And the new explorer looks really nice, seems like a unified explorer system (Container, MassFX, Layer, Light , Property, even 'Missing Plugin Objects' as different templates), and also drag and drop!
And the new surface placement feature looks very useful, sort of like the like surface in maya.
I hope Maya sneak peek will be at least good as last year - grease pencil. It was so much fun reading comments like Maya now has awesome new feature - MS Paint.
In this video they positioned stuff around the body. Is there something like that in 2014 release?
That is something totally new and could be really cool. There has been object paint in the ribbon modeling tools. It allows you to paint a series of objects on the surface of other objects. But it's clunky to setup, lacks a preview when you want to place just one and is more set up to paint a series of objects or randomly scatter objects. What they showed looks more intuitive and more geared for single object placement.
Personally I liked Soulburn's Scripts Object placement script better than the ribbon, his spline painter script was a lot better too, but this could be cool.
I also heard someone saying 'oh, that's just the explorer, I thought that's a new thing', here's a lil secret, it is a new thing ^^
It looks like they upgraded Scene Explore by merging it with the layer manager and giving it nested layers like outliner. ABOUT DAMN TIME!
I'll have to test it out to see if it can actually replace outliner, based on that quick demo, it might... maybe.
Also ShaderFX, YEAH!!@
That will rock, I wonder if it will be viewport only or if it will render also? I guess the viewport set to realistic is awesome enough to take screen shots but that leaves out a whole lot of rendering tools and file management options that they have built in.
Things I hope they add/fix:
Transparency in Nitrous, specifically RTT cages.
Quad Chamfer, Quad Cap (and all of Marius Silaghi's scripts), just pay the guy an ass-load of money (that you would spend on some pointless acquisition) and include it already!
viewport performance when animation is playing, Monsters script helps with this quite a bit.
Make it so gpoly doesn't destroy normals/shading when converting back to edit poly.
No it's not a feature in Object Paint. Object paint is more like "paint scatter". It doesn't preview the mesh before placement and doesn't give you any option to adjust its orientation, you have to select the object afterward and manually noodle it around to get it aligned.
It runs inside the DX Material.
So you can switch your DX Material over to use either a text file, like before, or enable ShaderFX and open its node editor.
Most features work in both Maya/Maya LT and 3dsMax.
(most nodes like reflection, normal maps, vertex colors etc)
You can also load your Maya ShaderFX graphs into 3dsMax and visa versa.
There are a few things that did not make it into the Nitrous viewport at this time
Specifically Tessellation and Transparency (alpha clip does work, so you have a little something at least).
If you take a Maya shader with tessellation, it will still work in 3dsMax though, but the viewport won't show the tessellation.
So ignoring those items, you should be able to do most of what you see here in 3dsMax also: http://www.shaderfx.com/
This is the first version in 3dsMax, so go gentle on me
I know there is more stuff to fix in the future!
There are a few things that did not make it into the Nitrous viewport at this time
Specifically Tessellation and Transparency (alpha clip does work, so you have a little something at least).
Is that gonna be in a Service Pack or does that have a longer timeframe?
I don't know, sorry.
I expect if it comes at all, it will take a little longer.
I'll poke some Nitrous developers again to see what the plan is though.
Kees, congratulations on shaderfx coming back to max! I still use the original shaderfx extensively, and along with Ben's DVD's it really helped me in my early years of learning HLSL.
No alpha-blending in this new version though? What a bummer! I use alpha blending a lot for mocking up realtime environmental effects like drifting fog, waterfalls, smoke, etc. I suspect it has something to do with Nitrous viewport, right? It's 2014, you'd think something like that would not be an issue.
Hopefully you'll be able to convince the Nitrous developers the importance of alpha-blending in the viewports.
In Maya those things are quite easy to do, but I believe the way Nitrous uses transparency and shadows makes it hard to expose those things to a custom game shader.
Those are definitely the things I would like to see added asap.
