3D Studio Max 7 is here

Illusions

Ok, 3D Studio Max 7 has been out for two days now, and Discreet has a 30 day free trial over at their site...and guess what...its both a kickass upgrade and has the occasional pain in the ass bug...

Edit Poly modifier = Cool
Direct X 9.0C Viewport rendering = wonked (the 2048x2048 body texture on my Smoke elemental is blurred horribly in 7...but not in 6, both are running Direct X rendering for the viewports...)
Paint deformation = highly displeased with it...(it has a tendency to lag, and crap max out...)

Still trying it out, I'd say I'm pleased with most of the new features I've experienced...

ironbearxl

ok, i noiced the viewport blurriness too, but it can be corrected by turning off mipmap filtering in the map settings.
About the "slowness" of paint deformation, i found that the better you control the 0 level subD (or the base mesh) the faster the paint def will go at say subD level 1 or 2. I haven't needed a reason to go above 2 tho, as the mesh will gets really dense.
This is the best version of 3ds yet, and they finally bundled character studio.

MoP

The UV Relax tool is STILL broken. Seriously, they've had since max5 to fix it, but they just seem to be ignoring it. IMHO it's a vital tool, and they just don't seem to be bothered that theirs sucks. It actually ADDS more distortion half the time, because it just averages the vertices in UV-space, ignoring the world-space edge lengths... I'll take the UV-Helper (free!) script any day.

The new EPoly stuff is nice, I like Bridge and the new one-click Edge Turning (although they left Edit Triangulation too for people who prefer that).

Sub Surface Scattering in Mental Ray is a HUGE bonus. I can't wait to try that out.

Not to mention the built-in Normal-Mapping tools, and all the render-to-texture stuff. Very useful.

I haven't tried the paint deformation yet.

Mojo2k

their relax tool is not broken, its jsut difrent, it works the same way that the relax mesh modier works on mesh, not saying this is good, because i find it to be useless, they do need to make a relax tool that works like we are acustomed to them working

i've been using the beta of it for a few weeks, and why theres few things revolutionary, theres a lot of little things that rock, like preserve uv's

Illusions

[ QUOTE ]
ok, i noiced the viewport blurriness too, but it can be corrected by turning off mipmap filtering in the map settings.
About the "slowness" of paint deformation, i found that the better you control the 0 level subD (or the base mesh) the faster the paint def will go at say subD level 1 or 2. I haven't needed a reason to go above 2 tho, as the mesh will gets really dense.
This is the best version of 3ds yet, and they finally bundled character studio.

[/ QUOTE ]

It gets really slow when you aren't using subD's...like, this is how my stack looks in max:

>Edit Poly modifier
>Meshsmooth (2 iterations)
>Edit Poly modifier
>Meshsmooth (1 iteration)
>Low Poly model

and the reason for the mesh density: I need to paint small surfact detail in some areas in my model, that is at most 5 pixels wide...trying to do this has actually brought my machine the closest to freezing up as it has ever been...

FritzTHECAT

you gots to replace those Meshsmooths with Turbosmooth if you arent weighting the cage.

PaK

i dunno howto generate normal maps with max7, does nayone know how?

-R

FAT_CAP

Theres a video showing how to generate normal maps within 3DS MAX 7 PAK - the URL is:

http://www4.discreet.com/3dsmax/3dsmax.php?id=870

and its the Normal Mapping vid on there. It doesnt really go into too much detail though but its a good basic guide.

Although when I was testing this last night - the cage that is supposed to automatically wrap around my mesh to catch all the normal mapping information, was nowhere near as automatically perfect (as the video suggests it should be)and skewed some verts off into space ... not sure about the quality of the bumpmap compared to other generators either - I'll have to keep trying to get some good results tonight.

Illusions

In the projector modifier attributes hit 'reset' after you've loaded your highpoly...I don't know why they don't just make this an automatic feature...

then just bump up the 'push' value until the cage completely surrounds your model. Also, if you go into the 'Help' section, and search Normal Maps, you'll find a tutorial on how to make them. Real easy, but if you're following it, when they say to use "world" instead use "tangent"...

other than that...I'm trying to figure out how to conquer bigger problems with it (like it'll render geometry fine as a complete piece, but then you get overlap, but if I seperate, there is no overlap but the render is wonked...like normal maps aren't supposed to contain bright oranges and yellows in certain spots on a tangent map of a smooth plane...)

FAT_CAP

Ahah - cool - thanks Illusions - its a really nice feature having normal mapping inside your 3D app IMO - I haven't down loaded the help files yet....I tried but the conncection kept dropping halfway through - or the 1hr download time was still sitting at 1hr when it was time for Mr computer to say night-night and for my sleepy times...

...will try again today

Illusions

Lol, I'm waiting for someone to write a script for this, because...it really is irritating, I have down what I have to do already, and I've only been using it for a few days...its very repetitive...

+ Select load low poly > *Open render to texture > *Projection Mapping (Enabled)> *Pick high poly > *sub objects disabled > *Output add (Normalsmap) > + set filename and size > *output into source > *hit reset on Projection modifier > + Insert Push value > + render

Everything with a * is what I think could be automated by a script, anything with a + would be a user defined value or a button to push on said script...but I have no maxscript knowledge...future project perhaps...