Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 announced

Autodesk gets set to release the 2012 version of 3ds Max, providing artists with a new range of creative toolsets -- read on for preview videos of the Nitrous Viewport

Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core helps artists make better creative decisions

With the 2012 versions of Autodesk software for digital entertainment creation set to arrive this April, Autodesk has added a number of new tools to the release of 3ds Max.
As audiences and artists require more sophisticated content, Autodesk has emphasised its new, single-step interoperability that maximises creative capabilities and workflow.
There have also been a number of preview videos posted to YouTube. Scroll down to view the Nitrous Viewport at the end of the post.

Key new features:

• Move 3D data between software -- single-step interoperability between 3ds Max, Maya, Motionbuilder, Mudbox and ICE in Softimage
• New f-curve editor -- enables animators to switch between multiple Autodesk products using uniform terminology and a unified UI when editing animation curves
• Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core -- handles larger data sets with minimal impact on interactivity. Advanced scene management techniques and new render quality display provide a smoother workflow and a clear idea of final output
• mRigids Rigid-Body Dynamics uses multi threaded NVIDIA PhysX engine -- enables the creation of complex simulations in the 3ds Max Viewport
• New save and load brush settings -- enables artists to easily switch between favourite presets. When painting bitmaps in the Viewport Canvas, the clone brush source can be taken from anywhere on screen

“Artists are facing shorter deadlines coupled with increasing expectations for quality. 3ds Max delivers powerful tools that take advantage of recent hardware advances, along with better interoperability with our other products.
“Together these enhancements help artists to make creative decisions early, validate them and deliver better results faster,” says Marc Petit, senior vice president of Autodesk Media and Entertainment.

mRigids creates compelling simulations directly in the 3ds Max viewport

Pricing and Availability

3ds Max 2012 is priced at $3495 with an upgrade from the 2011 version costing $1745.  The new release will be available from April 2011.
3ds Max is also expected to be part of the Entertainment Creation Suite Premium 2012 -- together with Softimage, Mudbox, and Motion builder at a price of $6,495.
For more information visit the 3ds Max product page on the Autodesk website.
<h4>Nitrous Viewport previews:</h4>

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New features for Maya 2012 announced

Autodesk has unveiled Maya 2012, adding new tools for pre-viz, games prototyping, extended simulation capabilities and better pipeline integration

Viewport enhancements: now offers a range of full-screen effects

3D software giant Autodesk has announced a range of new features for leading 3D animation tool Maya.
Alongside enhancements to the Viewport and the addition of editable motion trails, is a focus on interoperability with other software including MotionBuilder, Mudbox and Softimage.
Maya 2012 contains single-step workflows, enabling users to move 3D data directly between the latest versions of Autodesk’s 3D product line.

Do more with less

Speaking to Autodesk prior to the announcement, 3D World was given a preview to a number of new features. It was said that a significant amount of the new features were implemented as a result of what senior product marketing manager Rob Hoffman labelled “The Avatar Effect”.
“Artists need to do more with less,” he says. “They are being asked to do a huge amount of work for less time and money. It’s something all artists are struggling with today.”
Hoffman went on to note that Autodesk recognised that users were using more than one piece of software, and that efficiency between different platforms has become a key focus.

Summary of new features:

• Viewport 2.0 Enhancements — now includes full-screen effects: motion blur, depth-of-field and ambient occlusion, component and manipulator displays, batch rendering capabilities and a high-performance API
• Node-Based Render Passes — create and edit node-based representations of render passes and render the composited output directly using the mental ray renderer
• Editable Motion Trails — Edit animation directly in the viewport, without needing to switch context to the graph editor
• Sequencer Enhancements — A Sequencer Playlist with a configurable spreadsheet view to reorder clips, edit In and Out points and change camera assignments; as well as support for multi-track audio and the ability to output multiple shots as a single sequence for easier game cinematic rendering or export to a games engine.
• Substance Smart Textures — dynamic, animatable and editable resolution-independent Substance smart textures and filters
• Craft Animation Tools — Four new camera rigs from the Craft Director Studio animation tool for creating complex camera movements. Also – four pre-rigged models
• New Simulation Options — Incorporates the multi-threaded NVIDIA PhysX engine (Windows only) for static, dynamic and kinematic rigid-body simulations in the viewport and the Digital Molecular Matter plug-in for shattering simulations from Pixelux Entertainment

“With Maya 2012, we have continued our long-term focus on improving production efficiency as well as real-time creative iteration,” says Marc Petit, senior vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment.

