Max 8 Arrived On the Doorstep

My upgrade for 3DS Max 8 finally arrived this weekend. I have been eagerly awaiting a chance to try out the new features on this awesome appliation as such you can bet that I was like a kid in a candy store. So what are my thoughts? Well lets cover what I don't like first...

The Packaging

Well its a good thing that this isn't some dime store 3D application that you pick up at your local Best Buy or Future Shop because the packaging box for this thing isn't just ugly its oogily. Officially gone are the awesome slip boxes that used to hold your CDs and manuals, in fact there is no box at all. Inside of the brown card board shipping box you get 2 booklets and a DVD case. The two booklets are a 100ish page copy of the "New Features" (in colour mind you but on cheap paper unlike the previous Max 6 and 7 release "new features" booklets which were roughly the same size) and a roughly 200 page "Tutorials" book that is in black & white (which is a lot smaller than the 600 page tutorial book that used to come with the software). The DVD case is okay however, not too fancy or anything that says "this is the coolest program in the world" but at least its not the lame paper flap system from Max 5.1 and Max 6.

I am a little surprised not to see some of the other goodies that I have come to expect in this box like the "Resource Guide" that teases you with all the plug-ins that you cannot afford to buy, or some of the additional software goodies and coupons that you get.

The Branding

Autodesks marketing department should be ashamed at the job they did here. I know that there isn't much to brand outside of the packaging but c'mon a black start-up screen? Once again I have to ask where is the notification that this is the coolest program in the world when I startup the app?

Shave & Haircut UI

Unfortunately this is the only UI that isn't consistent and uniform with the rest of Max, its still based on the UI that Joe Alter did when he wrote Shave & Haircut. As such it feels out of place and a bit awkward to use :(

Pelt and Gizmos Need to be Turned off in the Unwrap UVW modifier

This is more of a workflow beef that I have, but by default the selection option for the pelt mapper or the gizmos is still active after you apply an unwrap to your faces. As such you need to turn off the pelt or gizmo option first before you can begin to work with or manipulate your UVWs you just generated.


Ok so what do I like about it...

Skin Modifier enhancements

Lots of great work has been done here. Now not only do the bones you assign try to auto size their envelopes properly to conform to the nearby geometry but you also have some awesome new tools to help speed up weighing a character. Most important of these is the "Weight Tool" which is a floating window that when used with the new vertex selection option on the skin modifier lets you manipulate the influence that bones have on a particular vertex or set of vertecies.

On top of that you can also select edge rings and edge loops for a quick assignment of weights or even copy and paste one vertex weight to another vertex! Autodesk has done a great job here to make skinning a character incredibly fast and accurate.

Unwrap UVW Modifier enhancements

Pelt mapping is pretty huge here in this release. Pelts are basicly seams or selections of faces that you grab and use a tool to relax and stretch the faces like they were cloth. Its a pretty handy tool that realy speeds up your productivity while allowing you to have pretty uniform faces (and thus minimal distortion).

Another nice tool related to the pelt enhancements that they did is the ability for you to quickly draw seams on your mesh based on its current edges. Why I find this to be valuable is not just for pelt mapping (where you need to define where the geometry will be split for unwrapping) but for texturing in games. By using this tool you can quickly draw out your UVW clusters in 3D space and select them for the unwrapping that you want to do (versus having to rebuild them in the UVW window).

There are now 3 SO modes for your UVW data manipulation: vertex, edge and face which work as expected.

The guys at autodesk added a default B&W checker pattern to the Edit UVW display which is handy for checking out potential places of distortion on your UVW data. Now we dont need to load in a bitmap :)

There is also the addition of a stock set of unwrapping gizmos have been added to the Unwrap UVW modifier.

Lastly you can now render out your UVW data out to a bitmap file. As such there is no longer the need to load in the 3rd party plugin Texporter since its features are all built into Max now :)

Edit Poly Enhancements

There are three improvements here that I feel are worth mentioning since they vastly improve my workflow: Bridge, Remove Edges and Connect.

Bridge is much like the Max 7 outline SO modes bridge tool but works on Edge and Face level now. In an edge level it works like a fast "create poly" tool so you can seal up some open edges quickly. In face mode you can do some pretty wild geometry as you connect faces one another, creating tubes, holes as well as your stock join option that you would want.

The remove edges tool has some extra functionaility added to it so that when you press "ctrl" and click on the tool while you have an edge loop or ring selected it, it will not only remove the egdes but the verticies as well.

Lastly the connect tool has been enhanced to allow you to "slide" the connected edges up/down so that they arent perfectly centered or "pinch" so that you can move 2 or more segments that you are adding closer together or further apart.

Biped/CS

As much as CS gets a really bad rap for being a bad enhancement it does have some really good benefits and its nice to see that Autodesk is really trying to enhance its features. One of the nicest new features in this release for the Biped/CS is the ability to have it work on TCB or Euler controller types (hurrah now something that is visually logical)

The Biped itself was also given a structure overhaul with more neck, spine, pony tail and tail joints as well as the option of having the biped pelvis rotation affect the model (just like how a real pelvis would).

Hair & Cloth

These are both really great systems that I have had the opportunity to use already since I am on subscription with 3DS Max.

Save Animation

Save your animation data out into an XML formatted file... nuff said.


As you can see there is a lot of cool stuff here. When I get some time I will try to collect all this data together and create a "Max 8 Features for the Torque Artist" documentation.

