholder Objects on the Translator Options rollout.
When placeholder objects are enabled, geometry is sent to the renderer only on demand.
Leave Bucket Order set to Hilbert on the Sampling Quality rollout.
With Hilbert order, the sequence of buckets to render uses the fewest number of data transfers.
Contour shading does not work with distributed bucket rendering.
You cannot use distributed bucket rendering when you render to texture.

Important: To use distributed bucket rendering, you must set up host systems that are capable of running the mental ray renderer. There are two ways to do so: set up satellite systems by installing 3ds Max on the machines, or install mental ray standalone licensing on the machines.

You can launch distributed bucket rendering from the command line, using 3dsmaxcmd.exe.

If you use satellite processors, you cannot use Backburner to manage distributed bucket rendering. When host processors have mental ray standalone licenses, you can use Backburner to manage distributed bucket rendering.

Procedures
To use mental ray distributed rendering:

1. On the Render Setup dialog, go to the Processing panel. On the Distributed Bucket Rendering rollout, turn on Distributed Render. Note: The Net Render option on the Common Parameters rollout has no effect on distributed bucket rendering.

2. Click to select the names of those satellite or host systems you want to use for distributed rendering. You can click All to select all the host names in the list, or None to select none of the hosts. You can click Add and manually add the IP addresses of the host computers.

3. If other host systems have maps installed on them, with exactly the same file names and path names as on your local host, turn on Distributed Maps. With Distributed Maps turned on, remote renderers can use their local copy of maps, which saves time.

4. Render the scene. Each system renders the buckets assigned to it. The final rendering appears on your local system, with buckets arriving in an indeterminate order.

3ds Max CAT software is a plug-in for 3ds Max 2009 and Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009 and available to subscription customers. It is a set of tools used for character animation.

New Features include:

CATMuscle Integration
CATMuscle is a fully scaleable solution for solving skin deformation problems. CATMuscle provides you with the tools you need to achieve a smooth, organic skin deformation across a wide range of motion. It's easy to learn, and requires no understanding of anatomy.
CATMuscle rigs can be as simple or as complex as you wish, so they can suit your purposes whether you are working in film or game development.

Rigging
New rigging features include:
Setup Controllers
Layers can now have a setup controller rather than just a setup value. Any complex procedural animation can be configured onto the "Setup" or "Base" controller.
Bones can also contain a setup controller, which is used to drive animation. These controllers can contain procedural animation such as constraints, and script controllers.
Setup controllers for layers and bones are saved, and loaded with rig presets.
Layer Configuration Baking
Now each layer controller can save a mini clip file that defines all of the settings for that layer.
New Rig Nodes
You can now add extra information, like props, muscle configurations and skin meshes, to rigs. The extra information is saves, merged, and/or deleted with the rigs.
New Rig Saver
A new rig preset system allows you to save rigs by themselves, without their animation.
New CATUnits Position, Rotation, and Float Controllers
These controllers are used to create rigs that resize with the CATRig when CATUnits are changed.

New Inheritance Settings on Bones
Bones now have Inheritance options for Animation and Setup Mode. You can disable position, rotation or scale inheritance for the entire bone, including all layers, using a single toggle.

Layers
New layering features include:
Layer Collapsing Tool
A new layer collapsing tool allows you to collapse layers while preserving source keyframe times, keep constraints, and plot constraints to keyframes.
New Layer Manager
An all new layer manager has been written for complete CATRig layer management. It is both simpler and easier to use than the previous layer manager. Most layer operations can now be applied to many layers at once simply by selecting them in the layer manager.

CATMotion
New CATMotion features include:
Arbitrary Numbers of Feet Per CATMotion Limb
CATMotion now supports arbitrary bones as feet. You can turn any bone that is the child of a limb (a walking stick, for example) into a foot using a simple toggle.
CATMotion Foot Nodes Automatically Placed on Ground Plane
Should your rig's setup pose not place the character's feet flat on the ground (for example, the "Da Vinci" pose), 3ds Max CAT 3 can place them there automatically. Previous versions required the use of large offsets.