Maybe it's a stupid question, but due to tons of render problems(old gfx card) I can't use Nitrous so I have no idea what the benefits are. From the people I've worked with all I've heared are negative things about Nitrous as well. Mind you, those complaints were from 2-3 years ago-ish.
Just wondering what the big dealio is about shaderfx not being in Nitrous? What are the advantages of Nitrous?
Also really happy 'bout shaderfx coming to 3dsMax, now how about Max LT?
I think some of the complaints about the Nitrous viewport are still justified when you look at it from a game shading point of view. (Lack of shadows and transparency is not something I am happy about).
But other areas of the viewport have been improved so it is better then a few years ago.
Eg. I no longer have problems with normals, vertex colors etc.
So the basics are there for me to be able to make shaders at least.
The Nitrous team was also helpful getting live updating to work with ShaderFX. So any chages you make in the ShaderFX node graph update in the view right away. Which is is a nice foundation to build on.
But, 3dsMax has 3 different tangent spaces you can choose in the prefs to decide which one to use in the viewport.
I tend to use the Maya one because it gives me better results and I like to use Turtle or Beast for baking the maps.
I think the legacy tangents are the default though. So you may need to take a look at this when you get 2015 to see what you prefer.
On the ShaderFX side, I just use default tangentToWorld calculation from the tangent space map. But since ShaderFX is completely customizable on a node level, you can add your own 'tangentToWorld' calculation node if you want to do something different.
I think the default .fx file that 3dsMax 2015 comes with has a few snippets of code in there to do some other things with the normal calculation.
I did not have time to really look at it though, since I just wanted to use the same calculations between max and maya for ShaderFX.
On a side node, you will have to be careful with the auto gamma correction in 3dsMax.
As it defaults to doing gamma correction on normal maps too, which gives very strange results.
In ShaderFX, I give you a warning at startup as a reminder of this.
"I think some of the complaints about the Nitrous viewport are still justified when you look at it from a game shading point of view. (Lack of shadows and transparency is not something I am happy about). "
wait,,,
there is still no shadows/transparency in nitrous? im confused.. so its useless for actual presentation? why would i light up a shader fx tree when i get no shadows. it's only useful for basic texturing/quick view or whatever, but i still will have use marmoset or whatever engine im in for proper presentation? i think might be missing something here?...
Of course Nitrous has shadows. It doesn't deal with alpha/transparency very well, but shadows are certainly there. Have you used max at all since 2012?
I wish they would bring back the alt-b shortcut
well the lock pan and zoom option, that was great, saved me having to create a plane based on an image each time
Of course Nitrous has shadows. It doesn't deal with alpha/transparency very well, but shadows are certainly there. Have you used max at all since 2012?
no i haven't... i had to switch to maya at my job last year, so i haven't done any nitrous/DX stuff since 2012
Replies
Yay! outliner might not be a must install now!
Do I see viewport tesselation on that face? no?!? yes?!!
I hope they don't clutter the UI any further and it is optimized.
If I had to decide based on this video, I would say "nothing new, move on".
And the new explorer looks really nice, seems like a unified explorer system (Container, MassFX, Layer, Light , Property, even 'Missing Plugin Objects' as different templates), and also drag and drop!
And the new surface placement feature looks very useful, sort of like the like surface in maya.
Maybe things are finally changing for Max
Windows movie maker ftw
I had the exact same thought. Not going to shell out for something that's worse.
No Franky, that's a new feature, something similar to live surface in maya(I think)..
Apparently some people watching the video have thought that that's just an object paint tool, it's not, Max has had that since version 2011 or so.
I also heard someone saying 'oh, that's just the explorer, I thought that's a new thing', here's a lil secret, it is a new thing ^^
Personally I liked Soulburn's Scripts Object placement script better than the ribbon, his spline painter script was a lot better too, but this could be cool.
It looks like they upgraded Scene Explore by merging it with the layer manager and giving it nested layers like outliner. ABOUT DAMN TIME!
I'll have to test it out to see if it can actually replace outliner, based on that quick demo, it might... maybe.