Editable motion trails are a long overdue feature, but it's been delivered extremely well within the viewport

Pricing and availability

Autodesk has stated that it expects Maya 2012 to be available in April 2011. The software costs $3,495 for a standalone licence, and $1,795 for an upgrade from Maya 2011.
Maya is also expected to be part of the Entertainment Creation Suite Premium 2012 – together with Softimage, Mudbox, and Motion builder at a price of $6,495.

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Review: LightWave 10

Industry veteran NewTek has brought out an update to its 3D application. 3D World finds out whether it’s worth the upgrade

Newtek has updated LightWave at NAB 2011 – find out what’s in LightWave 10.1.

Using the Piranhalien from the LightWave 10 content. Unlike the VPR equivalent (right), this final render includes motion blur and depth of field

Price:
Full version: £599 / $895 / €695
Upgrade: £339 / $495 / €395
Developer:
NewTek
Main features:

• Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR)
• Linear workflow
• Improved I/O
• 3Dconnexion support

The last time 3D World reviewed LightWave was version 9.5 in December 2008. LightWave 9.6, widely considered the best yet, was released just a month later. NewTek then announced a next generation of LightWave called CORE. This isn’t that LightWave.
NewTek decided that since creating a worthy version of CORE would take a lot longer than envisaged, a new ordinal version of its flagship 3D software would be released, with CORE available to those who want to help beta test it and included in all LightWave 10 licences when finished.
LightWave 10 is a solid release, with new features that are mostly well done, if a little raw. The most immediately obvious is the Viewport Preview Renderer, VPR, which transforms any 3D viewport into a rapid iterative renderer that can have snapshots saved from it – meaning that often you won’t even need to hit [F9].
There are certain things it can’t see at the moment, notably depth of field, motion blur and preprocessed nodal surfaces.

VPR can be used in more than one viewport at once and at different resolutions, as show here. FiberFX can only be shown in the first viewport, though. NewTek has added a snapshot button that enables you to save the viewport image to disk

However, it does see some things that LightWave’s most famous interactive renderer plug-in, FPrime, can’t, such as Hypervoxels, FiberFX and volumetric lights.
FPrime owners will need to weigh up this and the fact that VPR pays attention to LightWave’s own radiosity settings and linear workflow tools to make the decision whether to upgrade.
LightWave now has an easy-to-use end-to-end linear workflow system, with centralised global controls and individual overrides where necessary, that compares favourably to packages such as 3ds Max and Blender.
For new scenes created in 10, leaving all the controls set to linear should be all that’s needed to get richer renders that are ideal for further post-processing – although bringing in older scenes will require some thought for best results.
You can now see anaglyphic stereo in OpenGL and in VPR, including animated previews. This feature supports toe-in and parallel-style stereo, but doesn’t yet offer the possibility of off-axis or parallel axis asymmetric frustum, or changing the colours of the lenses in the glasses used.
While these omissions mean that it’s similar to the anaglyphic system added to LightWave 5.5 in 1997, the added VPR functionality means it’s a lot more useful than having to render separate frames and composite them.
Toe-in is really the only physically possible choice available for compositing LightWave with live action, but for all-CG shots either of the other two mechanisms would be better.

Virtual studio

Another addition to Layout is the Virtual Studio tool. It’s an interesting concept for those with the opportunity to exploit it.
Imagine a hydra with an animator for each head and someone else controlling the camera that’s filming it, all in one copy of LightWave.

