At SIGGRAPH '97 in Los Angeles, Kinetix debuted the next release of 3D Studio MAX. This new release contains over 1000 new features and enhancements that are primarily designed to cater to film and video professionals. MAX users will now have the power of NURBS, raytraced rendering, dynamics, and camera lens effects just to name a few. Aside from the new features, MAX 2 sports a beefed up, more efficient user interface mainly based on suggestions from users. Kinetix has decided to jump on the OpenGL bandwagon with full OpenGL support (and Direct 3D for 95 and NT 5 users). Early numbers show R2's OpenGL performance much faster than a comparable product on NT, Softimage 3.7. The end result is a product that is more than worth the upgrade price.THE NEW INTERFACE
Starting with the new interface, drag and drop is major enhancement. You can now drag and drop maps from the material editor to any slot that accepts maps, such as lights. You can also drag and drop materials straight to objects in viewports. There's even a new feature that allows you to drag and drop .max files straight into the viewports. And since .max files can be viewed as thumbnails now, there's little guesswork involved. You've also got a host of new modeless dialogs that make working with R2 a joy. For instance, the new display floater mimics the Display panel. Now you hide objects without ever having to leave the modify panel.THE MATERIALS EDITOR OVERHAUL
The new material editor is much easier to work with. You can now view AND edit up to 24 materials at once. Sample material slots can be magnified, rotated, and customized with your own objects and backgrounds. There are several new map types including cellular-a procedural map great for doing skins, water, or even a dry lakebed. It may become the most used map next to noise. The enhanced bitmap map allows you to crop maps or size maps to fit on your material. Navigating material trees is much easier, however new users may still have some ramp up time. The new Material/Map browser keeps you out of the Material Editor completely if you like. Here, you can drag and drop materials and/or maps straight from this modeless window. One very welcome addition is the ability to view thumbnail images of the maps that make up a given material in a hierarchical order.There are several new geometrical objects. Primitives include chamfer box and cylinder, which create nice rounded versions of their hard-edged counterparts. Many of the 2D shapes also have similar features that allow for filleted corners. The text tool is enhanced for multi-line entry, justification, and kerning and leading. A section tool has also been added, an enhanced version for 3D Studio VIZ, that creates 2D spline cross-sections of any 3D object.
LIGHTS AND SUCH
Lights, cameras, and helpers have been improved. Lights have had the most overhauls. All lights can now be attenuated using real world inverse squared calculations. R2 takes lighting a step further with contrast and diffuse softening spinners. Rather than having to fuss with material settings, you can simply alter these spinners for small rendering touch-ups. Cameras are based on real world cameras now so matching your .max scenes to live action shots will be much easier. Cameras have a new option for orthographic projection. Simply put- animated user (axionometric) views. A new basic helper is protractor to measure angles. Like everything else, its position can be animated as well as the value for expression based animation. New atmospheric helpers include box and cylinder apparati. This is because atmospheric effects such as combustion and volume fog can now use them.WARPING TO A NEW DIMENSION
Space Warps and systems have taken on new forms as well. There are now FFD-based space warps. Shoving an elephant through a keyhole is now possible. There are now separate categories for particle and dynamics-based space warps. Using new space warps such as Motor allows you to twist particles along a virtual axle as they emit. Finally, new modifier-based space warps allow you to bend, twist, taper, or apply noise to objects in world space. Lastly, the new Bones system makes setting up IK chains a snap. The AutoBoning feature takes any hierarchically linked objects and creates a linked bones system from it. Also, IK chains are automatically 2D when created in an ortho view. This makes animating IK chains much quicker since you don't have to first tweak axis constraints. See the paragraph on IK in a later paragraphMODIFICATION TO THE EXTREME
Modifiers have improved dramatically. You can now cut, copy and paste modifiers within an object's stack or even between objects. There are several new modifiers that make life easier. For instance, the Mesh Select modifier allows you to select an area without having to apply edit mesh. Speaking of Edit Mesh, it appears as if Kinetix is moving away from it with R2. The modifier has now been relegated to appearing in the "More" button within the modify panel. Along the lines of new modifiers, there are new FFD modifiers which allow for customizable numbers of control points, a Lattice modifier that turns any object into a framework based on visible edges. In short, modifiers and the modifier stack are much improved over R1.USING THE NEW IK
The new IK includes better constraint control, a spring back system, which returns the IK chain to its original position, and a new end effector controller that makes animating chains much less complicated. Overall, the new IK system will make animating easier, however some of the new paradigms for building and constrained chains may take some time to get used to for experienced users.NURBS MODELLING, YUP
Getting on to some of the major new features are things like NURBS. Users will be pleased to see that the NURBS modeling features of R2 are integrated right into the software like polygonal or patch modeling. Kinetix has taken it a step further with new interface elements such as a floating creation dialog box. NURBS are implemented as primitives, surfaces and curves. You can create ruled surfaces, blend surfaces, and u-lofts for more complex geometry (and that's just for starters). Surfaces can be dependent or independent. The surfacing technology from Mental Images (creators of the Mental Ray and Twister renderer) makes surface tessellation an afterthought. While the NURBS is impressive, there are still some features missing such as trimmed surfaces. Kinetix promises that this is being worked on, though.RAYTRACING. FINALLY!
