IMAGINiT Visualization Solutions Blog Archive

Got laid-off recently? Autodesk wants to help. You can get now get free software licenses of 3ds Max and Maya as part of the Autodesk Assistance Program. Designed to help "displaced employees update thier skills and improve their employability in a down economy". Autodesk is offering 90 day student licenses, free online training, as well as reduced cost classroom training through resellers.

To read all about it, click here. To see if you are eligible or to apply for the program click here.

If you have a file in Revit with RPC entourage and you export to FBX, the file can become very very big. This file can then take a really long time to import to 3ds Max Design. You can speed up this process by making a change to an INI file used by the Custom UI and Defaults Switcher. Here's how:

1. Locate where your 3dsmax.ini fileis stored. On my system this is C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\3dsMaxDesign\2010 - 32bit\enu. There should be a defaults folder there.
2. In the DesignVIZ.mentalray subfolder locate the CurrentDefaults.ini file and open it using Notepad.
3. Locate the [Performance] section. There are two lines where you will change the value from 0 to 1.
   • Don'tRepeatRefMag=1
   • InvalidateTMOptimization=1
4. Save the file, then use the Custom UI and Defaults switcher to reselect the DesignVIZ.mental.ray profile.
5. Restart Max, and try the import again.

If you can't find this file, search for Factory Defaults\DesignVIZ.mentalray folder and edit the CurrentDefaults.ini there. If the user folder isn't found, 3ds Max Design uses this location instead.

This trick should also speed up translation times during rendering. Let me know if you find this useful. Who knew? Pierre-Felix Breton at Autodesk. Thanks from users everywhere!

I get a lot of questions from users regarding rendering in Revit and Autodesk 3ds Max Design. Both products have the same renderer (mental ray 3.7), so people want to know, when should I render in Revit and when should I render in 3ds Max? Since it's the same renderer, why not only render in Revit?

Essentially, you should use mental ray Rendering in Revit while you are in the design process, to validate your work. To see if what you think you are designing is actually what you've created, the Revit rendering will do a good job of showing you the materials and lighting and give you a sense of the space.

However, when you are rendering for client presentation or municipal approval process, it's a good idea to move the file to 3ds Max Design and continue your renderings there. While the quality is identical between the two products, the rendering speed and available controls will lead you to 3ds Max everytime. 3ds Max clocks in at up to 10 times faster speeds when rendering the same files.

When mental ray starts a render it first goes through a translation process which turns the entire scene into a mental ray specific file. This is called the Geometry Cache in 3ds Max, and once you have calculated this, you can choose to reuse it, so that you don't have to recalculate it each time you render. After calculating the Geometry Cache, you can also calculate and reuse the Final Gather Map. Most important is that you can do this independently from the rendering. If you are working on a big scene with limited memory, this is a life-saver, and this is not available to Revit users, only 3DS Max will give you this option.

The other critical thing that Max provides over Revit is the ability to scale your render time by using more processors through network rendering. Revit doesn't support the concept of a render farm, 3DS Max does.You can cut your render time in half by using a second processor, the more computers that share the work of the rendering, the faster it goes. Use 10 computers and render in 1/10 of the time. And it doesn't cost anything extra, you can install 3ds Max free of charge on additional machines for renderfarm use. 3ds Max has a feature called Split Scanline, part of network rendering, which allows you to render a large resolution image in bits and pieces over many different computers. When its finished it automatically stitches the parts into a seamless single image. Revit doesn't have anything like this.

We recently did a rendering in Revit at the very best quality setting. It took over 4 days to get the rendering finished. Do you have this kind of time? I didn't think so. The same file on a single computer with 3ds Max renders in about 10 hours. If I use a render farm with 10 machines, I could render this in about an hour. Something to think about.

There is a brand-new HotFix download available for 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2010.

Here are the issues the Hot Fix addresses:

• Localized Versions - Particle Flow Window mouse pointer issues resolves when running English version on Japanese OS (or using Language for non-Unicode programs set to Japanese.
• Materials - fixed maxscript error issue.
• Parameter Wiring - Wire sub-controllers no longer removed during garbage collection.
• Undo - There are five undo fixes where the undo stack got cleared when it shouldn't have. See if you still have undo stack problems and let us know if there are more to resolve.

To download the hotfix click here.

When you go to import an FBX file in 3ds Max Design , there's a button you might have missed at the bottom left that says Web Update. The Web Update button will check the version number of your FBX exporter, and alert you if there is a new one.

Well, there's a new one.

On April 9th, Autodesk released a majorly enhanced version of the FBX plugin for all the products. FBX allows for file translation between Revit and 3ds Max Design, as well as Maya, Motionbuilder and even SoftImage for those of you in the media and entertainment side.

FBX (formerly known as filmbox) came to Autodesk via the Alias acquistion. Originally made by a company called Kaydara, FBX was a format designed to transfer motion capture animation data, and as such is very good at 3D and Animation. It supports NURBS, polygons and subdivision surfaces, morph targets and blend shapes, materials and textures, lights, cameras, hierarchies, inverse kinematics, deformations and envelopes. And Autodesk says it's going to add more. There's a huge long list of bugfixes you can read on Ken Pimentel's blog.

One extremely cool thing about the new FBX are the Biped Enhancements that come all with it. They're calling if Biped merge-back workflow. This means you can now take Biped animation, edit it in Motionbuilder and send it back via FBX.

If I understand this correctly, once you've installed the new FBX, you can choose "update scene elements" during import and it will let you copy your FBX animation information onto existing Bipeds in the scene. To download the new FBX update click here.

I once had to model a hospital room in 3ds Max for a forensics job. I had some photographs of the room, no measurements. I managed to model the room guaging the size based on the ceiling tiles. Then I had to model the hospital furniture. It sure would have been nice if I'd had one of the new collections from DigitalXmodels.com.

I've recently been doing some civil visualization using a 3ds Max plugin called called Dynamite VSP. Produced by 3am Solutions, this plug-in truly lives up to its name. It solves a number of problems confronting the civil 3d visualizer.

As all good 3ds Max users know, our favorite program uses "floating-point" mathematics which allows for very fast viewport rendering. Unfortunately, it also means that the further you are from the origin, the more problematic your work becomes. While this is not very evident in architectural visualization, it hits you where it hurts when doing civil work. Most files coming from Civil 3D and other similar programs are geographically located, meaning they can be miles from the origin. If you try to import those files directly, they can become corrupted instantly upon import. Dynamite VSP dynamically moves the file to the origin as it imports the file, this avoids any corruption in the geometry. Very nice.

But wait there's more. There is a free exporter for Civil3D, so the CAD operator can write out a specialized .VSP3d file. This file goes way beyond the abilities for DWG or XML. If you import a VSP3D file, the civil surfaces will automatically have materials and mapping assigned. They must be using Spline Mapping, because the road texture and shoulder textures are following the geometry, just the way I need.

The alighments and road centerlines come in as single splines which can easily be used for camera paths, or as spacing paths for street furniture (street signs, guard rails, vegetation, etc). Dynamite VSP comes with customized libraries called "country kits" specifically for your location. You can place automobiles on the roads and animate them by simply giving them a speed. If you want them to go in the opposite direction, a negative speed will accomplish that. Brilliant.

If you're not a regular 3ds Max user, Dynamite VSP has customized the user interface just for you. The command panel is hidden and many of the standard 3ds Max techniques have been streamlined and parameterized. If you don't know how to loft or use the sweep modifier, no problem, Dynamite has it all set up for you to create bridges or railroad rails and ties without really knowing all the ins and outs of using Max. Best of all, it's all a file-link system, so if the Civil3D file is updated, so is your max file.

Dynamite VSP has a nice online community site with a good selection of video tutorials to get you up to speed quickly. And so far they've been pretty responsive to my constant stream of questions and comments. It's a pricey plugin, costing $2995 USD, but it's well worth the investment.. There's a trial version, check it out, I know you're going to like it. Works with the current versions and most earlier versions of 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design. And look for a version 4 of Dynamite VSP coming out soon!

Got a need for Trees? Greenworks Organic Software has 100 free trees from their XFrog linefor you available on the Autodesk Seek website. Thank Ken Pimentel for arranging this, and be sure to tell him you want more.

The trees are available on the Autodesk Seek website, "the online source for design and product specification".

Free of charge, these trees are botantically correct, and come in a variety of formats - you can use them in 3ds Max Design 2010, 3ds Max 2010 and Maya 2009. These are the same trees that have been used by high-end film houses such as Pixar, SONY Imageworks and have appeared in movies like "The Incredibles" and "War of the Worlds".

Each tree is a separate download, so it can take a little time to get them, and make sure you have plenty of diskspace, I downloaded the breadfruit tree, it's 26 MB zipped and 75 unzipped. I got 3 breadfruit trees in the download, they represent 3 different ages (young, medium and mature). These are handy if you have to show the planning department what the vegatation is going to look like when the project is completed and what it will look like when the trees reach their maximum height.

I haven't downloaded all of them (oh for the time and diskspace), but I will. Soon as I get a vacation.

Virtual Gardening is good for you. Try it out!

I was part of the original team that developed 3D Studio in 1990.
I remember being amazed at the process that was used to develop the software.
There was a small team called the Yost group, Gary Yost, Jack Powell, Tom Hudson, Rolf Berteig, Dan Silva.
There was me and another guy sitting at cardtables in a closet full of filing cabinets. We worked on 4 MHZ IBM AT's.

Somehow our small team was augmentd by a rabid cadre of devoted volunteers, people who apparently stayed up all night, every night modeling and animating instead of sleeping.People who had obviously lost their minds, gone off the deepend. Using Compuserve, the evergrowing league of enthusiast found bug after bug which got tracked and fixed. Wish after Wish listed and considered.

I was an artist hired to test the software. I quickly realized nobody cared in I made art or not, as long as I crashed the software. Which I did quite frequently. One programmer in particular, Tom Hudson, would stay up every night making animation. Each morning he would have a new list of bugs to fix. Made my life as a tester quite easy.

Surely the most interesting thing about the process was the way all these people were interacting with each other. People on all the continents of the globe were connecting and communicating. Nowadays its called social networking, but in those days it was something new, without a name.

The people became involved in each other's lives. Friendships developed with people we'd never seen, and never met.
Way before Facebook and MySpace, LinkedIn or Plaxo, the 3D Studio community (now the 3ds Max community) connected and interconnected, like plant tendrils. Community masquerading as software, a good excuse for people to connect.

Even today, one of the best features of this software is the community of users, ready to share their knowledge with each other, for no good reason other than the joy of helping each other learn to use one very cool program indeed.

Since I've switched to 3ds Max Design, I've noticed that when I do standard AutoKey animation workflow, AutoKey has been setting the first key at animation at frame 1, not frame 0. This has been driving me crazy, since I'm expecting the first key to be at frame 0. I assumed this is a bug, and have been waiting for it to be fixed. But surprise, surprise, its not a bug, its a feature! If you go to Customize > Preferences > Animation Tab, at the bottom of the dialog there's a field that lets you set which frame AutoKey will use for it's initial frame. Thanks to Gus Carpenter, of Napa California for pointing this out to me.

If you're an old 3ds Max user like me, you rely on animating the visibility of objects as part of your bag of tricks. It was a great disappointment, back in the 2008 release, when I discovered that mental ray wouldn't animate visibility. You had to animate the material opacity in order to get animated visiblity affects.

In this release, its been fixed (kinda sorta).

To animate the visiblity of an object using mental ray do the following:

1. Turn on AutoKey.
2. Right-click on the object and choose Object Properties.
3. In the Rendering Control group, change the properties from Layer Properties to Object Properties.
4. Set a value in the Visibility spinner, then close the dialog.
5. Move the time slider to where you want the second key.
6. Again go to Object Properties and set the value for the second key, click ok.
7. You'll see the animated visiblity in the viewport.
8. Add an Arch&Design Material to the object.
9. Render the sequence. It works!

If you don't have a mental ray material assigned to the object, it will work in the viewport, but not it the render.
IF you try to do this by creating a visibility track in the Curve Editor, it just doesn't work.

Let me know if I'm wrong here about that last statement. Free T-shirt to the first person who figures out how to make it work by adding a visiblity track.

I had a client this week who had trouble creating network deployments of 3ds Max Design 2010.
Turns out you need to be careful not to use special characters or too-long file names, that was the problem that kept the deployment from functioning correctly..

In case you have never done this before, here are the detailed steps to accomplish this, thanks to Julie Rohret of Autodesk product support for these steps.

1. Run setup.exe to get to the main installation screen (or simply insert the DVD).
2. Click on the option to Create Deployment.
3. Choose the network location for the deployment, then click the Browse button to specify where on the network the deployment should go.
4. Name the deployment you are about to create.
5. At the bottom choose whether the deployment is to be a 32-bit deployment or a 64-bit deployment.
6. Click Next to continue.
7. Select the Products to Include in the Deployment, Whether you would like to include the components, tutorial files, etc.
8. Click Next to continue.
9. Wait for the deployment to initialize.
10. The next screen will be the EULA, click I accept.
11. Enter in The Product and User Information. Enter the Serial Number. Product key> 3ds Max: "128B1" or 3ds Design: "495B1", First name, Last name, and Organization.
12. Click Next to continue.
13. The next screen will be General Deployment Settings, check the boxes if you would like the following options with your deployment.
• Log file:
• check to Create network log and where with the Browse button.
• check to Create client log.
• Silent mode:
• check to have Client installations run in silent mode.
• Customer Involvement Program:
• check to participate.
14. Click Next to continue.
15. Review-Configure-Create Deployments. This reviews what is going to be created in the deployment.
16. Click Create Deployment button.
17. Wait for the deployment to be created and click Finish.

