New 3ds max extension

robioto · Jul 2008

Saw this on maxunderground...

The new extension includes: ProOptimizer modifier for optimizing high-poly models (a reworked and enhanced version of Mootool's Polygon Cruncher), 12 new Particle Flow operators (based on Particle Flow Tools: Box#1, featuring tighter integration with Max, improved memory and performance) and a ProSound toolset that incorporates multi-track audio capabilities with Maxscript support (Boomer Labs' most useful Sound Trax plugin). What's great news is that Autodesk has hired Oleg Bayborodin to once again develop software for the base Max application (or in this case to better integrate software he had already developed for Max), which could hint at ongoing efforts in that direction. Taking into account ICE-related developments on the Softimage front this would not be a bad idea.

Mark Dygert · Jul 2008

holy crap... they're including poly cruncher and soundtrax, oh fuck yea, about time.

I have a few monster scripts I wrote for soundtrax when doing facial animation. It's nice to see you won't need to buy the plug-in any more.

Oleg Bayborodin is on staff huh... wow that could be awesome! I really like particle flow. Maybe they're serious about kicking it up a notch.

Mark Dygert · Jul 2008

Found this to be useful, in case you're on subscription and can't find them in the normal spot.

It's not under the usual 'Extensions' link on the subscription homepage once you log in. Get to it by going to the link at the bottom of the home page under ' Product Information & Downloads' -> Autodesk 3DS Max and Autodesk 3DS Max Design - Click Here

Description of new stuff:

The Autodesk® 3ds Max® Creativity Extension delivers a host of innovations to help you expand the scope of your film, games, broadcast and television productions, while you quickly and intelligently optimize your models in real time. Add a whole new dimension of realism to your work through the addition of sophisticated particle effects. You can also incorporate audio and sound effects into your animated scenes.

Polygon Modeling

Reduce the number of faces on your model, quickly and intelligently. The 3ds Max Creativity Extension release incorporates the new ProOptimizer technology, which is ideal for optimizing high-poly count 3D models from digital sculpting applications, such as Autodesk® Mudbox™ software.

This newest, high-performance 3ds Max modifier offers support for

* Precision control over the number of faces or points in your scene/model
* Preservation of detail: useful faces are removed last, enabling you to reduce your selection up to 75 percent without removing detail
* Real-time scene optimization (optimization is precalculated)
* Batch optimizing of files (you control the optimization level for each file)
* Preservation of all UV texture channel information and vertex color channel information
* Optimization of multiple objects simultaneously (optimize a selection of faces or the inverted selection across multiple objects)
* Symmetry preservation
* Protection or exclusion of object borders, so your objects stay connected after optimization

Advanced Particle Effects

Incorporate sophisticated particle effects into your scenes. PFlowAdvanced includes 12 operators new to 3ds Max Design, giving you easier access to a whole new range of creative options. The addition of the PFlowAdvanced technology to 3ds Max not only greatly enhances the functionality of Particle Flow, but it also gives you a high-performance, streamlined 3ds Max workflow, through which to access its features.

* Numerous paint tools enable you to precisely place particles in your scene. Operators—including Particle Paint, Birth Paint, Placement Paint, Birth Texture, and Mapping Object—enable you to paint both particles and emitters onto specific parts of your objects. Other special effects include the ability to emit particles based on animated color data in emitter objects.
* The utility operators have been integrated into the 3ds Max core to extend Particle Flow's capabilities, while giving you a streamlined workflow for creating particle effects. Clean up particle flow, synchronize layers, repair the cache system, save a custom flow as a preset, and automatically delete operators that are not in use and lock or bond particles to an object (improves on the former position object operator).
* The ability to group particles enables you to perform specific operations on arbitrary subsets of particles. Quickly create multiple groups and work with as many of them as you like through such operators as Group Selection, Group, and Split Group
* The PFlowAdvanced Shape operators greatly expand the Particle Flow Shape toolset. Define a particle shape beginning with a pre-existing shape—a vast range of 3D and 2D shape presets are available to choose from. Additionally, the Fast Shape Evaluation operation evaluates a reference mesh object on the final frame quickly and accurately, significantly improving performance.
* Workflow enhancements include an Express Save operator that has been integrated with the 3ds Max auto-save functionality, backward compatibility with Orbaz Particle Flow Tools, Box # 1-based scenes, and general memory and performance improvements based on source code optimizations.

