3D Studio Max - Sneek Peeks

Well, there have been a number of these snippet, little, cheeky videos released over the pass few months, all from different people and with an odd variety subjects and video quality - so, with a marketing man's head on I'm not sure what is going on. Are these attempts at viral intrigue, or releases fro people within Autodesk HQ, or what....

But...With a 3D Artists' head on, wow! I think, at least I hope that some or all of these little 'sneek peeks' make it into the final build version (either 2013 or 2014), because some of these are fantastic!

videos after break//




I remember this from a few months back, this system works quite well, although it is locked into the ribbon at the moment (which is a little annoying).

MASS FX 



Now, this has been talked about quite a lot, it a reworking of the physics engines, looks properly cool. There are a fair few videos associated with the Mass FX update release, including hints of soft body integration, in the form of "mcloth." Should be good!







Nitrous Viewports





Nitrous accelerated graphics core, is basically a new viewport RT rendering format released in the 2012 edition, I must admit I do use it a lot these days, as a gauge to AO and shadow casting, as well as nice semi rendered Pre-viz vids. However, their new work on this platform looks really fantastic! DOF! Bokeh effects! What will be the point in rendering the dam scene in future!! this looks incredible and will stand to better link the speed and relationship between pre-viz and production and allow the client to better understand the final output earlier.

Media Sync

This looks to be some really interesting research into linking other, non-affiliated programs into the Max pipeline for smaller studios. We know Max used to have a good relationship with Combustion back in the day, and currently works quite well with "composite" (a free little comp program that ships with 2012) but as many small studios run an Adobe / Autodesk pipeline it seems Max will eventually be catering towards this. This is brilliant news (lame for me however, as I have only just, 4 monhs ago, bought the MAX2AE plugin from Boomerlabs). This sync state looks to deliver a very similar result to MAX2AE in the fact that, the assets can be exported direct from max as pre-views (Nitrous of course!) then imported into a new scene in AE, followed closely by the camera and nulls straight out of the max scene. This has proved extremely useful in the past, and will hopefully only get better and more fluid in the future.



Seriously exciting times!