It's official. The latest release of Autodesk 3ds Max Design is now available and shipping.

If you are on subscription you should be getting a box (depending on your subscription settings). If you have a previous order in for 3ds Max Design, your pending order will now be filled.

Expect it to take a couple of weeks for everyone to get their software. There are a lot of 3ds Max users out there, so the volume that Autodesk has to handle is huge. That's a good thing, it means we have a vibrant community, but you already knew that!

If you're not on subscription, and you haven't ordered the latest, you can download the trial version and give it a try for 30 days. The trial version is only availabe in 32 bit, it seems, I'll let you know if that changes.

Also note that everything above also applies to 3ds Max 2010 (the entertainment version). You can actually install both versions on a single computer now, so educators and reseller AE's will like that.

For a summary of main new features and to see new feature videos click here.

If you are a subscription customer, you can go to the Autodesk Subscription Center and download brand-spanking-new
Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 or Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2010 as of today. If you're not on subscription you'll have to wait until they get the trial version up on the Autodesk website. If you don't see 2010 yet, be patient and try again on Friday. This is a large group of people and not everyone has been processed already.

There are new licensing procedures, you'll need a product key and your subscription number available to Contract Managers and Software Coordinators through the Coverage Report. If you're having problems use the subscription help to find out what your product key/contract number should be.

Also, (and this is a first), there is a hot-off-the-press hotfix out for this release.The hotfix is not available on the subscription site, you have to go to the Autodesk support site for the hotfix.

The hotfix addresses these issues:

• Performance regression under certain conditions when using mental ray with Final Gather bounces.
• Stability issues when using an instanced Cloth modifier.
• Stability issues that occur during file load with instanced geometry and Hardware Shading enabled.

I've been playing with Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2010 and I like it alot. There are lots and lots and lots of new features. Three hundred and fifty of them. New UI, New Tools. Easier to use and much more interactive.

First the UI changes. In an attempt to "look modern", 3ds Max now sports new icons, new colors and I actually like it, for the most part. Somebody who went to art school got on the team and now I just feel more artistic after staring at the new interface. New users will like this a lot, older users may grumble a bit (who likes change? raise your hand).

More UI changes - the File menu is now the Application menu and it sports a new look. It's been redesigned so it's easier to scan and better organized. Recent Files now can display thumbnails and are sorted by date. If you have a file you want to always be in the recent files list you can pin that file to stay and not scroll off. Nice feature that.

There's a new Quick Access Toolbar that gives one-click-less workflow for opening and saving files and setting your project folder. This also now hosts the Undo/Redo buttons. There's a new dropdown list for the Undo/Redo stack. Older users may want to load a CUI file with the "classic" UI that returns the Undo/Redo to the Main Toolbar.

The viewports now have menus as well. All the tools that used to be found with a right-click on the viewport label are now accessed from 3 viewport menus. Some of the tools that used to be availble only on the quad menu are now found here. In particular the Viewport Lighting and Shadows tools have moved there.

Saving the best for last here, the other major UI change is the introduction of the Ribbon. This is a context sensitive feature that hosts the new "Graphite Modeling Tools". Autodesk licensed the Polyboost modeling toolset and expanded it and gives it you via the Ribbon. This is not new UI for new Ui's sake. Here are very fast and interactive tools for polymodeling that will speed up your modeling workflow.

If the Graphite Modeling tools don't appear as a default, you can launch them with a new icon on the Main Toolbar, found just to the right of the Layer Manager, and left of the Curve Editor. Because this is a context sensitive paradigm, you must have an object selected, and that object must be converted to an editable poly, or have an edit poly modifier on it. The Graphite Tools launch in "Modify Mode", clicking the Polygon Modeling dropdown gives you fast access to applying the Edit Poly Modifier, or converting the object to editable Poly.

Once you have the right context, there are about 150 new tools for you to use in the Ribbon. If you don't like the Ribbon, you can right-click any tool and Add to Quick Access toolbar. You can also add these tools to your right-click quad menus if you prefer.

Of course the headache with any context sensitive system is that you have to memorize the location of the tools, since you can't easily scan through everything. Having tools appear and disappear, seeming at will, can be disconcerting. The Ribbon dropdowns can be pinned to stay open, this helps a little.The Ribbon can also be displayed as to Show Panel Titles. I prefer this method, it's cleaner and easier to scan for me, and when you use this method opening up a panel shows ALL the tools in one spot, rather than having some tools hiding in a seperate dropdown.

In my next post I'll start covering my favorite new Polyboost tools and their usage. Stay tuned.

I recently worked on a project that was a little different than usual. A development company wanted some design visualization done, but they insisted that they wanted traditional media - watercolor, ink and pastel on paper. They said that the CAD visualizations they had seen lacked the warmth of the human touch.

I had to agree with them. My training is in the Fine Arts, I have a degree in painting and sculpture, and I really miss the practice and discipline of creating REAL art, using my hands. Suddenly I was struck with the idea, I could model the project in 3ds Max Design 2009, render it, then work from the rendering to create a traditional piece of artwork.

I worked with my son David, who has just graduated from college with a degree in Fine Arts. I started with DWG files of the elevations and plan drawings and quickly had a model built in Max. I rendered some views then emailed them to my son. Using his fine art skills, he was able to generate a delicious looking watercolor that has just the warmth they wanted. Adding the human touch brought a level of feeling to the picture that I don't think I would have been able to accomplish with Photoshop filters, Autodesk Impression, or any plugin. And the best part - somebody got to spend a few hours immersed in the activity of artistic creation, something which feeds the soul and makes you happy.

Imagine that!

What 3ds Max really needs is a nice schematic material editor. Now you can get one, it's called NodeJoe and is available through TurboSquid.

It's created by the delightfully named company Thinking Apes Gmbh. Sanctioned by the Autodesk Certified Animation Plug-in program (ACAP), this means it has been blessed by Autodesk, even if they didn't make it themselves.

NodeJoe will let you create materials using a more visual interface and more interactively than what is currently available through the material editor.Since it's making regular Max materials, anybody with Max will be able to see the material just fine, they won't need NodeJoe on their system.

TurboSquid is the world's largest virtual marketplace for 3D Content. Located in New Orleans, they've been affiliated with 3ds Max since forever, check them out if you've never been there. I'm going to be playing with NodeJoe, I'll post a review soon.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design lets you add a bitmap background to any viewport. It also lets you have a bitmap background in your rendering. This is one of the key reasons to use 3ds Max, to visualize a new design in an existing setting. By mixing a photo of an existing site with a virtual model you can clearly show how something will look, before it is built. You set the viewport background up by going to the Views Menu > Viewport Background, you set the rendering background up by going to the Rendering Menu > Environment > Background.

Here's a timesaver for you. Drag and drop the background directly into the viewport and you can set up BOTH the rendering background and the viewport background in a single step.

Once your background is in place, make sure to set your rendering output to match the resolution of the background image. Then turn SafeFrame on to ensure that your viewport doesn't distort the image. Now you can work in the viewport and what you see should match what you'll get in your rendering.

If you have installed the AutoCAD Revit Architecture Visualization Suite or the AutoCAD Visualization Suite and then used Add or Remove Programs to remove AutoCAD, you may find that 3ds Max will no longer launch.

This is because there are shared components that are needed for both products. These components get removed, and then Max won't start up as usual.

If you have this problem you can download a fix from the Autodesk support site.

Did you know that you can use equations and expressions in any numeric field in 3ds Max?
Go to any field where you would enter a number, press CTRL + N and voila the Numeric Evaluation dialog appears. Here you can use your math skills to put in complex math equations or expressions you want to calculate. The Result is displayed in the Result field. Press the Paste button to enter that result into the field you started in.

Note, (according to the help system) you can't use variables in the Expression Evaluator, but you can use the constants pi (circular ratio), e (natural logarithm base) and TPS (ticks per second). The constants are case-sensitive, so watch for that.

Bet you never knew you can use 3ds Max to balance your checkbook!

Sometimes you'll find that 3ds Max Viewports don't act the way they are supposed to. If you are experiencing something strange in the viewport such as the grid lines disappearing, or other objects not being displayed correctly, it may be your graphics card drivers. You can test this by changing to the plain-vanilla Software mode.

Go to the Start menu and choose Programs > Autodesk > Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009 > Change Graphics Mode. When you run this, a dialog appears. Click the "Revert from Direct3D" button at the bottom of this dialog, and then choose "Software" in the subsequent dialog box that appears. If your problem goes away you'll know that it is related to your graphics card driver.

You can then try to either update or rollback your driver You do this outside of 3ds Max. Right-click on the Desktop and choose Properties. In the Display Properties dialog, click the Settings tab. Choose the Advanced button to access the various Properties available for your individual card. I'm runnning a notebook with an NVIDIA card, so I go to the Adapter tab and there in the Adapter Type group choosing the Properties button brings up yet another dialog. Here I find the Drivers tab, and lo and behold there are buttons to Update or Rollback Drivers.

If you're unsure if the hardware you have will actually support 3ds Max, Autodesk has a link on their website to a list of currently qualified graphics cards.

Click on the OS you are using and you'll get a PDF file with a list of hardware. There's a little bug here, it says Maya not Max, but don't worry this list is correct for 3ds Max.

Just when I thought I would explode from trying to keep it secret, Autodesk has lifted the veil and announced the release of 3ds Max Design 2010. It's not shipping yet, but the word is out.

There is a lot of exciting new things in this release. Ken Pimentel's Blog on the Area has all the details. Head there at once. The new stuff is all laid out for you there. There are videos and text. Be sure to check out the Features and Benefits PDF link at the botom of his Blog.

I'll be telling you my thoughts about the new features in an upcoming blog piece, but if you can't wait (and you shouldn't), head over the Ken's Blog and read all about it.

Note: Autodesk has NOT yet made any announcement about 3ds Max 2010. Mysterious. Stay Tuned.

Do you have trouble managing materials? You can use XRef Materials to make your life easier. XRef Materials let you reference materials from one scene in another. Simple and straightforward to use, you can have one 3ds Max file that you maintain just for materials. Then in all your other scenes and projects, use Xref materials to point to those materials in the one master file. If you have different teams of people working on several different projects, this is a great way to make sure they're all using the same materials.

How do you select objects in 3ds Max?
Do you click on the object in the viewport to select it?
If you are in the Perspective Viewport and you're set to Smooth and Highlight and you have a lot of objects in front of each other, it can drive you crazy. Max seems to perversely choose every object except the one you want.

Anybody every experience this? Use to happen to me a lot. I think there's some code that performs a "z-cycle" which is to blame. What's the fix? Toggle to Wireframe. F3. Don't know why it works but it works. You can click on the wire of what you're trying to select and you will select it. Everytime.

Also gives your left hand something to do. F3. Wire On/Wire Off. Try it. Tell me if you like it.

Here's a little known shortcut that will save you some time during animation.
You can right-click in any parameter field in the command panel and choose "Show in Track View".
This will instantly launch the Curve Editor window displaying the animation curve for that parameter.
No need to navigate the Curve Editor windows, the curve is right there ready to edit.
Saves time and conserves mouse-clicks. Try it, you'll like it.

This year there are a plethora of Media and Entertainment sessions at Autodesk University. It's too bad so many of them are at the same time, for every one I attend I miss another one or two.

Architectural films are a big deal now. Michael Donn, University Professor from New Zealand, held a session called Architecture as Actor, which unfortunately I missed. Nils Nofgren, of Neoscape, led a class on 3ds Max Animation methods for Architectural films. Basically the message is that the walkthrough/flythrough is passe, and that we need to approach design visualization as storytelling and film narrative. Standard computer animation techniques tend to create "unwatchable" animations which deaden the interest of the viewer. If you use classic Hollywood workflows, such as writing a treatment, drawing a storyboard and creating an animatic, you will find a cure for the common visualization. Lots of good tips here including creating a cheap massing model for your animation, so you have realtime playback at full frames per second. Entourage will add interest and life to your animations, things like clouds blowing in the sky, people, birds, cars - any moving parts are good. Neoscape loves to animate buildings assembling themselves, furniture blowing into place, all kinds of entertainment tricks.

At the Media and Entertainment Keynote Session we heard from two guest speakers. The first, Bob Berkebile, principal of BNIM Architects discussed the rebuilding of Greensburg Kansas. Bob was a student of Buckminster Fuller, and he used the philosophy of "spaceship earth" to ground the story of how the town devastated by a tornado is being rebuilt as a new green ecological center where they will grow their own food, control their own water and energy, and generally recreate the town using a new paradigm of sustainable design. The second speaker, Barry Weiss of Sony picture Imageworks urged architects to become storytellers and entertainers.

We were also treated to a demo of the Project Newport software, a real-time FBX presentation tool for architects. Several architects who are beta testers showed off their projects using Newport. This looks like a great tool for casual users who don't want to invest in the learning curve of 3ds Max or Maya. Most exciting, however, was a demo of Mudbox using the new "Multi-touch" interface under Windows 7. Seeing an artist work with Mudbox using only his fingers to sculpt a digital model (not a mouse, just fingers) looks like a dream come true. This is something we've all been waiting for, this seems to close the gap between classical art and the digital process. As Jeff Kowalski put it, "We want the FUN, back!", and Mudbox on Multi-Touch looks like it will be BIG FUN. Stay tuned.

The mood at Autodesk University this year is upbeat, despite the gloomy news of recession. The opening session started with Lynn Allen, doing "man on the street" interviews with various attendees. Lynn always reminds me of some terminally cheery television host, I just don't know which one. The theme this year is "Experts". Giant B&W graphics of "Experts you can learn from" played across the screens, while we waited in the dark hall. "Experts, Like You" was the tag line. Nine thousand experts gathered in the hall coming from 74 countries to attend over 600 classes. We are all experts, or soon-to-be experts, that's the message on everyone's badge.

