How to activate 4D modeling in Maya
polycounter lvl 9
Not sure if this is the right place to post as this place is for 3D art, but hopefully it's fine.
Today Autodesk released a new update to Maya, and with it came a strange hidden feature my buddy and I managed to dig out: 4D modeling. It is not mentioned in the release notes and there is no documentation of it (so far). I guess it's supposed to stay in their development build, but accidentally got left in their published build.
Anyhow, I've spent the morning playing around with it and it feels amazing. It's pretty buggy right now and requires tons of memory, but it opens up a whole new world for modeling as we know it. Here's a quick guide in how to get it working:
First, Maya needs to know your hardware accepts its 4D capabilities, which is why you need to make a quick change in the command prompt. Open it up by going to windows > type in 'cmd' and hit enter. Now all you need to do is enter the prompt: "taskbegin 1223 adskMaya.hrdwraccelerate.4D=true /gullible.begin". Your computer might freeze for a second but after that you're good to go.
Now open Maya (I use 2015, so I guess 2016 is fine aswell. Don't know if 2014 is though, if someone could try it out and post about it I'd appreciate it). Go into the plugins folder Windows > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager and scroll all the way down. You should have a new plugin called "Hardware Accelerated 4D". Click "Loaded" (if you want it loaded on start-up, choose Auto load aswell).
Now click "Renderer" in the menu just above the viewport, and choose the new, "modified" Viewport 2.0 4D and be amazed.
As I said Maya will probably start lagging quite a bit for you as 4D literally multiplies the numbers Maya has to crunch. It's like when you subdivide an object, but now you do it with the entire software. Anyway, here are some of the things that look different when working in 4D:
First off is the basic cube as we all know it in 3D:
Here is that same cube with Viewport 2.0 4D activated:
As you can see another dimension pops up, which makes the possibilities of modeling this cube so much more. The extra axis (bottom left corner) is apparently "å". My guess is that the 4th dimension is the next letter in the alphabet after Z, and since I'm Swedish that letter is Å. Would be interesting to see this done on a non-Swedish machine.
Let's continue with a basic 4D pyramid. I don't know how to make GIFs but when I rotate it it's like a pyramid with 2 levels. It's kind of hard to describe 4D in words.
Here's a basic 4D torus. It's seems to be imploding. My computer almost froze entirely when I made this.
And here's a basic 4D pipe. It doesn't seem to know which side is up and down.
Now I've heard that the 4th dimension is time. But I don't know how you would render time so it sounds kind of stupid. And now we know for sure what the 4th dimension looks like. These pictures doesn't really do it justice but you get the idea.
I don't know if there's any other software that does 4D. I asked a friend who use Cinema4D what kind of 4D modeling he has been doing, but he didn't know what I was talking about so I'm not sure if it's possbile. Unfortunately we won't be seeing 4D modeling in 3Ds Max for obvious reasons.
If you have any questions please ask away.
slooF lirpA
Today Autodesk released a new update to Maya, and with it came a strange hidden feature my buddy and I managed to dig out: 4D modeling. It is not mentioned in the release notes and there is no documentation of it (so far). I guess it's supposed to stay in their development build, but accidentally got left in their published build.
Anyhow, I've spent the morning playing around with it and it feels amazing. It's pretty buggy right now and requires tons of memory, but it opens up a whole new world for modeling as we know it. Here's a quick guide in how to get it working:
First, Maya needs to know your hardware accepts its 4D capabilities, which is why you need to make a quick change in the command prompt. Open it up by going to windows > type in 'cmd' and hit enter. Now all you need to do is enter the prompt: "taskbegin 1223 adskMaya.hrdwraccelerate.4D=true /gullible.begin". Your computer might freeze for a second but after that you're good to go.
Now open Maya (I use 2015, so I guess 2016 is fine aswell. Don't know if 2014 is though, if someone could try it out and post about it I'd appreciate it). Go into the plugins folder Windows > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager and scroll all the way down. You should have a new plugin called "Hardware Accelerated 4D". Click "Loaded" (if you want it loaded on start-up, choose Auto load aswell).
Now click "Renderer" in the menu just above the viewport, and choose the new, "modified" Viewport 2.0 4D and be amazed.
As I said Maya will probably start lagging quite a bit for you as 4D literally multiplies the numbers Maya has to crunch. It's like when you subdivide an object, but now you do it with the entire software. Anyway, here are some of the things that look different when working in 4D:
First off is the basic cube as we all know it in 3D:
Here is that same cube with Viewport 2.0 4D activated:
As you can see another dimension pops up, which makes the possibilities of modeling this cube so much more. The extra axis (bottom left corner) is apparently "å". My guess is that the 4th dimension is the next letter in the alphabet after Z, and since I'm Swedish that letter is Å. Would be interesting to see this done on a non-Swedish machine.
Let's continue with a basic 4D pyramid. I don't know how to make GIFs but when I rotate it it's like a pyramid with 2 levels. It's kind of hard to describe 4D in words.
Here's a basic 4D torus. It's seems to be imploding. My computer almost froze entirely when I made this.
And here's a basic 4D pipe. It doesn't seem to know which side is up and down.
Now I've heard that the 4th dimension is time. But I don't know how you would render time so it sounds kind of stupid. And now we know for sure what the 4th dimension looks like. These pictures doesn't really do it justice but you get the idea.
I don't know if there's any other software that does 4D. I asked a friend who use Cinema4D what kind of 4D modeling he has been doing, but he didn't know what I was talking about so I'm not sure if it's possbile. Unfortunately we won't be seeing 4D modeling in 3Ds Max for obvious reasons.
If you have any questions please ask away.
slooF lirpA
Replies
taskbegin 1223 adskMaya.hrdwraccelerate.4D=true /gullible.begin
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haha cool command
Might be a graphics card issue, but I get a second grid, moving in concert with the first, but opposite. Unless it's a feature?