Yes I have Returned from Eugene...

Sorry for the lack of updates the past couple of weeks. I have spent most of the time since IGC just relaxing, recovering and spending time with my wife after a 4 week mini death march that was done in order to get Realm Wars 2 ready for the show (the game won Best Multiplayer if you are curious).

Here is a quick recap of the past two weeks...

Realm Wars 2 : I have spent a lot of time doing research and making notes with regards to the next phase of Realm Wars 2. We recieved a lot of great feedback at the show that I need to process through and deconstruct so that the team can pick through it all and work together a choosing the best solutions possible. Markus has begun the early prototyping here on this stuff but there isn't much that I can report back on what it is at this time (sorry NDA stuff).

Family Stuff : My parents have taken off to visit Europe for 3 or 4 weeks and that means that a whole bunch of wacky family responsibilities have fallen onto my shoulders. The most serious of these two are being the contact for my grandmother, who is in a nursing home and babysitting my little nephew, who is a year old, on Saturdays.

The first day being the contact for my grandmother was rather interesting. I get a phone call from my sister who tells me that the Nursing Home my grandmother is in has been trying to reach me, now I know that the cel phone recpetion where I work sucks (I think the building I work in knocks out some of the signal) but even still the employees at the home never left me a message which is annoying (GRRR!!!), anyways I need to truck back across town practicly to where I work (since the home is just a few minutes away from work). When I get there I found out that she has some sort of infection in her hand and needs to go to the doctors to get it looked at because she says it hurts... okay fine, I go get my grandma, make a side trip to help her friend in the home find her way back to her room (since this lady cannot see very well) and then off we go. From there its 2.5 more hours worth of waiting, meeting doctors, getting xrays and picking up medication. Luckily she is okay and had a simple infection in her hand from her arthritis and the medication has cleared that up.

The next day though my wife and I have to babysit my newphew. Now the little guy knows us but hes never been left alone with us before and never been left alone at our house alone. As such from 830 to about 1 he wasn't a happy camper, from 1 to 2 he fell asleep after a crying fit! Thankfully from 3 to 530 when he got picked up he settled down enough and was well behaved, we ended up watching "the Waterboy" on TV while my wife took some time out to play World of Warcraft :) I have to watch the little guy tomorrow on my own, so here is hoping that I can manage.

The House: The house has had some good progress that are best explained in pictures. Here is what the place looked like on Wedneday when I few out from Edmonton to Eugene...



... and this is what it looks like as of yesterday evening...





... great progress all around and it looks like from the wood that is stacked up behind the house that they are preparing to put in the sub-floor. SWEET! The house won't be ready for Christmas unfortunately but it should be ready for us by the time our first anniversary rolls around so its not too bad.

Weekend Updates

Preparing for a game conference such as IndieGamesCon (IGC) is pretty hard work. For the past few months I have been working behind the scenes with GarageGames and various speakers to help get the art track of this session organized and thought out. Thankfully everything went pretty smoothly with the organization and we were able to get the speakers that we wanted for the session (I am speaking at the "Indie Artists Production Cookbook" session). I still need to finalize my presentation but I am hoping that won't be too hard. The real hard part has been getting my new game ready to present at the show. Aside from all the little things that you need to get done in your project you also have all the little things that you want to have done to show off too and thus my time has been pretty limited as I did development all weekend aside from a couple of breaks that I took...

Hockey was on the agenda on Friday night. It was the start of the season for my new team (the Global Devils) and unfortunately we lost 7 to 3. Your's truely had a half decent game (finding my legs after the first period) but unfortunately could only get an assist for my efforts as I was robbed on some good chances by a hot goalie. Unfortunately I miss my next game due to IndieGamesCon, so hopefully I won't lose anything between now and my next game.

Saturday evening I took my wife out for supper, I figured it would be a good thing to do since A) I am going to be gone for 5 days in Eugene for IGC so I thought it would be smart of me to take her out. We unfortunately ended up at Kelsey's for a rather bland dinner before heading out. From there we joined some friends to play a bit of Magic the Gathering while waiting for the next show time of Serenity.

Speaking of Serenity I have mixed opinions of the movie. Now let me forewarn you that I am not a Joss Whedon fan, in fact I find most of his stuff to be pretty iffy at best with a few gems that make people somehow ignore a lot of bad stuff that he does in his work. Anyways in regards to the movie, in some ways it was a pretty interesting pop corn flick that really capped off what could have been an interesting TV series (had the series not been so bland and boring with a lame mixture of western and sci-fi that is). The movie itself kept up a pretty good pace and had a lot of intersting things that the TV series just lacked. They did a decent job in the beginning of introducing the premises and character to the audience in such a way that you never needed to have watched Firefly to know what was going on, but as the movie went on it seems as though this rule was thrown out the door and they just threw a lot of stuff at you that you had to have watched the TV series to know or understand. In the end I walked out of the movie thinking that it was an OK flick but not something that I would really want to tell people to go and see.

Sunday my wife and I went out to my parents house for supper and to find out what the plans are for Thanksgiving (since its next weekend here in Canada). On our way there though we stopped by our house to see what work had been done on it. As you can see for yourself the foundation is poured and has pretty much dried. Its scary how fast they can make these things when they put their minds to it, though in many ways I will probably need to watch the house like a hawk.



I will try to post one more update before I fly out to Eugene on Wednesday for IGC.