Carl Bass, CEO and President of Autodesk, opened the show. He told us of his recent trip to Asia, for Autodesk University China and Autodesk University Japan. In his spare time, Carl likes to make things, and I'm proud that he actually uses Autodesk software to do so. He showed the work of Artists who are using Autodesk software to make sculptures. Carl focused on one artist, Bruce Beasly, who creates his works digitally before carving them from stone. He explained how the software allows Bruce to make his mistakes digitally, and how he uses the software to explore his ideas, rather than just realize them. The ideas come from his interaction with the software. So rather than it being just a tool, artist and software become equal participants in created art.

Speaker Tom Kelley, head of the design firm IDEO, gave a rousing speech on the ten faces of Innovation. IDEO has created over 4000 design projects in the past ten years, and Tom distilled that experience into some helpful tips. He suggested we set aside what we know, so we can look at a problem with fresh eyes. He only talked about two of the ten "faces", the anthropologist and the experience architect. The anthropologist goes out into the field and observes, finding new problems to solve. He used the example of designing a kid's toothbrush for Oral-B. By watching kids brushing their teeth, he realized they hold the toothbrush in their fist, so a kid's toothbrush should be big and fat and squishy, rather than a minature version of an adult toothbrush. In attempting to describe the "experience architect" Tom used the analogy of baking a birthday cake. You can go to the store and buy sugar, flour, eggs etc and bake a cake. Next step up, you can buy a mix. Next step up, you can go and buy a cake. For the ultimate experience, you can take the birthday boy to Chuck E Cheese for pizza, cake and big fun, and that's how to be a hero.

CTO Jeff Kowalski wrapped up the session with a talk about the future of computing. Jeff noted that currently the computer lets us answer the question "what if". In the future the computer will not be so passive, it will also prompt us with the answers to "what else". Jeff brought the house down with a full scale 3D digital printed motorcycle, that he straddled, looking every bit like a modern Marlon Brando while Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild" blasted away.

Definitely a fun start to this year's show!

It's a really bad practice to render directly to movie format. Autodesk 3ds Max is a very powerful thinker, when computing an image it has a lot of information that you want to keep around, and which will get tossed if you render to a lossy compression scheme. So never render directly to AVI or MOV,except for preview work. Always render to a sequence of images instead.

Now how do you turn that sequence into a movie file? You could do this in a video editing package like Adobe Premiereor Final Cut Pro. But you don't have to go outside of 3ds Max to do this. You can use the RAM Player to load the sequence and then save it out to a movie file. But the RAM player is memory bound, and if you're on a 32 bit systemthat limits your assembly ability dramatically. What to do? Answer: Load the sequence in as a background.

Here are the steps.

1. Render a folder full of sequential images. Take note of the TOTAL number of frames.
2. Reset Max.
3. Click the Time Configuration button, just left of the viewport navigation tools, and change the number of frames tomatch the image sequence.
4. On the Render menu choose Environment.
5. On the Environment tab choose the Environment Map by clicking the large gray button that says None.
6. In the Material/Map Browser click Bitmap then click OK.
7. Navigate to the folder of images.
8. If the images are sequentially numbered you just have to pick the first in the series. There is a sequence button that should be on by default. Instantly 3ds Max will write an Image File List (IFL) file, which is simply a text file with the every filename listed. That IFL file will now be the Environment Map.

Tip: There is a utility called IFL Manager that lets you create and edit IFL files. This is another way to create and edit IFL files.

9. Make sure Active Time Segment is turned on, and choose Save File. Pick a filetype (MOV or AVI) and a name.
10.Click the Setup button to pick a codec. Set your quality settings and close the dialog.
11. Press Render. You should see extremely fast render times, even for high resolution files. Less than 1 second a frame.

Using this method you can easily reduce the final output resolution and Nth frame functionality at render time. You can try out different compression and quality settings to get the optimal filesize and playback speed (fps). Plus you get the joy of experiencing very fast render times - always makes you feel good.

Having trouble importing DWG files with materials from AutoCAD Architecture 2009? It maybe your Custom UI setting.

If you have the DesignViz.mental ray settings turned on, when you import theDWG file, a Global Material will get assigned to the objects in the scene. To preserve the materials from the CAD side, go to the Custom UI and Defaults switcher and choose either Max or Max.mentalray as the setting. Click the Set button and then exit/restart Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009. Now when you import the DWG file, the materials will come right in as Architectural materials, as it did in previous releases.

If your textures aren't visible in the viewport, open the Material Editor and eyedropper the material from the viewport. Navigate to the Map level and turn on Show Map in Viewport in the Material editor.

If the tiling is way way off, turn off Use Real World Scale, set the tiling to 1.0 by 1.0 and then apply a UVW Mapping Modifer. Turn off Use Real World Scale on the modifier and things should look right in the viewport..

I've noticed a lot of angry and frustrated users over my animation years.
People who experience computer suffering in the course of doing their work.
On the other hand, I've experienced a lot of joy in jobs that go smooth as silk,and have actually achieved the state of peace through network rendering.
Anger, Frustration, Joy and Peace. UV Mapping, Mental ray memory management, Daylight, Final Gather.

These reactions have led me to notice the similarity between being a 3d animator and being a zen monk.
Sit up straight, breathe, and stare straight ahead. The zen monk stares at the wall. The 3d animator stares at the cursor.
What's the diff? When rendering with mental ray, not a lot. Black robe, Backwards Baseball Cap.

Stare at the cursor. no need to curse!

Breathe, Sit, Realize the Nature of Conciousness!

I was recently in a classroom where everyone just pressed the render button in Revit. For the next ten minutes we all sat silently with our arms crossed deeply concentrating on the final gather pixel appearance. No one did anything. Sit, breathe, stare. Mental ray Zendo, No wonder they call it mental ray.

We spend so much time in front of our computers, we might as well get enlightened through them.

Alternately, you can get a second computer and a swivel chair. Whichever you find easier...

3ds Max has an automatic system for generating a camera that matches the photo, but it requires that you have some precise measurements. But more often than not you don't have these measurements, so what can you do?

Here are the steps I got through.

1. See what information you can get from the client. Can you get a CAD drawing of the scene, an aerial photo or anything that indicates the location of the camera. This is a key piece of information.
2. How far off the ground was the camera. The photographer can help you here. Even a rough estimate will be useful. Usually the photographer will be fairly accurate, knowing if they used a tripod, etc.
3. What was the focal length of the lens? Often digital cameras will include this information in Object Properties, however if the image has been run through Photoshop, you might no longer have access to it. See if you can get a hold of the image before it was processed.
4. See if you can get any kind of measurement that relates to the scene. The length and width of the room will really help. If you have to guess, guess.
5. With all this information then create a box to represent the general geometry. If you know the room is 20 x 30 but you don't know the height, make a 20 x 30 box and put in an arbitrary height temporarily.
6. Combine art with science. If you know the camera was at a certain location, place it there and refuse to move it from that spot.
7. In wireframe mode view the geometry through the camera.
8. Adjust the focal length of the 3ds Max Camera to more closely resemble the perspective of the view. Interiors tend to be shot with a wider angle lens. Generally I've found lens length from 18 - 35 are typical. If you have this information, use it and refuse to change it.
9. Now dolly the camera target to the extreme edge of the view. Use Dolly Target available off the Dolly Camera flyout.
10. Select the target and open the Move Transform dialog. You can right-click the viewport and choose the Move SEttings button to start this. Use the move spinners to "dial-in" the target placement.
11. When it gets close, feel free to shift the camera lens length or position and see if that helps the match. You can't be sure of this information, so the best way to get the camera match at this point is to throw science out the window now, and make adjustments. Try to make small adjustments and observe if they get you closer to the match. When you get the hang of it you'll be surprised at how closely you can make the 3ds Max scene match the photo.
12. When the photo is matched, if you need to have your objects cast shadows or reflect use Matte Shadow materials to do this. Create a groundplane and or other geometry as needed and add the Matte Shadow Material to it. If you're using mental ray, use the new Matte/Shadow/Reflection (mi) Material type.
13. Add a light source and a test object. Adjust the light source position and angle and render repeatedly until you have shadows that match the shadows in the photo.
14. You need to consider gamma correction if you are using mental ray. Mental ray tends to wash out the background photos if they are gamma = 1.0. You can check the gamma of incoming files by looking at their properties, or you can use tools inside of Max to check the gamma. You can gamma correct using Customize > Preferences > Gamma and LUT. Set the Bitmap Files Input and Output gamma to match the photo gamma and this will provide global gamma correction for textures. Or you can do gamma correction by simply using mrPhotographic Exposure Control, or use th Utility Gamma/Gain shader at the material level.

You recently may have heard about the Revit Light Utility produced by IMAGINiT. It turns multiple lights on and off with a single click. very cool.

I had something to do with this. I'd been doing a lot of FBX out of Revit into 3ds Max Design 2009 and one of the new features was that light fixtures now came in with light objects attached. In the previous release you had to go in and make light objects inside all the fixtures, which was a pain. Now, very nice, the light objects and geometry were all there, linked together. Only one problem - in my scenes the lightswere coming in turned off. Not so nice.

I wished a wish that I could have a quick way to turn all the lights on at once, and magic! my friend Glen wrote a script that did it. Next thing I knew, he'd added more features to his script and it turned into a full-fledged utility.

Turns out, however, it's NOT THE DEFAULT behavior to have the lights come in turned off. It only happens if you have your Revit Lighting Scheme set to Exterior Only in the Revit Rendering Dialog when you export the file to FBX. If you set the scheme to Exterior and Artificial the lights come in turned on, thank you.

It's still quite useful to be able to turn hundreds of lights on and off with a single click. But I want to apologize here, we said this was the default behavior, but its only a problem in certain specific conditions.

I learned a really cool trick from Brandon Davis while attending his masterclass at Siggraph.
Brandon is an old friend who has done film effects and commercial work with 3ds Max and Houdini for years.
His credits include the movies Armegeddon and Day After Tommorrow, I think he still works at Digital Domain.

His class was on making water, primarily ocean water. His trick was a method to automatically remove everything not in the camera's view. Here's how"

1. Create a Camera
2. In the Top Viewport, draw a trapezoid to match the cone of the camera. Call this object VolumeSelectObject
3. Extrude the Trapezoid to match the cone of the camera in the Front/Left viewport.
4. Use Vertex editing so you have an close match of the proportions of the camera cone.
5. Link the VolumeSelectObject to the camera.
6. Apply a Volume Select Modifier to the scene geometry.
7. In the Volume Select Modifier select vertices based on the Volume Select Object.
8. Invert the selection
9. Add a Delete Mesh modifier to the selection.

Now wherever the Camera travels in an animation, the Delete Mesh will be applied directly to everything unseen by the camera.

You can use the same idea to APPLY a Subdivide Modifier to ADD detail, rather than remove it. You can make a second volume select object that doesn't extend as far from the camera to control the range for the extra detail. This allows anything close to the camera to have additional tesellation.

Neat trick, huh?

Last week must have been Backburner week. I had 3 different support calls for Backburner issues from 3 seperate clients.

Here are some general tips regarding Backburner troubleshooting:

1. Full install? You should have a Full install of Autodesk 3ds Max (or 3ds Max Design) install on all server and manager machines, not just backburner.

2. All machines have names that start with letters only (no numbers at the beginning).

3. All machines have same OS (either 32 bit or 64 bit). Mixed environments are discouraged.

4. Verify that the Manager and Server are running in Application mode (not as services).

5. Can you go to the server machine's Start>Programs>Autodesk>Backburner>Server and launch the servers from there?

6. If you are using mixed environment, manager should be on the 32 bit OS.

7. Go to the manager machine (32 bit) and launch from Start>Programs>Autodesk>Backburner>Manager.

8. In the server windows, choose Edit> General Settings and disable Automatic Search. Enter the exact name of the Manager Machine. Restart the server and see if the manager and server now recognize each other.

9. Determine if the Backburner issue is scene specific by testing on a simple box and teapot scene.

10. Still having problems? Disable any 3rd party plugins and see if that solves it. If it's a 3rd party plugin issue, it's time to get their support line involved. RPC? Call Kentucky. VRAY? email is it Bulgaria? They'll respond, they're good!

Revit Global Light Utility for 3ds Max Design 2009 is now available for free download..

With FBX import you can now bring photometric lights directly into Max from Revit. Unfortunately they come in with the lights turned off. You can see them in the Light Lister, but you can't turn them all on with a single click. Got hundreds of lights? That's hundreds of clicks… Ow my wrist..

Thank goodness, Glen Whelden of IMAGINiT has written a utility that will solve this problem. It turns all lights on or all lights off with the press of one button. It also lets you turn on and off selected lights, sky portals and the daylight system, and separates the Photometric lights from any Standard lights you’ve added to the scene.

Check it out, this free download is availble for a limited time only.

