Hell I might switch to modo myself. Also it's not as blaoted as max and maya is. It's doesn't mean im gonna abandon max it's just modo has more powerful of a modeling tool.
While i love modo and use it as my main app, i have to call you out on this one. Modo is a great tool, simple and easy workflow, but it doesnt come anywhere near max in terms of power as a modeling app. Modo has nothing that can touch max's non-destructive modifier system, which is simply leaps and bounds beyond what modo can do for advanced stuff. Shell, FFDs, all sorts of cool stuff with splines/curves that you can edit whenever you want, not done with when you drop your tool.
Has anyone done anything with the RTT tools? I hear the baking is supposed to be better, i'm hoping there are options to bake normals to display correctly in realtime as apposed to offline rendering.
What do you mean with normals not displaying correctly, EQ ? Doesn't that depend on the method you use for displaying them (I'm thinking you're talking about flipped green?).
Anyway, I really, really like the new viewport display stuff. The AA and SSAO really are a huge leap forward again, and once I get acces to soft shadows in custom shaders all will be good. Just too bad Post effects are utterly broken now when you use SSAO...
What do you mean with normals not displaying correctly, EQ ? Doesn't that depend on the method you use for displaying them (I'm thinking you're talking about flipped green?).
Anyway, I really, really like the new viewport display stuff. The AA and SSAO really are a huge leap forward again, and once I get acces to soft shadows in custom shaders all will be good. Just too bad Post effects are utterly broken now when you use SSAO...
No, max generates its normals to show up correctly in the offline renderer, which for whatever reason must use totally different bi/tangents than realtime shaders, this is really apparent when doing hard surfaced stuff. Easy to get tons of smoothing errors etc. On the other hand maya seems to correctly generate normals to view in realtime, with the correct bi/tangents/normals, and you get much much less smoothing errors. And XN even generates really accurate normals, when displayed in XN. The big problem here is that there is no standard for this stuff, everything seems to cacluate tangents differently, and even max renders and displays differently.
BradMyers82: Yeah I was waiting for the 64 bit trial myself. Now i'm wondering if I should just go ahead and install the trial or wait until I can get my hands on the trial DVD.
Xoliul: Very nice! The new viewport stuff is really impressive especially now that you can use Mental Mill to create shaders that'll work inside Max.
No, max generates its normals to show up correctly in the offline renderer, which for whatever reason must use totally different bi/tangents than realtime shaders, this is really apparent when doing hard surfaced stuff. Easy to get tons of smoothing errors etc. On the other hand maya seems to correctly generate normals to view in realtime, with the correct bi/tangents/normals, and you get much much less smoothing errors. And XN even generates really accurate normals, when displayed in XN. The big problem here is that there is no standard for this stuff, everything seems to cacluate tangents differently, and even max renders and displays differently.
Aah yeah, I also noticed that. good point bringing it up. I had such a hard time baking a highpoly car body, always these tangent errors showing up. Good to know there are bakers that actually compensate for this.
Now that I think of it, if the tangent normals are baked based of the binormals and tangents that scanline uses, it makes sense the they don't work 100% realtime.
What I think might be a fix however, is if someone (I hope to do this myself one day), can duplicate the high quality normals you get with standard materials if you enable "Best" viewport display. These are actually more towards offline rendered tangents, but I can't find what calculations they do to improve these normals. They would provide a better tangent base for normalmapsI think.
I finally got a chance to try out 2010 and have to say I really like it. Just the fact that I have polygon cruncher is nice (which I bought years back, but I can't get to work on newer versions of max ) And it's nice that I don't have to worry about tracking down and installing polyboost either.
I know its sort of a cheap rip off by Autodesk of these plugins, and you CAN get pretty much the same functionality in Max via the older plugins; it's just nice having them all in one organized package. Furthermore, there are small adjustments they made that make things run smoother when modeling. Pretty much all the updates you will see, work slightly better then the older plugin counterparts.
For example, when you use polyboost and lets say you are moving verts over a surface. Every now and then one will go flying off in space or something. What makes matters worse, if you try to undo the mistake, all the verts you moved go back to there original position. Now with 3ds max's polyboost knockoff, flying verts rarely happen, and you can undo each movement individually. I have noticed many many more small improvements like this already. While its not earth shattering it is quite nice and will save you time for sure.
So to me 3ds max 2010 is a far better upgrade then 2008 was to 2009. In my opinion its the best update since they upgraded to 64 bit.