Also ShaderFX, YEAH!!@
That will rock, I wonder if it will be viewport only or if it will render also? I guess the viewport set to realistic is awesome enough to take screen shots but that leaves out a whole lot of rendering tools and file management options that they have built in.
Things I hope they add/fix:
They were moving meshes and they oriented themselves to the underlying mesh, that's not a feature of object paint, is it? (I'm still on 2009)
It runs inside the DX Material.
So you can switch your DX Material over to use either a text file, like before, or enable ShaderFX and open its node editor.
Most features work in both Maya/Maya LT and 3dsMax.
(most nodes like reflection, normal maps, vertex colors etc)
You can also load your Maya ShaderFX graphs into 3dsMax and visa versa.
There are a few things that did not make it into the Nitrous viewport at this time
Specifically Tessellation and Transparency (alpha clip does work, so you have a little something at least).
If you take a Maya shader with tessellation, it will still work in 3dsMax though, but the viewport won't show the tessellation.
So ignoring those items, you should be able to do most of what you see here in 3dsMax also: http://www.shaderfx.com/
This is the first version in 3dsMax, so go gentle on me
I know there is more stuff to fix in the future!
Is that gonna be in a Service Pack or does that have a longer timeframe?
I don't know, sorry.
I expect if it comes at all, it will take a little longer.
I'll poke some Nitrous developers again to see what the plan is though.
congratulations to that!
No alpha-blending in this new version though? What a bummer! I use alpha blending a lot for mocking up realtime environmental effects like drifting fog, waterfalls, smoke, etc. I suspect it has something to do with Nitrous viewport, right? It's 2014, you'd think something like that would not be an issue.
Hopefully you'll be able to convince the Nitrous developers the importance of alpha-blending in the viewports.
Not that I know of.
In Maya those things are quite easy to do, but I believe the way Nitrous uses transparency and shadows makes it hard to expose those things to a custom game shader.
Those are definitely the things I would like to see added asap.
Just wondering what the big dealio is about shaderfx not being in Nitrous? What are the advantages of Nitrous?
Also really happy 'bout shaderfx coming to 3dsMax, now how about Max LT?
ShaderFX runs on the new Nitrous viewport.
I think some of the complaints about the Nitrous viewport are still justified when you look at it from a game shading point of view. (Lack of shadows and transparency is not something I am happy about).
But other areas of the viewport have been improved so it is better then a few years ago.
Eg. I no longer have problems with normals, vertex colors etc.
So the basics are there for me to be able to make shaders at least.
The Nitrous team was also helpful getting live updating to work with ShaderFX. So any chages you make in the ShaderFX node graph update in the view right away. Which is is a nice foundation to build on.
But, 3dsMax has 3 different tangent spaces you can choose in the prefs to decide which one to use in the viewport.
I tend to use the Maya one because it gives me better results and I like to use Turtle or Beast for baking the maps.
I think the legacy tangents are the default though. So you may need to take a look at this when you get 2015 to see what you prefer.
On the ShaderFX side, I just use default tangentToWorld calculation from the tangent space map. But since ShaderFX is completely customizable on a node level, you can add your own 'tangentToWorld' calculation node if you want to do something different.
I think the default .fx file that 3dsMax 2015 comes with has a few snippets of code in there to do some other things with the normal calculation.
I did not have time to really look at it though, since I just wanted to use the same calculations between max and maya for ShaderFX.
As it defaults to doing gamma correction on normal maps too, which gives very strange results.
In ShaderFX, I give you a warning at startup as a reminder of this.
wait,,,
there is still no shadows/transparency in nitrous? im confused.. so its useless for actual presentation? why would i light up a shader fx tree when i get no shadows. it's only useful for basic texturing/quick view or whatever, but i still will have use marmoset or whatever engine im in for proper presentation? i think might be missing something here?...
well the lock pan and zoom option, that was great, saved me having to create a plane based on an image each time
Fits perfectly on the general appearance of 3DS.
When can we expect an interface overhaul ? 2020 ?
I mean come on, Win2000ME times are over.
/rage end
Curse your good modeling capabilities and convenient smoothing groups