You can download a service pack now for Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009.
This service pack addresses these issues:

• FBX/Revit - Older AMD processors that don't support SSE2 now will render ProMaterials
• Materials and Mapping - Files with Arch & Design Materials from earlier versions now load properly. Spline Mapping and Manual Seams crashbug is fixed
• Opacity/Transparency fixed in OpenGL
• Double-sided materials fixed in cached D3DXMeshes
• Biped bugs fixed - Xtra bones use the animation segment time now, and saves keys correctly.
  - No more "Disappearing" bipeds (when using Layer plus Zoom Extents)
  - no more crash when combining XRefs and Motion Flow
• CER reports set correct Production INformation Name now
• New Custom Attributes work without Max reset.
• Daylight System - Perez weather now calculates correctly
• Edit Normal Modifier - edge selection crash fixed
• Hair - some motion blur problems have been addressed
• IK - When using HI IK, you can now link a bone-chain to an object
• IPv6 Maintenance Update
  Now you can submit jobs to an IPv6 only Backburner network. You have to have the Backburner 2008.2 update for this to work. Warning: This is only for IPv6 only networks. If that's not you, don't install Backburner 2008.2 update
• ViewCube - Crashing and Performance issues have been addressed, especially related to network rendering.Keep Scene Upright is now on by default.
• SteeringWheels - Crash bug fixed related to drawing over geometry.
• Network Rendering - running two command-line jobs at the same time has been fixed.
• mental ray - Shadows and render elements now work again.
• Flipped UVW's and Forced Two-Sided behaves properly when rendering to texture.
• Revit Import - LIghts with (") double quotes in their names now are available inside LightLister.
• Viewports - some directx errors addressed. Problems with viewport initialization and workstation locking are fixed. Viewport display is no longer scrambled by drag and drop of modifiers onto viewport objects. The Top View stays correct when changing to Orthographic (U). And Paint and Circular selection marquee now draw properly.
  
  As usual, you have to have administrator priveleges to install the update. This service pack includes all the previous HotFixes, so this is all you need to install.

Click here to get the download now.

People learn in different ways. Some folks like to poke at the software. Others like to follow a DVD, or online tutorial. Often in my classes people will request a reading list, or recommendation for books.

Here are some books from my bookshelf.

Disclaimer: I was technical editor on all of these books, so I'm biased.

Title: Learning Autodesk 3ds Max 2008 Foundation
Focal Press
Author: Remi Breton
Contributing Author: Mark Gerhard

This book is an attempt to teach you a lot of max fast. It's unique in that it blends some design visualization workflow with a lot of character modeling/materials/mapping. Written by longtime Max user Remi Breton, you make both a building (some sort of Miami condo) and a character (a Chinese KungFu looking fellow) and animate the character walking into the building. This book is an "official" Autodesk training Guide.

Attention High School Kids - Use this book to teach yourself max if you don't know if you're headed for games/film or design viz. Disadvantage: This book has not been updated for 3ds Max 2009.

Title: Essential cG Lighting Techniques with 3ds Max
Focal Press
Author: Darren Brooker
Technical Editor: Mark Gerhard

This book is a gem. It slows you down to see what lighting is all about, both theoretical and practical technique. This book has the recipes to get your lighting just the way you need it. Currently being updated for 3ds Max 2009. Every max user should own this book.

Title: 3D Architectural Visualization with 3ds Max 2009
3DATS
Author: Brian Smith

This is a great book. Brian Smith has been using Max to make architectural visualizations for a good long time now, and he teaches you the techniques he's used when you have to get it right and get it done on time. Uses AutoCAD a lot, not for the faint of heart. Should be available in about a month. Really topquality, full-color, college textbook quality. Know AutoCAD, want to learn 3ds Max? Buy this one!

Title: Mastering Autodesk VIZ 2008
SYBEX
Author: Jon McFarland

I know, the title says VIZ, but this book is too good to pass by. At almost 1000 pages, this is a book that weighs a ton and covers a lot of ground. No one is more thorough in their technical explanation than Jon, who's been teaching this and doing this for one very longtime now.
Currently being revised for 3ds Max 2009. Look for it!

A random conversation at the Game Developers conference with Ivon Smith, Autodesk AE, lead me to a chance meeting with the editor of CGSociety, Paul Hellard. Paul invited me to write a review of Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009 at that time. My inner journalist took over my mouth and agreed, so now (at last) here it is.

Many thanks to Jennifer O'Connor of 4D Artists, Travis Schmiesing of HOK, and Paul Schuyler for providing images to go along with the review.

Read it here.

You can go to the Autodesk Product support webpage and now download Hot Fix 3 for Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009. This hotfix corrects a number of problems that surfaced shortly after the shipment of the new product. First it corrects the issues associated with the Viewcube. This handy new navigation device was responsible for various viewport issues, and some crashes in both Windows XP and Vista. In addition the Viewcube was the cause of some Backburner and command line rendering crashes. This has been addressed as well. Lastly there was a compatibility issue with older Athlon processors and the new ProMaterials libraries, which would prevent installation and launching of the software on these systems.

Note that there are indivdual fixes for 3ds Max 2009 and 3ds Max Design 2009, make sure you get the one that matches your software choice.

I have two monitors in the office, but when I'm in the classroom, just one. If I'm not careful, I go to hit render or material editor and I don't see the new dialog, because it's being displayed on a non-existant second monitor. Here's the trick to select and move the off-screen dialog back where it belongs:

1. Activate the particular dialog through it's shortcut or menu entry.
2. Hold ALT + press Spacebar
3. Press the letter M (this invokes the Move command for the dialog).
4. Use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move the window into view.

If that fails to work, rename your 3dsmax.ini file, when you exit and relaunch max, all will be well.

Who knew? Steve Curley, webboard forum assistant.

.

For years now I've been battling the "real-world" mapping coordinates struggle in Autodesk 3ds Max.
I think was max 9, or even 8, when this feature inserted inself into the workflow.
Textures that were fine previously now came in weirdly, giantly scaled up or tiling many many times.
For several releases, I had to figure out the correct weird value to add to the bitmap tiling to make it look ok. If the answer isn't 1.0, then it's 0.01, or 0.001, 10 or something like that. The current right answer is around 10, it was 0.01 last release.

This is only about the files that are old, making new files it all works ok. As a teacher, I have to use files that are part of a curriculm, they have a long shelf life.

Use Real-World Scale is on by default in 3ds Max Design 2009. It's on in the Material Editor and in the primitive objects mapping coordinates. It's also on when you make a UVW Mapping Coordinate. You can't scale the UVW Map gizmo if this is on. It's represented as a tiny box in the viewport, when you change back to standard max UVW mapping, the gizmo returns to its normal behavior. The size of the map is strictly governed by the values in the Material Editor.

Why is it on by default? It's part of the Custom UI and Defaults Switcher setting, DesignVIZmentalray which optimizes settings for architectural work using mental ray.

This is all part of the move to physically-based lighting, materials and rendering.

Max Users who want to turn this feature off can do the following: Go to Customize > Preferences > General > Texture Coordinates > Use Real-World Textures Coordinates and uncheck it.

Have you noticed that 3ds Max insists on selecting every object except the one you want?
Clicking in the viewport is surely the worst way to select an object, it just doesn't seem to be able to read your mind, and picks the objects behind, under or in front of the one you're trying to get.

Tip: Toggle wireframe mode on using F2, then click on the wire of the object you want. Toggle F2 again to go back to shaded mode. I know this doesn't sound like a trick, but next time you are frustrated, selecting the wrong object over and over again, try wireframe, it works!

In 3ds Max Design 2009, experienced users will see a couple of new UI elements prominently displayed in the viewport. These are the SteeringWheel and ViewCube, which are viewport navigation tools that were added as an attempt to make viewport navigation easier for people who are new to 3ds Max. These are tools are already can be found in other Autodesk programs like Maya and AutoCAD.

For the experienced user who already has no problem navigating the viewport, they are generally an annoyance. The first thing you'll want to do is hide these, or turn them off. Hitting the ESC key hides the Steeringwheel, but the Viewcube is a little more work. On Views menu go to ViewCube > Properties, then in the Display Options group turn off Show the ViewCube. I've added "Toggle ViewCube Visibility" to my quad menu because I actually like the "home" feature of the viewcube.

For large scenes, it turns out this new feature can impact viewport performance and so I recommend that you remove this functionality completely. You can do this by renaming the file AutoCamMax.gup to AutoCamMax.gup.bak. Close 3ds Max first, and then find the root installation ( the default location is under \Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2009\stdplugs). To reinstate this feature, just rename the plugin back to it's original name by removing the .bak.

You might experience that in the middle of installing the trial version of 3ds Max 2009 your system suddenly decides to reboot.
Don't panic. This will happen if you haven't been installing your Windows Updates, it has to do with the dotnet framework that needs to be installed before 3ds Max. The installer doesn't tell you that it's doing this, so you might start to hyperventilate if the machine shuts down and restarts suddenly. Again, don't worry. Just run the installer again and all will be well.

Note: This won't happen if you have dotnet3framework already installed.

As promised and on schedule, Autodesk is now shipping the 2009 version of its flagship Design Visualization product, Autodesk 3ds Max Design.

There seems to be a fair bit of confusion about 3ds Max 2009, so I'm going to try to explain this as clearly as possible. Autodesk 3ds Max now comes in two flavors, 3ds Max Design (which is for Design Visualization) and 3ds Max (which is for entertainment). Calling these products "two flavors" is a bit misleading, this is like saying we have chocolate chip, and chocolate chunk. These are almost identical software programs. The only difference between them is that the Design product comes with one extra feature, dubbed "Exposure" which is a lighting analysis tool that can be used for LEEDS 8.1 certification. The entertainment version comes with the SDK (software developers kit) used by developers to write plugins.

The other difference is that the tutorials and help system are customized for the different target industries. Also the default settings maybe different between the two installations - just as they used to be if you used the Custom UI and Defaults Switcher to choose Design Viz or mental ray settings.

Regardless of which package you order, you get the same DVD which includes both products, and installs using the same serial number. You pick which one you want to install and authorize. As before, you get both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions when you order the software.You can download the trial version of 3ds Max Design 2009 using this link.

Click on the left where it says Product Trial. This will give you a 30 day full-featured version of the software to try out, with the restriction that you don't use it for commercial purposes. You don't get all the samples and extra files that ship with the software, but you do get the working program, in all its glory. On the same page you can get an overview of the software, or click on a link to 18 demonstration movies showing off the various new features in the software. (Tip: You can't view these movies on a 64 bit machine, they're Quicktime which isn't supported yet. Call Steve Jobs and complain about this).

You can download the tutorials for Autodesk 3ds Max Design here.

The tutorials can be downloarded as either PDF files, or as a compiled help file (CHM). You can also download the supplementary files needed to complete the tutorials at the same location

If you're a Autodesk VIZ user, yes you've heard correctly, VIZ is being discontinued. Autodesk is offering some pretty sweet crossgrade deals right now, to get you into the Max fold. Check with your local IMAGINiT sales rep to find out more about it. You'll be glad you did.

Autodesk has released a second hotfix for 3ds Max 2008. This hotfix address problems in DWG import/File Link that happened upon reloading the file. The readme notes that Files using Autodesk Architecture 2008 Object Enabler under Windows Vista 64 can lead to program errors. So if you're using Windows Vista 64 with that Object Enabler, don't install this hot fix. If you've been having DWG File Link issues, you might give this hotfix a try. If it doesn't solve your problem it's easy enough to uninstall it.

The hotfix also makes the Help system more helpful, apparently several options in the menu were "non-functional" included Subscription e-Learning Catalog/Create Support Requests/View Support Requests/Edit Subsciption Center Profile. These features incorrectly returned pre-release serial numbers, now they return the correct ones.

This hotfix is cumultative, it includes the earlier hotfix which corrected the Outline function being broken on splines with multiple vertices, and Biped Fig file corruptions.

To download the hotfix.use this url: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=10814118&linkID=9241177

This year the conference is in Boston, Massachusetts, being held at the Westin Waterfront May 12 – 13. Early bird registration happening only until March 15. Good place to rub shoulders with decision makers and visualization visionaries. Visualize Boston in springtime. Love that muddy water. See yourself there.

Autodesk 3ds Max is one of the few programs on the planet that was designed from the very beginning to take advantage of multiple processors. Nowadays it's quite common for a machine to have 2, 4 or even 8 processors.

If you do have a machine with multiple processors, you can reserve one of the processors so that 3ds Max WON'T use it (so you can do your email, or whatever else you might fancy). Here's how:

1. Once 3ds Max is running, CTRL+ALT+DEL to open up Task Manager.
2. In the Processes Tab, sort by size, and you should see 3ds Max right up at the top.
3. Right-click on the 3dsmax.exe entry and choose Set Affinity.
4. In the Processor Affinity task you can select which processors 3ds Max is allowed to use. By turning off one of the available processors, you have one left over for your other non 3ds Max work.

Who knew? Keith Chamberlain, 3ds max guru and master of global marketing images.

Autodesk has announced that it will no longer develop Autodesk VIZ, shifting it's entire VIZ development staff over to the 3ds Max software program. In recognition of the increased importance of visualization in the CAD communities, Autodesk will now offer 3ds Max Design 2009, a full-featured version of 3ds Max 2009 customized for the design visualization customer.

VIZ subscription customers will receive a Pro-Booleans extension to be released in the spring. VIZ customers who purchased VIZ before Feb 12, 2008 with Subscription will have a chance to crossgrade to 3ds Max Design 2009 for a bargain price. VIZ customers who purchased VIZ before Feb 12, 2008 without subscription will be able to crossgrade to 3ds Max Design 2009 for about the price that VIZ used to cost.

I was around during the genesis of Autodesk VIZ and it was a product that led a charmed life. Everyone was so interested in 3ds Max, it seemed VIZ never got the attention, yet word got around and VIZ sold steadily for many years without any visible marketing.

Rumors of VIZ death have been around for a longtime, they tried to kill it off years ago, but it was snatched from the jaws of death by the head honchos and continued on its merry way.

As a longtime VIZ user, I should have been sad to see VIZ go, but I'm not. I'd rather have one code base, and have everybody on Autodesk 3ds Max Design. We'll be using better software to do our jobs.

VIZ was a great product, but it was kinda like having a set of stairs to the basement where you bang your head on the way down. Repeatedly for as long as you live in the house. Know what I mean? No sub-object animation, no parametric animation, no particles, no BIPED. Ouch, stop it, you're hurting my head.