Using a 3Dconnexion SpaceExplorer enables you to set your shot quickly and comfortably, while VPR, new to this version of LightWave, can show volumetric features such as light and voxels in the viewport

Using 3Dconnexion devices and InterSense’s VCam, this is in theory possible, but the Virtual Studio is in its
infancy; fragile and poorly documented.
Support for 3Dconnexion’s 3D mice is a welcome inclusion to Layout, though. With the device set to Walk, you can specify a ground plane through which the camera or other chosen object can’t pass and a bank limit to steady motions, whereas Fly allows you full aerobatic possibilities.
Right now, you can’t customise the various buttons on more advanced 3D mice, which makes it awkward for use in Modeler, where keyboard shortcuts are more necessary.
LightWave’s MDD system has been in use for transferring point-level animation between 3D apps for a long time and plugins such as PointOven are well-established in other 3D tools.
MD Scan and Bake have been updated for Autodesk’s Geocache equivalent to be used and to bake multiple items at a time. Importing and exporting Geocache vertex data caches between LightWave and Maya works well and there are no longer any scaling issues.

Exporting FBX or Collada formats using defaults ruins this scene because of rotation order issues. However, the Geocache format works just fine in both directions

While inter-application data exchange is a major focus of this update, LightWave is still hampered by the fact that it uses a different rotation order to other prominent applications, making transferring higher-level animation between LightWave and other packages less easy than it should be.
Although the Valkyrie suite of I/O tools received a lot of work in the development of 10, moving a character from one environment to another using FBX or Collada is problematic if you aren’t using the strict rigging and naming conventions imposed by MotionBuilder.
LightWave’s ZBrush compatibility has also been improved, with better OBJ exporters creating their own MTL files and handling scaling more effectively.

The documentation

The major problem with LightWave 10 is the documentation. It’s an ugly mix of the manuals from 7, 8 and 9, with new bits from 10 thrown in.
Screenshots aren’t uniformly updated and often the text refers to an older way of achieving a task that hasn’t been possible for a number of years.

Previews can be rendered rapidly with VPR and the window undocked for more resolution flexibility, giving very accurate animation tests

Some of the new features can’t be found easily or at all, and the page layout is haphazard and inconsistent.
If you’re on a 64-bit Windows or Mac machine and already have 9.6 and FPrime, you might wonder whether you should upgrade.
If linear workflow, better communication with other packages and improved MDD controls are important, then it’s a yes.
Should you primarily be a 9.6 modeller, though, version 10 offers nothing useful you don’t already have.
However, if you’re still using a version prior to 9, we’d say go for it, particularly for the easy linear workflow, powerful and artist-friendly render engine and increased accent on decent I/O.
For those who’ve never used a 3D package before, LightWave has a shallow learning curve and one of the friendliest communities around – and the price is outstanding.
Our main concern with this version is that NewTek finishes what it’s started and these new features don’t wither on the vine like Motion Mixer or IKBoost have done.

What about Core?

CORE was originally announced in February 2009 and was expected to be released by the end of 2010, as reported in 3D World 133, but the decision was wisely taken to keep it in beta and temporarily switch focus to
a new version of LightWave 3D.
People buying into LightWave 10 now get it at the original price of $895 and are entitled to a complete version of CORE version 1.0 when it’s released later on in 2011.
People who buy in once CORE is released will need to pay the increased cost of $1,495.
CORE will feature a modifier stack, history and the ability to nodally connect anything to anything in the same fashion as Houdini, but for those outside NewTek’s HardCORE programme it’s all been a bit of a damp squib after the excitement of the initial two-week viral campaign.