Raytracing, another major feature, was sprung on the public at the last minute during SIGGRAPH. The welcome addition, developed by Blur Studios in Venice Beach, CA, is implemented as both a map and material. Rather than being built into the renderer, raytracing is actually independent of the main rendering engine. This means that you can raytrace in virtually any plug-in renderer, such as a cartoon renderer. Both the map and material have options for acceleration, blur, defocusing, antialiasing, and ray bounces. Although the user has an enormous amount of control, using the defaults is usually fine (and preferable considering the staggering amount of options you have). Even when using the raytracer with antialiasing off, the renderings a re staggering. For those who always griped about MAX rendering quality, your impressions will more than likely change. Raytracing is also implemented as a material. The Raytrace material essentially extends the Standard material's capability. Shininess strength is now unclamped for intense specular highlights. Special lighting effects such as translucency and phosphorescence make materials look much more realistic. The raytracer is a welcome addition for all MAX users. Of course, it's subject to some of the same speed limitations of every raytracer. However, options like selective raytracing and animatable settings like antialiasing, users can decide when and where the raytracing is needed.REAL CAMERA EFFECTS
Kinetix leaned on a developer, Digimation of St. Rose, LA, for its lens flare, glow, highlight, and focus features. Taking from the popular package, LenzFX, R2 directly integrates many camera lens effects that similar packages have had for several releases. The features are accessible through Video Post, which itself is mostly unchanged. Users can control most lens effects through color and intensity based gradients. These gradients are animatable and saveable meaning you can design complex elements and retrieve them at any time. After having seen many camera lens effects features in different packages, MAX R2's implementation is by far the most powerful.GETTING ANIMATED IN A NEW WAY
Animation has taken on a new face. While Track View has several interface enhancements, the real power comes with new controllers. Perhaps, the most impressive is the new motion capture utility. Similar to channels in Softimage, you can now animate objects based on various input devices. You can use a mouse, MIDI devices, your keyboard, or even a Sidewinder joystick from Microsoft to control how an object animates. One example is using the joystick to pilot a camera through a 3D world. A flight simulator in MAX! Rigid dynamics has been integrated into the product as a utility. While not real-time, the dynamics solver is one of the most comprehensive around. You can assign object properties via the solver itself or even through a material. Objects can react to gravity, wind, and other space warps. You can have hierarchies in your solutions to produce great wind chime effects. Collisions and object properties can be based on a number of dynamics models. This can be the object's bounding box, sphere, cylinder, or the object itself-, which of course takes longer. While the dynamics system is full featured, some users might find the fact that since it is a utility and not interactive are somewhat limiting. Nevertheless, it's a great start for a first-time implementation.SCRIPT YOUR WAY TO PERFECTION
Perhaps the most significant new feature in R2 is it's scripting ability. Scripting allows any user to create their own plug-ins within MAX. Way more powerful than R4's Keyscript, MAXScript plugs in to virtually ever part of the software. If you can do it with a standard plug-in, you can do it with a script. One beta tester even wrote a script to convert objects into MAX's form of MetaNURBS- in about a quarter page. Scripting will allow all MAX users to truly extend to power of the product.SUMMING IT ALL UP
MAX R2, is setting the bar higher once again. Kinetix and the Yost Group have expanded the product in 18 months that would take most other software vendors several releases to achieve. Apparently, the object-oriented nature of the software is paying off. The price of the software remains unchanged at $3,495.00 MSRP with an upgrade price of $795. (Users who purchased MAX 1.2 after SIGGRAPH upgrade for free). Some features definitely show since of first implementation such as dynamics and NURBS. Given Kinetix and the Yost Group's track record, improvements will more than likely be shortly forthcoming. If you've been wondering if all the hype is true- believe it. MAX R2 will rock your world.
Jeremy Hubbell is an animator and instructor in San Francisco. He has written chapters for books such as Inside 3D Studio MAX and instructed at several industry conferences. He can be reached at JHubbell@compuserve.com.