Discreet announced 3d max 7

[mildse7en]

http://www4.discreet.com/3dsmax/index7.php#


http://maxunderground.com/archives/0..._workflow.html

MONTREAL, Aug. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Discreet, a division of Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK) and a leader in digital content creation, management, and distribution tools, today announced 3ds max(R) 7 -- the newest version of its acclaimed 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software. Discreet's 3ds max 7 software will be shown for the first time publicly at the international SIGGRAPH Exhibition in Los Angeles, CA (August 10th - 12th). With over 280,000 registered users worldwide, and a 19% increase in sales revenues in the last year, 3ds max is clearly the most popular professional 3D modeling and animation application available today.

(continued...)


Responding to the ever-increasing industry need for powerful yet approachable non-linear animation tools, Discreet is integrating its award-winning advanced character motion toolset character studio(R) into the core feature set of 3ds max 7. With a unique constraint-based non-linear animation mixer, highly scalable behavioral crowd simulation capabilities, and extensive motion capture filtering and editing facilities, character studio brings industry leading price/performance capabilities to the existing 3ds max character toolset. The result of the integration of character studio and 3ds max is the democratization of character animation functionality, which up until now has been found in solutions costing two to three times more than 3ds max.


3ds max 7 also offers a wide range of newly developed core functionality including industry-first Normal Mapping, a workflow accelerator for gaming; and Edit Poly Modifier, designed to improve ease of use and speed of animation (a more comprehensive feature list is included below). Such groundbreaking features as Normal Mapping continue Discreet's legacy of cross-pollinating innovative technologies between market segments, where features originally designed for one market segment such as games can have a significant impact on other segments such as film or design visualization.


"NVIDIA and Discreet have worked together for years to deliver the highest performance graphics creation solutions for professional 3D animation artists," said Jeff Brown, general manager of professional graphics at NVIDIA. "With Discreet's acute focus on high-end real-time shading in 3ds max 7, it takes a powerful professional graphics solution with true 128-bit floating point frame buffers and Shader Model 3.0 support -- like the NVIDIA Quadro(R) FX workstation graphics solutions -- to unleash its full potential. Together, Discreet and NVIDIA have ensured that the full power and feature sets of our respective products give 3D game developers and visual effects artists a sophisticated, but approachable hardware and software duo that optimizes productivity."


"3ds max 7 is designed to deliver the optimized performance required for the large data sets of today's increasingly complex 3D production environments," said Marc Petit, vice president of product development, Discreet. "Major innovations in 3ds max 7 focus on delivering the most productive and customizable workflow to date, support for next-generation PC/console and mobile platforms, as well as powerful new creative tools. Furthermore, the integration of advanced character animation capabilities as a part of the core functionality of 3ds max will provide fast, efficient, and intuitive character tools for the benefit of all 3ds max 7 users."


Built in conjunction with industry artists and facilities, 3ds max 7 is aimed at boosting facility productivity and meeting the demanding production requirements set by today's highly competitive environment.


"We're always excited to be part of Discreet's development process," said Greg Zeschuk, Joint CEO of BioWare. "With 3ds max 7, we are seeing some great improvements in performance. The character animation advancements have reaffirmed our commitment to 3ds max 7 as our core development platform. Discreet's advancements for improved visual feedback have paid off in a significant way -- giving us the ability to handle larger amounts of polygons as well as more objects than ever before. Ray Muzyka, Joint CEO of BioWare also added, "As we are in the home stretch for bringing Jade Empire -- already an award winner at E3 -- to market in the first quarter of 2005, we will definitely be utilizing all of the features of 3ds max, both to ensure Jade Empire is visually stunning and also to help us get the artwork done quickly and efficiently; we're confident that Jade Empire will be BioWare's best game yet!"