I haven't used modo or really gotten into other 3d apps, but like I said I'm actually quite happy with the release of 3ds max 2010 atm.
just installed it here- and my texTools fails GUI wise
also couldn't find a light theme yet. Aliased fonts are all over the GUI and then not - it is fully inconsistent and so blurry for my eye's - I dont like it and I could not yet find a option to disable it.
edit: ah got it. goto customize > colors > scheme > use windows theme (and no not that XP teletubby design, but the classy win2000)
edit2: also the proper loop commands for your shortcuts are under customize > polyTools > and then:
loop
ring
insert loop
as I use them all them time, they work in vertex, edge and face mode _> unlike the other hidden commands you can assign that only work on edge and alike
renderhjs: Yeah, I ran into the same problems. I had to change the UI from black because I couldn't make out much on my monitor and for some reason the shortcuts are not well organized so its hard to tell what means what. (Example: finding the right shortcut for creating a polygon by selection verts took like 15 minutes. There are like 6 different names that all sound like they could be it in the list)
Like I said it works well for me know, but I should have mentioned it took some tweaking for sure.
[Edit] It could just be my imagination, but I was having a harder time seeing the vertices (distinguishing the little blue dots in the viewport) so I went to Customize/Preferences/Viewports and increased the size by +1 to = 3. It seems to help, and I thought I would mention if anyone runs into the same issue.
Has anyone done anything with the RTT tools? I hear the baking is supposed to be better, i'm hoping there are options to bake normals to display correctly in realtime as apposed to offline rendering.
and this is not a "invert green channel" issue? never ran into that, ok not doing much super hard surfaces, only armoprs from time to time, but depending on the engine i only have to flip the green channel and thats it, the maps that come out of max can go straight into unreal without any problems, the main difference i see between maya and max maps is just the inverted green channel other then that it always worked like it should no matter what engine was the target platform (have to admit besides urneal i only worked with 2 other engines that use normalmaps)
EQ have you tried putting on a DX/viewport shader and then dropping an edit normals mod on? It's like relax for normals and fixes a ton of hard surface bs. I am meaning to do a tut on this soon.
Neox: Read my other post
Iron: If that works or not, that is still just a lame hack ignoring the real issue. That max does not correctly render for realtime display. Its very simple to prove this.
1. Make a box with rounded corners
2. Make a low poly box with 1 SG
3. Render your normal map.
4. Render this object in the scanline renderer, it will display perfectly
5. Apply a realtime shader, it will be perfectly fucked.
Its not some sort of "oh you're doing it wrong" thing, because doing the same in XN/Maya will give you much better results. This is a true and very annoying flaw with the way max's RTT system works.
other renderers can handle that pretty heavy normal change of 90°? crazy i just add more geo to the baking mesh so the shadng on the lowpoly already works, not doing much hard surface though, so i normally don't have these issues
includes nearly 30 fixes for issues with undo, performance, responsiveness, viewports, material workflow, and mental ray® software. Specific areas addressed are Biped, Bitmap Pager, Bitmap Proxies, Containers, Edit Poly, Interoperability, Licensing, Materials, mental ray, Particle Flow, Performance, Photometric Lights, ProOptimizer, Render To Texture (RTT), Rendering, UVW Unwrap, and Viewports.
they wrote twice performance, still I somewhat still hate the new GUI bullshit they added.
Will give it a spin as soon as I am back on a computer with 2010 installed
they wrote twice performance, still I somewhat still hate the new GUI bullshit they added.
Will give it a spin as soon as I am back on a computer with 2010 installed
From the sounds of it, they needed to give it a twice-over
well if you read through the PDF at least from the sound of things it does not look they fixed what I would cared for, which is for me mainly the GUI (graphite slowness + anti aliasing forcing mix, retarded main menu with bad design usability [no shortcut label, slow, not snappy, bloated big,...] )
if i turn off propagate to instances, it doesn´t change the behaviour. If i turn it on, it also clears the material from the original object when i clone it
Can´t find the attribute in the general preferences (could find world uv coordinates which was unchecked).
I can´t get this thing to work and it is really annoying, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Replies
While i love modo and use it as my main app, i have to call you out on this one. Modo is a great tool, simple and easy workflow, but it doesnt come anywhere near max in terms of power as a modeling app. Modo has nothing that can touch max's non-destructive modifier system, which is simply leaps and bounds beyond what modo can do for advanced stuff. Shell, FFDs, all sorts of cool stuff with splines/curves that you can edit whenever you want, not done with when you drop your tool.
Has anyone done anything with the RTT tools? I hear the baking is supposed to be better, i'm hoping there are options to bake normals to display correctly in realtime as apposed to offline rendering.
Anyway, I really, really like the new viewport display stuff. The AA and SSAO really are a huge leap forward again, and once I get acces to soft shadows in custom shaders all will be good. Just too bad Post effects are utterly broken now when you use SSAO...