VIZ is dead, long live 3DS MAX DESIGN 2009.

In an accelerated development cycle, Autodesk® has announced that it is offering it's flagship M&E software product, Autodesk 3ds Max, in two distinctive varieties. Design Visualization customers will now be able to purchase a complete version of 3ds Max called Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2009, while entertainment customers will continue to purchase Autodesk 3ds Max® 2009.

The two products will share a single binary file, this means that this is essentially one product with two distinctive toolsets and interfaces. Unlike in the past, when design visualization customers were offered a product with limited functionality (Autodesk VIZ), going forward, CAD customers will be able to buy a version of 3ds Max will all the same tools as the games and film animators get. This move by Autodesk recognizes the increased sophistication required by the design visualization community, the need to generate ultra-realistic architectural films for presentation and marketing. No more second fiddle for design viz, we can play with the big boys now.

New features found in this release include the following:

"Exposure", a lighting analysis tool that can be used for LEEDs Certification.

"Recognize", FBX scene-loading technology, a new toolset for accurate importing of Revit® 2009 software lights, materials, and cameras through the FBX file format. This means that the newest version of Revit will have FBX export capability. If you've struggled with Revit to Max workflow using DWG, you're getting another option to try now.

"Reveal", rendering technology that accelerates the creative workflow by allowing you to specific which objects are rendered or re-rendered as you work.

"ProMaterials", a library of mental-ray materials ready for design viz usage.

The two versions of the software will ship on a single DVD, and users will be able to choose for themselves which version they wish to install. Only one installation will be allowed on a single computer, so if you install Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009, you won't be able to also install Autodesk 3ds Max 2009 on the same machine. The two programs will share the same file format (MAX), and you will be able to load files from the design version onto the entertainment version.

This new tact by Autodesk should eliminate the disconnect that we experienced in the past, when the new version of 3ds Max would come out and be out-of-sync with the last version of VIZ. Now both design and entertainment users will have the same software at the same time.

The release of these programs has been targeted for end of March, synchronized with the global launch of other Autodesk CAD programs. This should also help moving files from all Autodesk programs into 3ds Max, as the release timing for all Autodesk products now appears concurrent (except Autodesk Maya).

One difference between the two packages will be the inclusion of the SDK (Software Developers Kit) with the classic Autodesk 3ds Max, but not with the Design version.

Each version will have documentation, tutorials and samples customized to your industry. Yay!

A new compiler has been used, so plugins that worked in 3ds Max 2008 will most likely need to be recompiled by the plugin developer. Your mileage may vary.

Each version will have its own special set of defaults, similar to what the current Custom UI and Defaults switcher tool provides. For example, the LEEDs certification lighting tool (Exposure) won't install if you choose the entertainment version.

So where does this leave VIZ customers? Autodesk wants you to switch to 3ds Max, so they're going to make it tempting. Look for a promotional incentive soon!

Every class I teach someone says "This may be a stupid question, but..." and I respond "There are no stupid questions, there are only stupid computer programmers." It's not you, it's the idiosyncresies of the UI.
None of these questions are stupid, especially when you're trying to get a 3d design viz job done on time.

Question 1. Why is my network rendering failing?
Answer: You're net-rendering to a movie file format. You can't net render an AVI file.

Question 2. All my objects turned into boxes in my viewport? What happened?
Answer: You pressed "o" on the keyboard. You didn't know you did it. It's called adaptive degradation. In 3ds max 9 they expanded this feature, so this is also the answer to "All my objects turned into dots".

Question 3. I can't select any objects in the scene. Why?

Answer 3a: You pressed the spacebar and turned on Lock selection. You didn't know you pressed the spacebar..

Answer 3b: You're in sub-object mode. Is there yellow color visible in the Modifier Stack? You can't select other objects in the viewport when you're in sub-object mode.

Answer 3c: You've cleverly changed the main toolbar Selection Filter dropdown to Lights or Cameras. Set it back to All.

Question 4: Why is my network rendering failing on all but 2 processors?
Answer: You're using Autodesk VIZ with mental ray.

Question 5: My transform gizmo has disappeared, I don't see it anymore, where did it go?
Answer: Press the "x" key on the keyboard.

There's an old expression, it's not what you know, it's who you know.
In the world of 3ds Max knowledge, it's who you know and what do they know.

I'm a people collector. For the past 20 years I've been keeping track of people and what they know. This is because it is no longer possible for any one person to know everything there is to know about 3ds Max. I remember last year meeting with Tom Hudson, father of 3D Studio. He estimates he now knows about 10% of the functionality in a product which he once understood 100 percent.

And with the software coming out with a new version every year, what you know may no longer be valid in the latest release. Like the milk in the refrigerator, your knowledge may have an expiration date on it. You never know. Or at least you can't be sure until you test it out.

So I keep track of people that seem to have a handle on certain features. I've been focused on mental ray usage for the past year or so, and I've come to rely heavily on the expertise and opinions of certain key individuals. When I'm stumped, I send them emails and see what they say.
I send emails or read blogs. I see what Jeff Patton, Zap Anderson, Chris Bullen and Jennifer O'Conner have to say. I trust these guys, cause they make a living using this stuff. I ask people I know inside Autodesk like Gary Davis, Roberto Ziche and Pierre-Felix Breton, and see what they say.

Of course the catch is that they rarely agree on anything. So I gather up their collective advice and try it all myself. Then I draw my own conclusions. Otherwise it's like four blind men trying to describe an elephant. One touches the legs and says "an elephant is just like a massive cylinder", a second touches the trunk and says "an elephant is just like a snake", a third feels the ear and says "an elephant is like the leaf of the banana plant. The fourth keeps his mouth shut, he knows better than to open it and insert his foot.

Good example - mrPhotographic control. I love this new feature, because I spent years doing copycamera work in the darkroom, shooting film for screenprinting. I understand fstops and film speed, dodge and burn technique. I used to have a good grasp of adjusting Logarithmic Exposure control, I could get good results in 3ds Max 9. But in 3ds Max 2008, Logarithmic doesn't seem the same. Seems like mrPhotographic is the new best choice.

Watch out though. There seem to be "issues" at play here. Be careful - if you switch back and forth between mrPhotographic and Logarithmic, the Render Preview window seems to lose its mind and enter a coma. And on my machine, everything in the viewport turns green, if it's Tuesday, and blue if it's Wednesday. So I'm trying to train myself - use one or the other but don't switch back and forth between them.

Of course your elephant may vary. Mine is a snake, yours might be a banana leaf. Good luck!

Lately I've been working with what I think are giant files. Files with 30,000 objects in the scene. Files with 30 million polygons. Big files.

Tip #1: Fix Display Issues to Restore your Sanity

What happens when you have a big file with a lot of objects, is that the viewports don't play as nice as you'd like. Just loading the file in smooth and highlight can be a challenge. The viewport will attempt to draw all the objects as it Z-sorts them, and this can take quite some time. Once all the objects are displayed selection by clicking on the objects in the viewport can be hit or miss. If you select objects, zoom into them and then arc-rotate the viewport, if you do a lot of sub-object vertex editing, things may start disappearing the viewport that are actually there, they're just not displaying.When you see them disappear, and you KNOW they're actually there, you feel like you are loosing your mind. What should you do?

Answer To restore your sanity save the file and exit 3ds max. If possible, reboot your PC. Then restart Max, and reload the file. Objects that had disappeared miraculously return as if they'd always been there.

Tip # 2: Save Selected Workflow

You have 6000 objects imported from a Sketchup file. All the objects are named Mesh0000 through Mesh6000. The Select from Scene dialog is essentially useless, the names mean nothing currently. And all the normals are inverted, selecting on the objects in the viewport doesnt work. So what do I do?

Answer: Don't work in this file. Find the components you need to work on and then do a File > Save Selected. Open THAT file and work there. Wizard! You have only the objects you need, you're flying in the viewport and everything is so nice and well-behaved. When you finish, do a File Merge and bring the new work into the giant file and your done.

Tip #3 Reference Coordinate System will Save Your Neck

You have to model an addition onto an existing model, but the entire structure is angled 47 degrees off square to the world. You can't make precise incremental X,Y,Z values with the keyboard because everything is at an angle - what do you do?

Answer: Make a Dummy object aligned to the angled structure. Then whenever you want to Move/Rotate/Scale anything, choose the Pick Reference Coordinate option and choose the Dummy object. Now all the transform numbers are square to the Dummy coordinate system, and to can dial in precisely the work in the angled space with ease.

You've probably heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD.
Well I have a similar problem, I call it PCSD. Personal Computer Stress Disorder.

It all started on a Sunday night when I was trying to setup a webcast for Monday morning. I clicked on a link and my PC froze and my screen went

black. Uh-oh, this is not good. I wait and wait. My wife tells me that most of my problems are because I don't wait long enough.
It's Sunday night, I go into the living room and watch Eric Clapton on PBS. When it's over, hmm the computer is still frozen.
Power Down, Power Up. The screen is filled with green vertical tracks. very very bad sign.

I experience an instant pain in my right temple, like I've been stabbed with a tablet stylus. I feel like my arms and legs and head have been cut off with gardening shears.

But I know a trick. Safe Mode. F8 will take me to safe mode. F8 will do the trick.
Not!
Safe mode looks like someone drove a threshing machine over the screen.
OK, call support. "Hi, I've got a problem, I think it's a graphics driver issue. That or I actually fried the card. Just don't make me reinstall the OS".
Two hours later, the support guy has exhausted his repetoire of software gymnastics and tells me to reinstall the OS.
Three days later, I think i've got everything backed up. Probably not, but that's life.
I reinstall the OS and all the drivers. Reboot. No joy. The screen looks like someone has planted grass in rows using a seedsower by John Deere. My head hurts.
Call Dell. We need to replace the motherboard. Guess I didn't have to reinstall the OS after all.
A technician will meet me in Seattle and swap it out. Five days later, the motherboard has been replaced, but the screen still looks like hundreds of green ants are practicing parade manuevers. I'm taking ibuprofen and acetomenaphin like my dog eats his kibbles.

Back in California, they replace the graphics card. It Works! IT works it works it works! Although I still have the headache...should I call product support for that?

Postscript: Two days after Christmas, I boot up and hmmm, green trackmarks display all over the boot screen. Just like before. Safe mode looks like a playing field for Tetris. Call support - could you send someone over with a motherboard, and another graphics card?Same technician comes back, I'm starting to know him. How's the back problem? How's your family? Fifty minutes later, everything is working,

Second time around, you know how to fix a problem, Guess this is progress.

Attention Animators! It's all about our relationship to Time!

I was trained as a fine artist, and when you are drawing the model and you enter the zone of creative magic, you notice that Time seems to stop.

The model, your eye, the tip of the pencil, the line on the page - they are all connected in a wire, a flow, an infinite continuum that is palpable and brings an intense pleasure, if you happen to notice it. You enter infinity and eternity through your art, and that's why you do it.

Because of the relationship between time and space and you, you have an ineffable happiness. Now, if you can just figure out how to make some money doing it. How about Design Visualization? Press the Render button. Wait. Press the Render button. Wait some more. How long are you willing to wait? What will you do while you wait? Relax? Read a book, go for a swim? Breathe? I'm all for breathing, not enough of it going on these days. Are there any crafts we can all do while we are rendering? Or songs we can sing while we're apply UV mapping?

I have 3 computers in a little office, here I am spinning plates like an act on Ed Sullivan in the 60's. The HP desktop is rendering frames using mental ray, the Dell notebook is taking good notes on my thoughts using Notepad. The other notebook is relaxing, dreaming HP dreams. The cat sits by the monitor. Can cats see computer images? Can cats see TV? You tell me. Happy New Year!

They say you can't teach an old dog new software, but it ain't so. Toss me a dog biscuit, I actually learned some Maya.

I recently spent 3 fun-filled days in New Orleans at a Max/Maya Interfaith weekend. A couple of dozen application specialists for Autodesk resellers from all over North America were locked in a hotel ballroom and forced to use both Max and Maya in a marathon teaching intensive.
Now I've been using 3D Studio is all its forms since 1990, so I'm pretty committed there. But what the heck, Maya can't be that tough, right?

In fact, the first thing that struck me was that all the viewport navigation in Maya seemed to be done with mouse/keyboard combinations. The middle mouse button (MMB) figures prominently into this workflow.In 3ds Max I have always used the navigation tools at the lower bottom of the screen. Well, not any more.

I must travel miles each day going down into the bottom right corner of the viewport and back. After spending a few hours using Maya, I decided to figure out the 3ds Max equivalents. Of course they're easy as pie - press the middle mouse button and you can pan, hold ALT + MMB to rotate, and use the middle mouse wheel to zoom in and out. No wheel on your mouse? No problem, CTRL + ALT + MMB does the same thing.

And speaking of zooming into the viewport -- go to the Customize menu > Preferences > Viewport Tab > Mouse Control. Turn on Zoom About Mouse Point (Perspective and Orthographic). Now when you want to zoom into an particular point in your scene CTRL + ALT + MMB will zoom to your cursor position. Gotcha: The wheel zoom doesn't honor this setting, it will just zoom into the center of the screen.

Did you know that the 3ds Max quad menu has a hidden function?
If you select any tool in a particular quad, clicking on the inner gray quad area will repeat the last tool used from that quad.
Last week I was modeling hundreds of wires in a visualization of an electrical automotive harness.
My workflow as to draw a renderable spine using snaps, then going to the sub-object level and changing the vertex at the end of the line to Bezierand move the handles until the curve looked right. Set the color of the wire to match the Inventor file. Then Clone the wire, move it to the next position and repeat the steps.