Additional major new features in 3ds max 7 include:

-- Normal Mapping -- industry first revolutionary workflow developed
for gaming adds extreme detail to low-polygon models with high
resolution maps -- and with complete rendering support normal
mapping brings great time-saving benefits to film production and
cinematic visualizations
-- mental ray 3.3 -- enhanced integration in 3ds max with accelerated
performance and better memory efficiency. Improved Global
Illumination, new support for Render to Texture and Normal Mapping,
and Sub-Surface Scattering that disperses light for amazingly
realistic skin and dense translucent object rendering
-- Parameter Collector -- a new, unified interface that improves
efficiency when animating multiple parameters for any character
setup
-- Parameter Editor -- an enhanced, more powerful version of the
Custom Attributes feature with new data types and functionality
-- Edit Poly Modifier -- significantly increases the rapidity and ease
at which complex polygonal surfaces can be created, modified and
then animated -- improving the creative process
-- Skin Wrap Deformer -- greatly improved character animation workflow
with easy application of props and clothing to pre-skinned 3D models
-- Snapping Workflow -- improved accuracy and viewport feedback for
the underlying snapping system in 3ds max
-- Paint Selections -- an intuitive and interactive method for
building selections with a brush-based interface
-- Enhanced Interactive Performance and Scalability -- an ongoing
program to enable 3ds max to scale to very large datasets including
smart object culling for high performance manipulation of large
numbers of objects
-- TurboSmooth -- a highly optimized smoothing algorithm for increased
performance of high resolution models
-- Mobile Gaming Development Tools -- native mobile 3D asset creation
with new JSR 184 exporter and per camera diagnostic tools

[cocolas]

yeah..I was just reading through that on CG architect.........some just sounds like empty PR crap......I'm interested to see what the "TurboSmooth" is all about, since max has need a more efficient way to deal with high poly models for a while.....and the snapping system definatly needed an overhault......



paul.

[samuel_bubat]

ph no.. another marketing release

[dbuchhofer]

Heres to hoping that they haven't broken (YET AGAIN) every single plugin ever made :P

[guest]

Simple as always, but what are you waiting from 1 year of dev? I have waited only for edit-poly and some viewport speed improvements Other things should be done by 3rd party developers.

[ashras99]

But Vray 1.5 not released yet.

May be 3dsmax also adopting vray policy of announcing and not release this year.

If this happen then what will happen :P

[cocolas]

hope they didn't change enough things in 7, where it will further delay vray 1.5......


paul.

[lordshaitan]

They should spend a year just working on stabability, And old plugins work.

[Long John]

They should spend a year just working on stabability, And old plugins work.

setup your system correctly.
max 6 is a stable program.

what makes it buggy are bad coded third party plugins.

[Da_elf]

whats this about an industry 1st normal mapping?? what sort of nonsence is that. i thought normal mapping was around for a while now.

[tom schuelke]

Think

we will have to wait again for a whole new written modern max core code.
But i think this is for max the biggest problem, due to the fact that it depends more than other programs on thrid party plugins.

so when plus are their advantage, they are also their problem.

well edit poly and cs integrated, let´s see what it´s good for. When i first used max 6, it wasnt spectacular, but after a while i didnt want to miss the new smal enhancements.

Tom

[APLevitz]

Yeah, normal mapping itself isn't an industry first. Nor is having your core program produce said maps without additional plugins. This would be one of several innovations I think they borrowed from ZBrush, to be honest. But I won't complain about having them here, because we also have Max's superior poly-editing tools (which really do get improved in 7, from what I saw at Siggraph).

No, most of their displacement demos focused on the fact that it's a renderable effect. Like a cheap displacement that you can actually see in your realtime preview. It's part of your default material now. I think they're claiming the overall workflow, integrated in one place, is an industry first. Whatever.

Nobody cares who was first. Let them have their empty claim -- It's not a point worth scrutinizing.


There are some HUGE improvements this time around. But you need to be pretty deep into the program to even notice a lot of them. If you're a casual user (read: pirate), I don't expect they'll mean much to you. Nor, I should add, do I care what you think at that point. But if Max is part of your serious workflow, some of the rigging tools in particular are going to make you very happy.

[dennis]

didnt read it all trough. but the 1. person cam cought my eye for a while. This should be fun ( and i suppose it will make it easier to get that very special angle on your shoot )