Here's something I made with Max 2010, only possible because of it:
http://laurenscorijn.com/projects/240SX
No, max generates its normals to show up correctly in the offline renderer, which for whatever reason must use totally different bi/tangents than realtime shaders, this is really apparent when doing hard surfaced stuff. Easy to get tons of smoothing errors etc. On the other hand maya seems to correctly generate normals to view in realtime, with the correct bi/tangents/normals, and you get much much less smoothing errors. And XN even generates really accurate normals, when displayed in XN. The big problem here is that there is no standard for this stuff, everything seems to cacluate tangents differently, and even max renders and displays differently.
Xoliul: Very nice! The new viewport stuff is really impressive especially now that you can use Mental Mill to create shaders that'll work inside Max.
Aah yeah, I also noticed that. good point bringing it up. I had such a hard time baking a highpoly car body, always these tangent errors showing up. Good to know there are bakers that actually compensate for this.
Now that I think of it, if the tangent normals are baked based of the binormals and tangents that scanline uses, it makes sense the they don't work 100% realtime.
What I think might be a fix however, is if someone (I hope to do this myself one day), can duplicate the high quality normals you get with standard materials if you enable "Best" viewport display. These are actually more towards offline rendered tangents, but I can't find what calculations they do to improve these normals. They would provide a better tangent base for normalmapsI think.
I know its sort of a cheap rip off by Autodesk of these plugins, and you CAN get pretty much the same functionality in Max via the older plugins; it's just nice having them all in one organized package. Furthermore, there are small adjustments they made that make things run smoother when modeling. Pretty much all the updates you will see, work slightly better then the older plugin counterparts.
For example, when you use polyboost and lets say you are moving verts over a surface. Every now and then one will go flying off in space or something. What makes matters worse, if you try to undo the mistake, all the verts you moved go back to there original position. Now with 3ds max's polyboost knockoff, flying verts rarely happen, and you can undo each movement individually. I have noticed many many more small improvements like this already. While its not earth shattering it is quite nice and will save you time for sure.
So to me 3ds max 2010 is a far better upgrade then 2008 was to 2009. In my opinion its the best update since they upgraded to 64 bit.
I haven't used modo or really gotten into other 3d apps, but like I said I'm actually quite happy with the release of 3ds max 2010 atm.
The application failed to start because the Side-by-side configuration is incorrect.
GG.
also couldn't find a light theme yet. Aliased fonts are all over the GUI and then not - it is fully inconsistent and so blurry for my eye's - I dont like it and I could not yet find a option to disable it.
edit: ah got it. goto customize > colors > scheme > use windows theme (and no not that XP teletubby design, but the classy win2000)
edit2: also the proper loop commands for your shortcuts are under customize > polyTools > and then:
loop
ring
insert loop
as I use them all them time, they work in vertex, edge and face mode _> unlike the other hidden commands you can assign that only work on edge and alike
Like I said it works well for me know, but I should have mentioned it took some tweaking for sure.
[Edit] It could just be my imagination, but I was having a harder time seeing the vertices (distinguishing the little blue dots in the viewport) so I went to Customize/Preferences/Viewports and increased the size by +1 to = 3. It seems to help, and I thought I would mention if anyone runs into the same issue.
and this is not a "invert green channel" issue? never ran into that, ok not doing much super hard surfaces, only armoprs from time to time, but depending on the engine i only have to flip the green channel and thats it, the maps that come out of max can go straight into unreal without any problems, the main difference i see between maya and max maps is just the inverted green channel other then that it always worked like it should no matter what engine was the target platform (have to admit besides urneal i only worked with 2 other engines that use normalmaps)
Iron: If that works or not, that is still just a lame hack ignoring the real issue. That max does not correctly render for realtime display. Its very simple to prove this.
1. Make a box with rounded corners
2. Make a low poly box with 1 SG
3. Render your normal map.
4. Render this object in the scanline renderer, it will display perfectly
5. Apply a realtime shader, it will be perfectly fucked.
Its not some sort of "oh you're doing it wrong" thing, because doing the same in XN/Maya will give you much better results. This is a true and very annoying flaw with the way max's RTT system works.
Works good though man. It's like a make pretty button. I was pissed and happy at the same time when I first used it.
f'n max hate love.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=13642460&linkID=9241178
Will give it a spin as soon as I am back on a computer with 2010 installed
solves it for the session or max file
In the preferences search for the same (general I believe) and uncheck that bullshit. Also uncheck world uv coordinates should it be enabled.
if i turn off propagate to instances, it doesn´t change the behaviour. If i turn it on, it also clears the material from the original object when i clone it
Can´t find the attribute in the general preferences (could find world uv coordinates which was unchecked).
I can´t get this thing to work and it is really annoying, any help would be greatly appreciated.