3D World verdict

PROS
• End-to-end linear workflow
• VPR feature speeds up texturing and lighting immensely
• Good-looking new UI
• Extensive bug-fixes throughout
CONS
• The manual is extremely poor
• A difficult decision if you already have 9.6 and FPrime
• Still no major Modeler updates
LightWave 10 isn’t a huge update, but it’s one that we hope will be consolidated over the course of this version

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Software review: Vue 9

3D World looks at the improvements in e-on software’s 3D modelling application for digital environments

Price: $1,495 (xStream), $995 (Infinite) | Developer: e-on software | Platform Windows/Mac
Main features

• Relighting
• Improved terrain modelling/painting
• Parameter Publishing
• HyperBlobs
• Flicker reduction

Let’s start with some good news for Mac users: Vue 9 comes rebuilt (“from the ground up” according to e-on) as a 64-bit native Cocoa application that equals its Windows counterpart in speed and stability.
So, if you’re running Vue on Mac it seems like version 9 is a must-have upgrade regardless of other features.
But what about Windows users – how much does this update offer compared to Vue 8.5?
Firstly, Vue’s interface has been redesigned with softer grey colours, new icons and buttons, giving it a stylish, upto-date look and a comfortable feel overall.

Vue 9's redesigned interface

This is more than just a facelift though; some buttons have been re-organised in a more logical fashion. A handy Randomize button has been added to fractal terrains, materials and clouds, and the base grid is now infinitely adaptive, with a scale ruler in each window.
Also, measurements are now standardised across the board as real world units and degrees, making work in
Vue more coherent.
Surprisingly, a few rather archaic aspects of the interface have been left unchanged. The numerics tab, for
instance, still displays rotation as pitch, yaw and roll, and the colour editor remains modal, which can be a problem when using the new relighting tool.

Self publishing

Parameter publishing - you can creat your own control panels

By far the most significant new interface feature in Vue 9 is the ability to pull out (or ‘publish’) any parameter from the function editor and create your own customisable control panels in the terrain and material editors.
Without the need to jump back and forth between the function editor and other windows, editing complex procedural terrains and materials becomes much more fast and fluid.
Published material parameters have their own animation curves, which allows for much more precise material animation.
The last couple of versions brought substantial enhancements to terrain modelling, and Vue 9 continues this trend with more features and improved workflow.
Terrain paintbrushes have been re-organised into a Photoshop-style library with the ability to modify and save your own brushes with a dedicated brush editor.
This editor includes some very useful additions such as the much-needed ability to control the subdivision resolution for image-driven brushes, and the option to control brush behaviour with environment rules.
For example, you can now paint snow where you want it while still having it appear only on flat areas.
To further facilitate terrain painting, a separate ‘freeze mask’ can be layered in at any time to protect areas from being painted, and a new Smear brush comes in handy for shifting large chunks of terrain without destroying small detail.

Terrain paint brushes organised in a Photoshop-style library

Vue 9 also comes with a new terrain algorithm, the Rocky Mountain fractal – quite possibly the most powerful and flexible terrain fractal to date.
It can be used on its own, to create sharp-ridged, highly detailed alpine mountains, or mixed with a Terrain fractal for instance, to add rocky outcrops, stones or scree.
Like other fractal algorithms, it’s not easy to master but it packs a lot of power and can generate a surprising diversity of terrains.
Another very useful addition to the Terrain Editor is the ability to extend a fractal terrain, rather than just rescaling it.

Relight and Retopologize

The new Retopologize function automatically rebuilds the mesh of standard terrains, attempting to correct bad topology that results from drastic sculpting or stretching.
The Looseness parameter lets you define the amount of mesh relaxation, but even at minimum settings there’s a considerable amount of smoothing that destroys small-scale detail.
This limits the usefulness of the Retopologize tool, especially since you cannot apply erosion and effects to
retopologised terrains.
Relighting lets you tweak the intensity and colour of multiple lights as a post-render real-time process.
Vue’s lighting paradigm has always been based on a single light source – the sun – so in order to fully use the potential of relighting, a shift from the one-light paradigm is necessary.
With the help of the Influence Editor, you can restrict the main sunlight to the sky alone, add a second sun for extra light on the clouds, a third for the actual scene, add localised and ambient lights, and then fine-tune with relighting.
Vue’s relighting is derived from the actual raytraced render. This means that tweaking a light realistically affects shadows, reflections and refractions across the scene and changing the sun’s intensity and colour immediately changes the appearance of the sky, which consequently affects the ambient light.
It all works quite beautifully, making relighting a great tool for quickly generating different looks out of a single render.
What’s currently missing is a separate slider to control the indirect lighting contribution.