By total accident I discovered that after the first click, I never had to click Clone again on the quad menu, I could just click in the inner gray box marked Transform and Clone would automatically be reselected. Since I had to do this hundreds of times I found this to be a great little feature I'd never used before, and it saved me lots of repetetive steps.

On a similar note, on the Tools 1 quad there is a "Repeat" command. This lets you do any kind of sub-object edit geometry command and repeat iton multiple objects. For example, say you extrude a polygon on a editable poly object. You can then select other polygons on the same or on other objects, hit "repeat" and have the same extrusion automatically applied to these objects. You'll also find the same feature under the name Repeat Last in the Edit Geometry rollout on the Modify Panel.

Of course the new Override HotKeys in 3ds Max 2008 will let you much of the same thing, but this is nice if you're working on someone else's machine and you don't want to deal with setting up or installing hotkeys.

I recently spent 3 weeks doing some contract work using 3ds Max 2008 64 bit version and it was a very amazing experience.
If you haven't considered buying a 64 bit box before, now's the time. The 64 bit version is a rocket ship, the 32 bit an airplane. If you want to create out-of-this-world imagery, you know which one you'll need.

I was very surprised - all my fears about 64 bit failed to materialize. I didn't find any functionality that I depend on in the 32 bit version which was broken in the 64-bit version. Colors seemed to match, everything seemed to work. Mostly what I found was that I could open much much larger files than I could possibly use previously. I worked on a 350 MB DWG from Revit MEP with 30 million Polygons and 30,000 objects. This type of file is simply beyond the scope of the 32-bit version.

Running under Windows XP Pro 64, I rarely encountered problems that seemed OS specific. Viewport Performance was excellent, the new adaptive degradation is a solid implementation of some very good ideas. In this release of 3ds Max they've made it a lot easier to work with thousands of objects in the scene.

A word of warning however: there are still limits. My machine had 16 MB of RAM and still I experienced crashes. I learned (the hard way) that just because you can now OPEN a file with 30,000 objects and 30 Million Polys, and you can NAVIGATE a file of that size, doesn't mean you can RENDER that file. I know I don't need all of those objects, but if you're too lazy to do anything about it, 3ds Max will remind you when it crashes during render.

Moral of the story: Select everything in the scene visible from the camera viewport. Press CTRL+I to invert the select and hide it. Don't ask me why, but hiding the thousands of objects the camera can't see makes a difference. Mental Ray will render the file with the objects hidden, if they're not hidden, you win a free trip to the desktop.

Another gotcha - the file will render on the box with 16 MB of memory, but crashes on the render farm, where the boxes only had a lowly 8 MB of memory. Remember the good old days, when 8 MB of memory was a lot?

Think of 64-bit Max as a very very big shovel. Watch out because it will let you dig a very deep hole. You no longer have to play tricks to get the file into the viewport, and it is a joy to work with the file as you set it up. But realize you've just postponed the pain to the rendering phase. You'll still need to economize and strategize to outwit the computer. You may feel like the sky's the limit, but you can't act like you have unlimited resources, cause you don't. There's still a size to the box, and you have to fit inside it. You can think outside the box, but you can't render outside the box. (Unless you use distributed bucket rendering - but that's another topic for another day.)

3ds Max 2008 is Shipping, so why should you upgrade?

Autodesk 3ds Max 2008, the latest incarnation of 3D Studio is now shipping to customers.
You can download the trial version of the software at: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/mform_proc
Create Stunning 3D in Less Time! Try it today!

Once you download it, there is a very nice website with learning movies and even a crash course in 3ds Max if you've never used it before.

Why should you upgrade?

1. Working with Large Datasets
   Got thousands and thousands of objects in a scene? Max will load this file faster, select the objects in the file faster and assign materials to them faster than previous releases.
   New Adaptive Degradation tools makes viewport interaction smooth and easy.
   New Scene Explorer lets you select scene objects by the thousands quickly.
   Select Similar lets you select thousands of objects, without even knowing their names. You'll work faster and be more productive.
2. Interior lighting
   Interior lighting is easier to get correct with the new Sky Portal Area Light.
   mental ray self-illumination also lets you light the scene using materials that give off light.
   The new glare shader lets you add a glowing aura around objects.
   The new mr photographic exposure control lets you control midtones, shadows and highlight areas. The sliders uses the language of cameras,so you can set fstop, aperture and film speed (iso).Less Headaches, more enjoyment.
3. Modeling Improvements
   The new temporary modeling pivot called Working Pivot streamlines an previously awkward workflow.
   New Hotkey Overrides let you instantly jump to another tool, and when you finish, return right back to where you were before.
   New constraint to Normal gives you interactive push manipulation on vertices, nice new modeling workflow there.
   New Preview Selection lets you see the selection before you commit to it. Cool new ways to work. Easy to learn, simple new features.
4. Revit Interoperability
   Revit Solids performance is...more solid. Use Solids when you go from Revit to Max.
   Revit material names are preserved
   Revit stairs come in correctly now - no flipped normals or missing levels.
   Revit Sun and Sky settings come into 3ds Max as mr Sun and Sky.
5. Vista support
   Buy a new computer, it comes with Vista. Good thing 3ds Max 2008 is Vista ready!
   Why might you want Vista? I hear Vista 64 will let you address up to 128 Gigabytes of RAM. xP 64 is limited to 16 GB.

When you run out of memory, the computer uses swap space instead.
When you run out of memory, and you run out of swap space, you crash.

This is like the law of gravity. There's not much point in arguing with it. Gravity wins.
Same thing goes with crashing 3ds Max. The trick is to not exceed the system limits so instead of crashing you get a gorgeous looking image.

What to avoid:

• Too many objects - Just because it exists doesn't mean you need it in the scene. Are you going to see it? If you're not going to see it, you can get rid of it. 3ds Max 2008 lets you load in more objects than ever before, but its not going to render them any faster. Your scenes should be as lean as they can be.
• Too many faces - Can you see through your geometry? No point in spending thousands of polygons on a handful of pixels. Optimize your geometry either with Edit Poly or Edit Mesh modifications, or use a modifier like MultRes or Optimize.
• Too many shadows - Lots of shadow casting spotlights in one scene can eat up your memory. You can fake shadows with projector maps,shadow maps, even flat geometry you lay on the ground can make a phony shadow effect.
• Too big bitmaps - Do you need really 4K bitmaps for your textures? Use the smallest textures you can get away with. If you worked for a video game company they wouldn't let you act like this. Use the Bitmap Pager, if you insist on needing large images.
• Too much resolution - Are you rendering images at 1024, 2058, or 4096? As the image size steps up, your memory usage quadruples.
  If you have to render a bigger image, consider using distributed rendering, which breaks a single image into multiple rectangles, rendered separately and then stitched together.
• Too high quality - Are you the sort that always wants the best? Don't set your mental ray final gather preset to High or Very High just because you can. Find the lowest setting that gives you acceptable results. You want gorgeous images, not drop dead gorgeous. Remember you don't want Max to drop dead.
• Scene Corruption - Often a particular element in the scene is corrupt and this is reason you crash. Removing the offending object or material will restore the integrity to your file. To find the offending object, start an empty scene and merge elements from the crashing file one at time, rendering after each merge. When you crash, you know the last merge did it. There are complete instructions on the Autodesk support Knowledgebase.
• Too many programs - You'd think this goes without saying, but shut down your email, Word, Photoshop, Internet Explorer before rendering and you've just given yourself some additional resources.
• Not enough swap space - In the old days we used to recommend 3-4 times the physical ram as a swap space. At least set your swap space to equal your physical memory as a minimum.
• Not enough RAM - Windows 32 OS lets the program access 2 Gig's of Memory. But if you only have 2 Gigs of memory installed, You'll crash at around 1.7 gigs of memory, because of the stuff that already running. So having 3 Gigs of memory installed, will let you access the full 2 gigs the OS allows. There is also a 3 Gig switch you can set in your boot.ini file which lets the app use an additional gig of memory. Note: This is an "unsupported" method - it's not guaranteed to work for you. IMPORTANT: If you're thinking about using this you must first read this thread on the Autodesk 3ds Max Discussion forum. WARNING: Messing with the boot.ini file can result in a failure to restart Windows.
  
  But, if it does work, you can go get 4 gig of memory, then the app will access the full 3 gigs available through the switch.
  If on the other hand you're still crashing, it's time to move to a 64 bit OS and use 64 bit 3ds Max.
  Then you can use 128 gig of ram per application, which ought to be enough ram for anyone, let's hope.

Here's the recipe for creating a material that has two textures which use two different mapping coordinates, in Autodesk 3ds Max.

For the rug (the decal) you'll need two matching bitmaps - one for the decal and a matching opacity map to act as a mask. We'll use a rug texture and opacity map

For this example we'll simply use a box object.

1. Create a box object.
2. Go to the Material Editor and select any available sample sphere.
3. Name the Material "Texture with Decal" and assign it to the object by dragging it onto the object in the viewport.
4. Add a Diffuse map to the Material. In this example, we'll use a bitmap of plywood.
5. In the Material Editor click the Show Map in Viewport button. You should now be able to see the texture in the viewport.
6. In the Modify Panel, add a UVW Map Modifier to the Plane object.
7. Expand the UVW Map Modifier so you can access the gizmo.
8. Adjust the gizmo as you like to size/rotate/scale the wood boards on the plane. All of this is standard procedure for making a material with a texture map. In order to add a decal, you'll change the Material Type.
9. Click Go to Parent to get up to the top level of the material. Then click the Standard Material Type button and choose Blend as the new material type.
10. Choose to keep the old material as a sub-material. Now you have a new Blend material with the old material as one of the new materials.
11. In the Blend material, click the second Material button. Make a new second material with decal texture map.
12. When you pick the new texture map, set Map Channel to 2. Turn off Tiling for the Texture Map, so it doesn't repeat.
13. Click Go to Parent to go up a level in the material.
14. Apply an opacity map to the Mask map field, this is a black and white version of the outline of the decal usually.
15. Again, make sure Tiling is off, and Map Channel is set to 2.
16. Close the material editor.
17. In the Modify Panel, right-click the UVW Mapping Modifier and choose Copy.
18. Right-click again the same spot and choose Paste.
19. Change the new UVW Mapping Modifier to Map Channel 2 in the Parameters rollout.
20. Adjust the gizmo of the UVW Mapping Modifier to affect the placement of the decal.
21. Render to see the decal.

Often you find a nice bitmap of a swatch of grass or cracked mud that you want to use on a larger area of terrain. If you simply tile the texture map there will be obvious repetitions that will call attention to the pattern, and kill the illusion. Here's simple trick you can use in Autodesk 3ds Max to hide the tiling of the texture. Let's suppose you want to use this texture of some cracked mud. Here's what it looks like textured:

Instead of tiling the texture directly, create a material with a Checker procedural map as the texture. Tile the Checker to the same tiling you wanted to tile the texture in the first place. Apply the checker to the object, and click Show Map in Viewport to see the checker.Now expand the Noise rollout for the Checker, and turn on Noise. Set the Amount to 100 and the levels to 10, then slowly change the size of the Noise. Depending on your geometry, the correct result could be less than 1, or much greater. In this case this plane is about 12' square, and the noise size is also about 12. The most important step comes next - in the Checker Parameters rollout, adjust the Soften amount while watching the checker in the Material Sample change. Tip: Use a Sample cube for easier observation of this effect. You want a soften value that blurs the edges without obliterating the checker pattern too much.

Now add the same bitmap into both channels of the checker. Make sure not to instance, you want the two maps to be indepedent here. Render to see the result. Here the map has been applied to the Color #1 Channel.

Apply a map to the second channel, and use slightly different values for the tiling, offset and angle. Voila!

You can also add some Noise to one of the maps, again the size of the noise is crucial to creating the effect. You have to experiment to get the right set of values, but when you do, the regular tiling will be pretty much masked and invisible to all but the most discerning of eyes.

Part 2: VisMasters Design Modeling & Visualization Conference

I went to two conferences in San Diego - SIGGRAPH and VisMasters

The contrast between the two events was striking. SIGGRAPH is a mammoth flocking of computer creative-types, herds of nerds and gaggles of geeks. Thousands of people jostling for a view of the latest version of the SOFTWARE TRUTH. Lots of blinking lights hanging around lots of necks. Pink hair and dreads. Pink Dreads.

VisMasters was a concentrated gathering of the cutting edge in design visualization. Around 300 of the world's most exclusive club gathered in a few hotel ballrooms to share their experiences and network. These are people who dress normally, in CAD business default, no blinking lights. They're architects and designers who look a little serious, cause they're rebuilding the Bay Bridge or the Seattle waterfront highway. It's not like they are making cartoons (read fun and games).

But these guys were smiling, because they've become film-makers. The technology is so good, they can make movies of their designs using 3ds Max and Autodesk's other product (AutoCAD/Revit/Architecture/Inventor substitute your fave here). They can make really good movies, with actors and helicopters greenscreened into virtual models of their actual project. They get to make commercials, and they seem to be having fun.

High Points

Doug Eberhard of Parsons Brinkerhoff, NY was a keynote speaker who showed a use of animation I'd never really seen before. He showed an animation of the World Trade Center reconstruction project following the progress of the development over months of time, "By simulating the project virtually and visually before it was real, we were able to find and fix conflicts earlier, before the construction actually happened. We reduced project risk, rework, cost and schedule, and increased communication and coordination between all project stakeholders. We increased Client Satisfaction." Mr. Eberhard also showed slides of the upcoming San Francisco Bay Bridge retrofit. He showed an animation of what the driver will experience during the reconstruction, a flythrough from behind the wheel.
And an animation of the construction of the replacement roadway which will be rolled into place during the Labor Day Holiday Bridge Closure. The 3ds Max renderings were on the front page of my hometown newspaper yesterday! I love it.