Integrated Audio

The incorporation of ProSound into the 3ds Max Creativity Extension means the software now supports integrated, multitrack audio to enhance your presentations through the addition of high-quality audio, and sound effects. This allows you to assign sounds to objects such as doors and fountains, and add a music track or voice-over for your presentations.

* The 3ds Max ProSound toolset supports up to 100 audio tracks per scene, per-track animated volume, audio output normalization, and audio playback during motion capture.
* • An intuitive user interface and workflow features help you to quickly synchronize your audio. Sync your playback with the viewport, render your track to match playback speed, or play it backwards and forwards (ping pong mode).

ProSound supports both PCM and compressed audio in AVI and WAV format with up to six output channels. It can also be quickly controlled via MaxScript through 46 script commands.

I'm downloading them now. I'm VERY excited that they decided to include boomer labs plug-ins. 3dsmax2009 just got interesting.

spacemonkey · Jul 2008

ok, if poly cruncher can handle higher range polycounts I will be very tempted to install 2009 at work.. which we have access to, but I couldnt find justification to get all the max users to switch to..

pixelherder · Jul 2008

sorry to derail slightly, but is there ANYTHING like polycrunch for maya? or an independent app (free/opensource in particular)?

i've googled to no avail, so if anyone knows any better....!

*edit* xnormal helps a bit, just because it doesnt crash with super-detailed OBJ's but it'd be nice to get stuff into maya in a slightly more optimised state

kary · Jul 2008

There is Meshlab.

spacemonkey · Jul 2008

Poly cruncher decimates the faces in a far more effective way than mesh labs. I've used both and although poly cruncher is better.. its always been a pain in the arse that it cant handle high poly counts. You have to break high poly meshes into chunks and then batch process them... which can be fine, but its another step to take.. and unless you have a script to handle the breaking down/batching it can be a pain.
Mesh labs doesn't have batching available afaik, but I think its planned for future releases.

anoon · Jul 2008

Wasn't the whole point of Polycruncher to preprocess and knock down a model so that it could be brought into max for Render To Texture without the application grinding to a halt and dying?

If Polycruncher is integrated into max, how are you supposed to get the model in there in the first place for reduction?

ALoopingIcon · Jul 2008

@ spacemonkey

About the MeshLab vs Polycruncher.

I got exactly the opposite feeling. MeshLab output seemed be better than the PolyCruncher one. MeshLab is able to manage very large meshes and that for a tool aimed to reduce the size of large meshes is a rather basic feature.

Simplifying big meshes in chunks affect the final quality in a significant way.

The only missing feature of MeshLab simplification is the symmetry preserving option.

spacemonkey · Jul 2008

ALoopingIcon, yes meshlabs will handle higher polycounts but the end results are not as good as poly crunchers - it does not maintain detail anywhere nearly as effectively as polycruncher.. which is the problem.
As I pointed out above yes breaking down meshes to batch process in polycruncher shouldn't be necessary however the functionality to view face decimiation and control it via a slider certainly arent available in meshlabs. You can have a far greater degree of accuracy in that regards, which can be crucial when dealing with delicate areas such as a face.
There is no undo in meshlabs and you cant preview the decimation before committing. All combined with the lack of batch processing make for a bit of a disappointment. Hopefully they will make some improvements

ALoopingIcon · Jul 2008

spacemonkey

Yes, I was speaking about the quality of the results, and imho polycruncher simplified meshes are not as good as meshlab ones (tendency to open/enlarge holes http://www.mootools.com/plugins/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=54, flipping faces on planar regions http://www.mootools.com/plugins/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=27 ) and so on...). But this is just a personal opinion I do not want to start a flame here

.