HyperBlobs - remarkably suitable for creating highly complex rock formations

HyperBlobs are not an entirely new technology, but rather a marriage between the two existing Vue features of MetaBlobs and HyperTextures – albeit with enhanced controls and functionality.
It’s now possible to add displacement on top of the HyperTexture material, control the subdivision amount and cut out floating, unconnected bits.
All this makes HyperBlobs remarkably suitable for creating highly complex, resolution-independent rock formations.
However, like fractal terrains, they are not very intuitive, and take time to calculate and render. It’s not possible to export HyperBlobs or convert them into simple meshes.
While they can be a great modelling tool for large-scale features, HyperBlobs aren’t very suitable for use in EcoSystems, for example. Therefore, a preset-based SolidGrowth-style rock generator is still high on our wish list.
One of the major points of criticism toward Vue has been the flickering that often occurs in animations with dense EcoSystems.
According to e-on, flicker reduction in Vue 9 isn’t an additional feature, but rather an internal improvement
in plant rendering, so it’s not selectable or user-controlled.
Our tests showed that while flickering hasn’t completely gone, it is considerably less obvious than in Vue
8.5, without any noticeable blurring or loss of detail.
So while Vue 9 doesn’t deliver anything major such as a new plant editor or rock generator, it does offer some exciting features like relighting and the Rocky Mountain fractal that open up new creative possibilities, together with substantial workflow enhancements.

Verdict

Pros
• New terrain modelling and painting tools
• Relighting is useful
• More customisable controls
• Rewritten 64-bit OSX version
Cons
• No improvement to rock generator
• No ambient relighting control
• Limited Retopologize
A solid and very worthwhile upgrade for any serious Vue artist – and for Mac users in particular

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Review: modo 501

Expectations are high for the latest version of Luxology’s flagship application, but does modo 501 deliver?

modo handles more complex scenes with ease, especially in 64-bit, provided you have the RAM to take advantage of it

Price: £642 / $995 / €756
or £255 / $395 / €300 (upgrade)
Developer: Luxology
Platform: Windows/Mac
Main features:

• Improved render speed and quality
• Pixar subdivision surfaces
• Multi-resolution sculpting
• Occlusion shader
• Enhanced depth of field and bokeh effects
• Numerous toolset and UI improvements
• Enhance:modo Texture suite included

Since its inception, Luxology has primarily marketed modo as a modelling tool, and one that integrates easily with a wide variety of different production pipelines.
Over the years, each major release has added significant features to this slick and intuitive package, but – on paper at least – 501 appears to be a consolidation of the existing feature set, rather than the launch platform for new and exciting functionality.
Indeed, 501’s roll out has been a much more low-key affair than that of 401, which was preceded by a number of online feature reveals leading right up to release.
However, after extended time with 501, we can say that while there’s been consolidation of the existing tools, it has more than enough new features to justify its billing as a major release.

A new schematic viewport provides a nodal system with which to build complex rigs and animated scenes

Browsing the modo forums, it’s clear that many expected 501 to be the ‘character animation’ release, but this isn’t the case.
The animation tools have received a fair number of upgrades this time around, and while stopping short of full CA functionality, it’s obvious that Luxology has laid a solid foundation for it to appear in a future release.
The software’s inverse kinematics tools have been improved, and a new node-based schematic view for the animation pipeline makes its debut.
Changes such as these not only add extra functions now, but also hint at major additions further down the
line.
Adding a character animation toolset would require a solid code base to be properly integrated, and 501 looks to go some way to providing this.