Another groundbreaking project was presented by Hsiao-Lai Sean Mei, President and CEO of Screampoint in San Francisco CA. He demonstrated a project, I think it was Wuhan China, in which a virtual model of the city served as a visual database interface. In service of the water district, you could move through the model of the city, click on any location and connect to all kinds of information about the water system within a vicinity of that spot. You could see video of the inside of the water system, to check for leaks. What was fascinating was how videogame style navigation of a 3D world could serve an a 3D Interface to information. This was heady stuff, very futuristic.

Sean Ahlquist, of Proces2, San Francisco, CA showed original use of 3ds Max for conceptual design tool. He used a mesh generation program combined with 3ds Max to create organic and random networks of shapes which turned into a concrete screen in a Japanese neighborhood.
It was nice to see someone take advantage of the amazing conceptual design power hidden in 3ds Max and Autodesk VIZ.

Chris Nichols, is a kind of celebrity in the design vis community. He's made the leap from architectural film into the bonafide film effects world, he showed shots he worked on from "I, Robot", "The Day After Tomorrow", "Stealth", and "GhostRider". He gave a very nice visual chronicle of the process of doing an actual car commercial, from creative brief to storyboard to animatic to 3d modeled, rendered and composited film.

Years back when I first started teaching 3ds Max, I was struck with how many architects were learning max so they could escape architecture and make commercials. Cool to meet someone who actually made the leap.

Chris Bullen presented 3 hours worth of information about mental ray professional production. I was co-presenter in these classes, but Chris knows so much, I just wanted to shut up and get out of the way. Chris is a master of mental ray and it was a joy to watch his knowledge at work. Even more scary, it seemed that most of the people in the room were mental ray masters, as well as VRay, Maxwell, finalrender masters (Am I missing any?). It was sweet to see the principals of NeoScape sitting in the class, Nils Nofgren and Rodrigo Lopez. These guys are leading the charge in the world of architectural film.
They're making it acceptable for us to get creative in our presentations and have fun with moviemaking, to leverage the power found there and find new ways to use it in our work.

I was lucky this year, I got sent to San Diego to attend the back to back conferences SIGGRAPH and Vismasters Design Modeling and Visualization Conference. I'll write this in two parts, one for each conference.

The annual SIGGRAPH convention, as always, provided a finger on the pulse of the industry (and Autodesk), a showcase for the newest technology and latest releases of your favorite software (3ds Max in my case). I got to see the newest releases of Max, Maya, and Motion Builder at the Autodesk Users Group Meeting and see new versions of old human friends (you know who you are).

Highlights of the Users Group meeting included a pep talk by the head of marketing for the New Chrysler with an actual sportscar prototype (was it a Dodge Demon?). Everyone attending got a Hotwheels car, the pink ones were in high demand. (more on that later). Jeff Barnes of CafeFX talked about creating the Oscar winning "Pan's Labyrinth" using our software. It was amazing to see 3ds Max playing such a strong role in an extremely artistic creation. Jeff opened with a video spoofing Autodesk that is one of the funniest things I've seen in years. Best line of the evening "so Autodesk Maya is a lot better than regular Maya?"

The Users Group evening was wrapped up with a massive party on the USS Midway. Something about the fireworks over the battleship smacked of military victory, there was a sense that the software wars had been fought and won, and the twin cultures of Alias and Autodesk were feeling their way to a new corporate culture. Got trapped on the upper deck through some crowd control maneuver by boat people, rumors that Autodesk is buying the US Navy are not true, let me be the first to say it.

Cool new features demoed in 3ds Max 2008 included souped-up performance on lots of objects and lots of vertices. Got Geometry? Lots and lots and lots of geometry? No problem. It's all Faster, bigger and better. New Adaptive Degradation tools should make working with huge files definitely doable and possibly even pleasurable. There is a new games to play in the viewport called "Review" which includes features like seeing shadows, displaying physical sun and sky in the background, and viewport display of mental ray A&D materials.

Did someone say mental ray? Great new mental ray sky portal lights, photographic exposure controls, exact Ambient Occlusion, and (finally) self-illuminance in materials (yay!). In 3ds Max 9 they made mental ray exteriors easy, in 3ds Max 2008 they've turned the focus on mental ray interiors.

The Autodesk booth was front and center in the main hall, hard to miss no matter how hard you'd partied the previous night. There was a smorgasbord of presentations showing off the new features in Max, Maya and Motionbuilder, Toxik and probably more that I missed. There were wonderful testimonies by design visualization companies such as Uniform, Smooth and NeoScape, showcasing the new genre of "architectural film." The days of simple walkthroughs are over, now we're making commercials for buildings. Stay tuned for more on that.

Beyond the exhibits, I attended a number of Autodesk MasterClasses.

1. Mental Ray with Jeff Patton and Zap Anderson

Jeff Patton is a mental ray expert who demo'ed some tricks I really wish I'd known a year ago. I did a visualization project of a Samsung mobile PC using mental ray, but I couldn't get the logo shot texture map to look correct. Turns out that using logarithmic exposure control is the same as changing your gamma so it's going to wash out your textures. To return the textures to their correct state go to the Customize menu > Preferences > Gamma and Enable Gamma. Then set your Image input gamma to 2.2. Magic--your textures render out Pantone perfect. Zap Anderson is a longtime 3ds Max programmer and user currently working for mental images. Zap created a chrome mapping plugin for 3D Studio R3 or 4, long long ago and far far away ( Sweden ). Now he's king of mental ray shaders and demo'ed the new 2008 mental ray features in this class. Zap has a blog with mental ray tips not to be missed.

2. Automotive Design with Damien Fulmer

Damien is the real deal, he makes car commercials using 3ds max. He showed some of the nicest looking images I've seen of cars done with our software. He revealed basic tips for doing car lighting using bouncecards and VRay materials. I want to see him do the same in mental ray, I know we can.

3. The Emergence of the Architectural Film with Nils Norgren cofounder of Neoscape

When I first started teaching 3D Studio in 1991, I was surprised that the classes appeared to be filled with architects who had the idea they'd get out of architecture and make commercials instead. Now it seems that architects are making commercials for construction projects, and NeoScape is in the forefront of this new genre--the Architectural Film. It employ the vocabulary and techniques of Hollywood, using actors shot against greenscreens composited into virtual worlds, and helicopter shots camera matched to the 3D design footage. A mysterious 3d reflective crystal slides between building exteriors in one movie, young and hip urbanites swing their way through the visualizations of another. This is not your father's Oldsmobile, welcome to Hollywood. Nils showed tricks like using the Mesher to create time offset instances and linking multiple dummies to build a camera rig.

4. Exploring Proceduralism with Brandon Davis

Brandon is an old friend of mine and is currently at Digital Domain doing 3ds max for commercials and Houdini for film. He pioneered 3ds max at ComputerCafe (now CafeFX) and is now on a stealth mission to seed DD with max goodness. Brandon showed tons of 3ds max tricks that leverage the fundamental object oriented proceduralism of the software. Constraints, controllers, parameter wiring and modifier stack tricks were on the menu. Despite his best intentions, he couldn't stay away from Particle Flow for long, nice to see someone that is so fluid in that interface.

5. Making a 3D Short--Andy Murdock

As a special present to Subscription customers, Andy Murdock gave a presentation on his unique story with the making of "Lots of Robots". Andy is an old friend of mine for at least 20 years, and we share a lot in common. We both went to art school and studied painting before diving into the world of CG. Andy worked for Mondo Media using 3ds max so he was a production slave to the corporate masters. I don't remember all the details exactly, but when the Mondo Media chapter closed, Andy decided to produce his own 3D Short (Lots of Robots) using 3ds max as his primary tool. A musician and sound engineer, Andy did everything himself, from modeling, rigging, texturing, lighting and animating to writing Plugins for complex animation. His short film takes us into a land of robotic birds and insects, a strange wordless adventure with a sound track that sounds like Tuvan throat singers and Tibetan monks meet techno. Andy sells DVD's each year of his work-in-progress on Lots of Robots, the DVD includes tutorials for 3ds max in addition to the film itself.

Autodesk unveiled the next release of 3ds Max at the annual SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles this week. Renamed 3ds Max 2008 (sounds modern doesn't it?), the new release is brimming with good things for both design visualization and entertainment customers.

You can expect some serious productivity improvements coming out of this release. For a long, long time, Max has suffered in comparison with other products when it came to working with large datasets. Well, they've taken this to heart and worked hard on improving all aspects of working with files that have huge numbers of objects. Viewport selection, material assignment, viewport interaction have all be given an extreme overhaul, so you can now expect to see between 10 to 60x speed improvements when dealing with scenes with more than 5000 objects. New Adaptive Degradation settings allow for better control over viewport interaction.

A new Scene Explorer combines the power of Schematic View with the functionality from the Select by Name dialog. Customizable and configurable, the scene explorer gives you access to all object properties for all objects at the same time. You can rename, delete, link or unlink, hide/freeze/ sort by or apply other object properties quickly on large numbers of objects at once. Like TrackView you can save and recall multiple customized Scene Explorers. You can also select and manipulate objects within the Scene Explorer without selecting them in the viewport, or sync the selection between the two.

For design visualizers, there are some good new tools - they're calling this tool set "Review". It includes the new ability to see shadows in the viewport, and to see the mental ray Sun/Sky and Arch and Design materials preview in the viewport as well. Mental Ray 3.6 is the updated version shipping with Max, and there are some significant additions here. New Sky Portal lighting brings the ease of outdoor lighting to interiors. Improvements to Ambient Occlusion for detail enhancement include a new "exact ambient" rollout that honors the light color and gives a more realistic AO in shadow areas. New shaders include MirrorBall and Lume Glare shaders, and a new Tone Mapping system that is a camera-based is included as well.

DWG support, always a work in progress, now lets you bring in AutoCAD 2008 and Revit 2008 DWG files. Improved support for Solids from Revit, maintains material names and assignments now (and you thought you were doing something wrong, didn't you?) and you can use Propagate Materials to Instance now with Revit solids. And a new Select Similar command selects objects based on DWG properties, so you can select multiple objects that are different but share something in common. DWG also now imports Sun/Sky geographic location and time of Day, as well as UV import improvements, adding support for box/spherical/cylindrical and mirror texture tiling.

Wonderful modeling improvements are coming your way in this release. Sub-object selection just got a whole lot quicker and easier with the new preview selection features. You can preview what you are going to select before committing to selecting it using the preview SubO feature. Or use the Multi setting to switch between select polygons, edges and vertices in a single interface. I LOVE THIS, you will too. A new "working pivot" lets you override the existing pivot while modeling, so you can set a new working pivot as you work. Very flexible, just what the artist ordered. Chamfer now has a segments field, no need for multiple chamfers anymore. There's also a new Constrain to Normals setting.

Animation improvements abound. Bones can now be "curled" like biped skeleton rotate bones mode. New defaults for bones and IK goals remember the last size values. Track View - Show animated filter now hides branches. Zoom Trackview zooms to the cursor position, And Show Only Selected Objects is the new default (at last!). You can assign controllers to multiple objects now, and access controller properties with a quick double-click. Euler controllers have a new angle filter to control flipping. You can Hide Global Tracks, and you can Load/Save Animation directly from the TrackView Quad menu, which can now be customized via Custom UI. Also the new hotkey for Edit Trajectories should speed things up.

Biped has some new goodies. A new "Xtras" object is an all purpose FK chain you can place anywhere for wings, facial bones, you name it. Biped Base Layers now export as bips and the other layers export as "offsets" from the base layer. Biped Heads can be relocated now to any location (good for that "leave you head on bus" animation). Biped IK keys can now be applied to multiple objects, how much time is that going to save? Lots. There's a new Pivot selection dialog, and in trackbar the IK Keys are now color coded correctly. And the Motion Mixer automatically creates a new mapping file for retargeting controller motion.

What's new in texturing? Material assignment is 10x faster, especially noticeable on huge numbers of objects. You can assign UV Modifiers to multiple objects at once, big workflow improvement. Render to Texture now has presets, and the ability to exclude objects from Ambient Occlusion passes. RTT now supports DirectDraw Half Float Image format. Projection Modifiers can export the cage as a mesh, or import a mesh as the cage.

Small but useful changes - the skin weight dialog is resizable, parameter wiring dialog is now modeless and has filters. Modifier lists can be searched with sequences of characters, Press "ME" takes you to Melt, not Extrude. Good one. New Hotkeys let you to go up a branch and down the next one. Rendered Image Window (VFB) now has a copy to clipboard button.

FBX now has improved import/export support in animation/mesh/materials and lighting. DWF now supports multiple cameras from Max. Point Cache 3 files were enhanced to improve exchange between Max and Maya. And Xref resolves now in a "more intelligent" manner. Oh, and you can now install on Windows Vista, it's now official.

No ship date announced. A 30 day trial version (as always) will be available for both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

Controlling Layer Organization

Revit has no Layers, but DWG files are organized by Layer, so you have to determine how the file will be "layered" as it is exported to DWG. Revit has export layer settings that you can control by loading different standards. You can edit the layer names and save the standard as your own. By editing the Layer Names you can control the naming of the layers into 3ds Max. You might think that this would be all you needed to achieve a good transfer into to max, but actually there's a lot more to it. You can save out to DWG in several vintages - 2007, 2004 and 2000. It's best to stick with the latest unless you've got a good reason for the earlier ones

Controlling Number of Objects

When you take a Revit model into 3ds Max, you have a lot of choices and options you can change. Dialing in the right combination of these can allow you to import all your Revit materials without much fuss. The Split by Material option will allow materials to come in with the correct mapping and textures. However this option forces the creation of an objectionablly large number of objects.