On the other hand I agree, the absence of an undo feature is a striking annoying omission in MeshLab.

spacemonkey · Jul 2008

The people in those posts clearly didn't read the options before they used the tool hah, that is not representative of quality in any way at all. In regards to quality I am referring to the smart degradation of faces... the meshlabs algorithm isn't as effective at maintaining detail imho.

But use what you want... like I said I have used both and I have simply tried to explain what I think of them.

pixelherder · Aug 2008

thanks for the meshlab link - i'll have a look and see if i can break it!

Mr GetDown · Oct 2008

Why not use them both

Meshlabs to get down in polys. Then Polycruncher to finely tune.

I personally find Meshlabs good enough to get my meshes into Max. Cool thing is it allow u to manually select areas you want to optimize.

Neox · Oct 2008

spacemonkey, what are you using polycruncher for anyways? You're creating LODs with it? Or like Epic getting your highresmeshes _somehow_ into max, never understood that workflow as you can get quite a big load of polies into max (biggest model i worked on was 30-40mio and no problems with getting it into max)on a mediocore machine.

Mr GetDown · Oct 2008

biggest model i worked on was 30-40mio and no problems with getting it into max)on a mediocore machine.

No freaking way!!
My comp starts to freaks out on 1mil. I don't like to work on models over 500k as it slows my work flow.

What's this modest computer spec?
Mine:-
Geforce 7600
DualCore E6400
2 Gigs Ram

Neox · Oct 2008

2 gigs ram
7800 GTX
Pentium 4 3.2ghz
on the machine here
at home quadcore
4gig ram 8800 GT

as said very mediocore, no need for polycrunch for that stuff, i understand using it for lods when it has to go really quick, but nor for that stuff

Geezus · Oct 2008

@anoon: I was thinking the same thing.

Any news on perhaps and update to the archaic realtime renderer/viewport? That's really my only gripe with Max.

Neox · Oct 2008

My comp starts to freaks out on 1mil. I don't like to work on models over 500k as it slows my work flow.

why do you need to work on those? I'm just talking about getting highres geo into max, to bake that into normal- and/or lightmaps and stuff, no need for editing there and no need for showing the meshes, the renderer can handle very high polycounts, you don't need them to be visible in screen for baking and such things, even for presentationrenderings or stuff, just import a lower level for viewport representation, or as a reference for setting up the render cage

same goes to geezus and anoon, when you only want to bake it, why do you have to actually see it in the viewport? Thats just nonesense, just grab a lower res of your mesh, set up the cage and import the highres without showing it in screen to bake it

almost 30 mio and still decent framerates, simple as that...

Mark Dygert · Oct 2008

Mr GetDown wrote: »

No freaking way!!
My comp starts to freaks out on 1mil. I don't like to work on models over 500k as it slows my work flow.

What's this modest computer spec?
Mine:-
Geforce 7600
DualCore E6400
2 Gigs Ram

It really depends more on the version of 3dsmax you're using. 2008-09 have some really great improvements for handling really high numbers of polys, well.
pre-08-09 well you're taking your chances...

Neox · Oct 2008

well this thread is about current max extensions, but i also worked on 10mio meshes in Max9, but yes 2009 is definitely way faster but mostly due to the new im-exporter which doesn't crash on import. But the Guruware importer exists for Max9 too and that improves it quite a lot.

Mr GetDown · Oct 2008

Ok, I'll admit I never had that knowledge, so how do you reference an object without ever seeing it's mesh in the viewport? I'm sure there are a few people who' like to know that.

...I guess you just import everything with the veiwport set to bounding boxes. Then just parent the low res reference objects, to the high ones? Then hide the high res objects?

Any aligning would have to be done in external software (zbrush)?

...ha ha. I found what I was looking for the diplay as bounding box button. Under object properties.

I believe Epics main reason for optimising was the file sizes. Also they applied colours to the high res, for easy texturing.

Mark Dygert · Oct 2008

If you right click an object and go to Object Properties you can set it to "display as box".

Neox · Oct 2008

you can still apply colors to the highresmeshes :P
baking that without lighting is fast as hell, having it optimized is just a error source i'd avoid

New 3ds max extension

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