New modelling features

The centre object here shows the advantage of Pixar sub-d over regular sub-d (right), when used with weight maps

Modelling is where modo has always excelled, and with 501 the list of improvements is staggering.
Regular subdivision modelling is still present and correct, but Pixar subdivision surfaces modelling makes its debut, and proves to be one of 501’s most invaluable new features.
The advantage of P-sub modelling is that bevels and edge sharpening can be done primarily with edge
weighting, reducing viewport polygon counts significantly, and the Pixar sub-d algorithm gives a smoother result than regular sub-d models.
Objects created using the P-sub/weight map method can also be exported to Maya 2011 (via FBX), which is a huge boon to studios that use modo in their pipeline.
Pixar sub-d models can take advantage of another of 501’s new features – multi-resolution meshes. A model created using Pixar sub-d can have a minimum sub-d level set, and then be divided further using the multi-resolution controls.
In this way, a simple shape can be subdivided several times to enable high-resolution sculpting on the actual mesh, but with the option of returning to the low-resolution model at any time.
All high-resolution sculpt data will still be visible at the higher resolution, but this gives more flexibility in how you handle high-detail sculpt data, such as baking displacement maps for the low-res mesh.
Rendering has been a main feature of modo since 201, and it too has seen a massive number of improvements in 501, both under the hood and in terms of added functionality.
Render speed and quality have both been enhanced enormously, and the preview engine has been given a full overhaul.
In 401, modo’s render preview was no slouch, but the speed improvement in 501 is obvious.

With the new RayGL, renders can be previewed directly in any viewport, which speeds up your workflow immeasurably

Complementing it is RayGL, which gives a low-res version of the preview render in your working viewport and is updated on-the-fly.
501 also sees enhancements in render quality, with new anti-aliasing options, improved depth of field and motion blur, and advanced camera settings with full bokeh.
Displacement quality has been optimised and integrated with the newly recoded bump mapping algorithm.
Both bump and displacement now give far superior results, with lower overheads, although because these use a completely new engine, any legacy files that use bump or displacement maps will need to be checked and most likely adjusted in 501.
Procedural textures have been given some much-needed attention as well, with 501 now offering the Enhance:modo Textures (a suite of 149 new textures and presets), as well as standard procedurals.
Each is fully customisable, and when combined with the new occlusion shader, they can create stunning results, especially when applied as a combination of bump maps and layer masks.

Further enhancements

This object is being textured with the new Enhance:modo Textures and occlusion layer masking

Using 501 is just as much of a joy as ever, and users who’ve been with modo for a few years will notice small changes to the UI, and that a few tools and menus have moved.
That said, 501 still feels familiar and snappy, even with the added features.
Modelling with modo has always been a fast and enjoyable affair, and with the new render enhancements, previews no longer feel like a bottleneck in your productivity.
Luxology has also achieved feature parity between the Windows and Mac OS X releases with 501, as 64-bit versions are now available for both platforms.
The new OS X Cocoa build, while suffering from a few (documented) bugs, is solid enough, and Mac users with both Snow Leopard and more than 4GB of RAM will see huge benefits with larger scenes.
There are, however, some glaring omissions from the feature set. Forgetting the aforementioned character animation tools, modo still lacks any form of dynamics, particle or fluid simulation.
A soundtrack option would also seem like an obvious addition given that animation has been present since 301.
modo has been maturing nicely with each new release, but when we first browsed the feature list, we were worried that development may be slowing with 501.
Such fears proved unfounded, though, as the new bells and whistles are very impressive.
Combine this excellent feature set with the fact that the core of the application has been polished to such a high sheen, and you’re undoubtedly left with the finest iteration of modo yet.

3D World verdict

PROS
• Pixar sub-d modelling
• Fast, clean renders
• Consolidated feature set
CONS
• No character animation
• Glitchy Cocoa release
modo silences the doubters as Luxology release the most stable and feature-rich version of the software yet. Character animation may be conspicuous by its absence, but there’s easily more than enough here to compensate

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