If you are bothered by having hundreds of objects in your Select by Name list, this is the trick for you. Instead of filelinking your DWG file in for all the layers, only choose one layer. You can then filelink multiple times, once for each layer of your drawing that you need visualization. For each layer you can choose a different Derive Primitive By setting. If you choose One Object, then all the objects from that layer will come in as one object. Really. No complex hierarchies, just one object. If you choose any of the others, you'll have lots of objects linked in a hierarchy to additional parent objects (dummies created during import.) Is it perfect? no - you lose your materials when you choose One Object, although it should keep the material ID values. If you have a problem with losing the material, then use Split by Material to get the materials into the scene, bring them into the material editor and then go back to One Object. Reassign the material.

Keeping Revit Textures

If you're adding materials in Revit you need to be aware that Max will only understand Materials with bitmap texture maps. Revit materials with procedural texture maps won't have any textures when they've made their way into Max, they'll be architectural materials without diffuse maps attached. So it's not a bad idea to learn how to make materials in Revit and customize those with texture maps, if you're planning to send the file downstream to Max/VIZ for visualization. Build a library to corresponds to the Revit procedural one. Revit ships with a good collection of bitmaps to use.

Import or File Link

When you bring the Revit geometry into 3ds Max, you have a choice of two basic methods - Import or File Linking. Import brings in the file without any exterence referencing to the DWG file. File Linking allows for a Live connection between the DWG and the MAX files. Update the DWG and save it, next time you open the MAX file, you'll have the option to reload. File Linking is the preferred method when you know there will changes to your model during the visualization process. It really makes sense to use it.

Avoid corrupt geometry

When File Linking you have different Presets you can customize. You set up the Weld Threshold and Surface Deviation Curve parameter for solids, and these two settings control the vertex creation in max. These settings need to be very very low (like 0.001) or you will start getting crumpled up geometry as it collapses in on itself.

Losing Materials on Reload

On the Advanced Tab of the Modify Presets dialog there are two radio buttons for material options. Use scene material definitions and Use scene material assignments on reload. Turn both of these on and save the preset, then use this preset when you file link a Revit scene with bitmap textures you want to keep.If you do this the first time you load in the file, subsequent reloads will keep the materials intact on all the geometry in the scene, except for the geometry that changes during the reload. Also any material assignments you've changed using 3ds Max will remain when this is employed.

1. Use Hotkeys

Hotkeys make everything go faster. Plus they give your left hand something to do.
But please, don't bang on the keyboard, it's too noisy and you can break it.
You can assign your own hotkeys, if you share a machine with someone else you can save and reload your own sets.

2. Name your Objects

If you make them, name them. Box01 is not a good name for an object. You'll be glad when you need to select by name, especially when you have 1000's of nicely named objects in the scene.

3. Name your Files intelligently and systematically

You must have a system that lets you easily find your files, and be sure they are the right ones. There are enough things to confuse you already, your file naming system shouldn't be one of them. Never use the word "final" in your file, it's a curse that ensures this file won't be final.

4. Network Render

If you are doing 800 frames of animation it's going to take a long time to render. Network rendering cuts that time dramatically. Just adding a second computer divides the time by half. Just ask Gary Davis. You can also use network rendering on mega-large images splitting the rendering up on multiple machines. Use the Split Scanline option in the Network Job Assignment dialog.

5. Iterate

It never happens that you only render once. After modeling, lighting, materials, animating objects characters and cameras you finally render. Now your work can begin! You get to see how much of what you thought you did do you actually accomplished. Do you like surprises? Not on deadline, you don't. There will always be surprises, so render frequently while you model, while you light, and while you do materials. What you see in the viewport is not the end-result. Get to the end of the production pipeline as quickly as you can to learn something you can apply to save time and effort.

6. Don't Crash

I'm not kidding. Control crashing. Crash once it's Autodesk's fault maybe, Crash twice you've got something reproducible, the testing department will like that. Send in a bug report please. [choose Defect Report] Crash 5 or 10 times a day, it's your fault. Change something, don't just keep crashing. Stop and redo, start again, avoid what is making your software crash. Don't live with it. We must outwit our computers! Are we not men?

7. Get a Life

Sure this is fun, but no matter how you look at it, it's mostly just you sitting in front of your computer. You'll do better work if you get away from it regularly. Go do something with people, get outside, leave your Blackberry off. Play some music, cook some food, go walk in the woods or dig in the garden. You know you should, you just got a little distracted by the great playroom of virtuality.

A team of researchers at Purdue University have used 3ds Max to create simulations of the plane attack of the World Trade Center tower on 9/11 . The resulting video of these studies has been viewed over a million times over the Internet.

The video is titled "A High-Quality Physically-Accurate Visualization of the September 11 Attack on the World Trade Center". The simulation is narrated by Voicu Popescu, the scientist in charge of visualization. In the narration he explains the process used:

"The visualization had to be eloquent to the non-expert user. The simulation was placed into context by modeling and importing the buildings of the WTC plaza into a Google Earth model of lower Manhattan. A finite element analysis simulation of the impact between the Boeing 767 and the top twenty floors of the North Tower was computed using a state of the art simulation code. then the results were imported into a "state-of-the-art" animation system where the visualization was produced. The simulation tracked the impact over 3/4's of a second realtime."

By viewing the animations at a speed 13 times slower than reality, scientists were able to examine the details of events that took place in a split-second. Furthermore, by placing cameras within the building they could see the structural damage to the core columns. They could see the floor "oscillating" due to the impact. Plane debris can be seen flying out the far side of the tower.

All the geometry of airplane, the facade and the structural core of the building was generated from the simulation data using a program called LS-DYNA. A plugin for 3ds Max (Dynaplugin) written at Purdue translated the simulation data into 3ds Max objects. This includes particle system data used to simulate exploding jet fuel, rendered with reflections and refractions using a raytrace material.

By calculating "eroded elements" they can show a slab of concrete turning into dust, and flying shards of glass. By rendering the plane with transparent materials damage to the core columns and their connecting beams can be studied in isolation.

I talked with Christopher Hoffman, who lead the project, over the phone and via email. In his paper on the website he explains that the goal of the study was to understand what damage occurred, why it occurred and how. This knowledge, he hopes, will help "create superior structures that will protect life" and let scientists "explore potential disasters before they happen."

To view the complete video on YouTube click here.

About once a week I get a call from someone who wants me to explain the difference between VIZ and MAX, and tell them which one they want to use.So I thought I'd write it all down, so I don't have to keep repeating myself.

3ds Max is the premier package for design visualization animation and rendering. It offers all the tools you'll need to make architectural movies, mechanical visualizations, or do any kind of professional rendering you might desire. It also works, just as well, to do film special-effects and character animation.

Autodesk VIZ is the exact same software, with certain features turned off. It is the "entry-level" product for the firm that wants to start doing design visualization and animation. If you have just now moving into 3D Design and you want the ability to fly around, over or through your model, Autodesk VIZ is the program you can start with and it will produce results of startling beauty and astonishing realism.

But quickly your imagination will start whispering in your mind's ear: 3ds Max, 3ds Max. You'll want to do fountains, running water or other particle effects. Or you'll want to add fancy text and lighting effects, ripples and warps that add some moviemaking pizazz to your presentation of your project. VIZ can do some of that, but you'll need MAX to do it all. Dynamics, Cloth, Hair and Fur, Space Warps and Particle Systems, plus Character animation via Character Studio or FBX skeletons and point caches, all these esoteric terms don't appear in VIZ, but you're going to want them.

So what exactly does 3ds Max have that VIZ doesn't?

1. Sub-object Animation - You can't animate any sub-object selections in VIZ. In editable meshes and polys you can't animate at the vertex, edge, or polygon level. You can only animate at the object level in VIZ.
2. Parametric Animation - in 3ds Max virtually even spinner, slider and numeric field can be animated. Not available in VIZ.
3. Spacewarps and Forces - Ripples, Waves, and other mesh deforming forcefields are only found in max.
4. Particles and Dynamics - particle systems are used to create everything from sprays of water, steam and smoke to flocks of birds. They are often combined with simulation tools such as gravity, wind, collision detection, rigid body/soft body collections, rope and cloth. Also used for explosions, and visualization of fire and movement of fluids/gases through pipes.
5. Video Post - you can do assemble editing using this tool in 3ds Max, in VIZ you need to use another program in order to edit.
6. Character Studio animation tools - More fun than a barrel of monkeys, character studio lets you create virtual skeletons which you can animate in your scene. Libraries of animations let you slap on motions of choice. Crowd simulation software lets you assign behaviors to delegates which can attract, seek or avoid
7. Morpher animation - Powerful organic changing shapes require morphing technology. From character lip sync and facial emotions, to the shifting sands on an ocean bottom, morphing is something you depend on.
8. ProBooleans - Max Booleans got a recent uplift with the addition of NPower's PowerBoolean code. You'll have to buy 3ds Max to use this,
9. Animation Layers - Max has a new layer system just for animation. VIZ has Layers, but not Animation Layers.

I'm sure there are lots of other things I've neglected in this list (like Hair and Fur, Reactor, Combustion integration, and HI IK controllers come to mind).

Now just to be fair, there are some things that VIZ has that aren't in MAX:

1. Tool Palettes - If you're used to using tool palettes in other Autodesk products, they've got them in VIZ, but not in Max
2. Walkthrough Assistant - Automatically walks you through the steps to create a camera following a path. In Max you need to know how to do this yourself, not that it's hard, but it's not automatic.
3. Print Button - On the File menu there's a print feature in VIZ - no print feature in Max There's a print size wizard, but you have to render to a file, then print that using Windows Explorer, or another program.

There are three distinct areas where Design Visualization has broad appeal.

1. Mental Exploration: You have an idea for a design, and you draw pictures of that idea in your mind's eye. Imagination deploys visual images, movies you experience as if they were real. (Remind me again, what's the dif? Real vs. As If?) Imagination paves the highway for the idea to drive to reality. 3ds Max is the train, the car, the cart all aboard!

Using Design Visualization software you can recreate those mental pictures virtually, directly in 3ds Max viewports. It's like a camcorder into your imagination. Wait, do they still make camcorders? It's like YouTube straight from your dreams.

Because of the flexibility and interactive interaction of 3ds Max's tools, you can push and pull forms around as if they are made of clay. Scale, move and rotate the pieces of your creation as you wish. You can explore ideas for mechanical creations, or architectural constructions or organic characters people with clothes, and faces with hearts brains skeletons and circulatory systems. There's not a whole lot of difference between animation of traffic in a cityblock, and insulin molecules flowing in the bloodstream. They both require key interpolation.

2. Design Verification: Using Design Visualization, you can see if what you think you are designing is actually what you are designing, What will it look like and how will it work? If you don't know the answers to these questions, design visualization will help you investigate, explore, discover and evolve your concepts into something concrete. Virtually concrete.

Being able to build a virtual model and view it from any and all locations, including inside and out is a very powerful artistic tool. Being able to create materials that truly mimic real-world surfaces and Set virtual lights to illuminate beams of light of the setting sun through a window gives one the power of a 17th century Dutch painting master. Instant Rembrandt, just add geometry, materials and mental daylight. Well, it helps if you know the software too.

3.. Design Presentation If you show a floorplan or even an elevation drawing to the average human, they'll have no clue what they are looking at, really. They won't be able to pull a distinct idea of what the picture of the scene will be. A rendering, anyone can understand. An animation will grab and hold their attention. Once you've completed your design, you can present it to the world. this includes your design partners, your potential financial backers, people of importance in expensive clothing. You can also show it to your children or grandchildren and your neighbors.

Tip: If you're visualizing military installations, don't post your visualizations to public websites. Sharing isn't always a good thing.

In the presentation of your design, you can animate key elements of your idea to tell the story or add realism. Add animated pedestrians and traffic to architectural visualization. Show the passage of daylight and the movement of the shadows. Or Use it to show anything that changes over time. Melting of Icecaps, rising sea levels sadly comes to mind. If you are designing mechanical assemblies, you can animate the assembly part by part of the machine, or slice into it to view the internal workings. Want to show gasoline exploding inside a piston chamber (and who doesn't?) 3ds Max particle flow is just the thing. What to show how you machine will work with a human? Use 3ds Max Character Studio for character animation in a mechanical engineering visualization. You can't do that in Inventor or Mechanical Desktop.

Do you need a nice shot of how your million dollar project is going to look before it's built? Not a problem. Does the planning department want to know the visual impact of the proposed design, before stamping the permits? You can do it, and it's fun to do, too. Maybe a little too much fun, dangerously addictive in fact. You may spend hours and hours behind the computer doing this. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I'm starting a new feature here called "Who Knew?". I'll be posting one useful trick that you should know for 3ds Max/vIZ. And I'll tell you what software magician taught me the trick hoping to create a cult of celebrity for these unsung visualization masters.
Software Magic Tricks revealed! Before your very eyes!

The Problem: Dialog Boxes gone missing.

You hit the Render button and it renders but the window's not there. Or you press M and the Material Editor fails to appear on your monitor. Perhaps you had two monitors at home and when you saved the program, the render window or material editor dialog is offscreen.

Returning the window into view can be accomplished by this neat trick:

1. Press the command for the missing dialog - this activates the offscreen window, it's alive and awake now, you just can't see it.

2. Press Spacebar and ALT - this brings up the windows menu you use to Close and Restore, Size and Move.

You might not see it because it hangs off the missing dialog box. However the fact that you can't see it shouldn't stand in your way.

3. Press M and then use the arrow keys to move the activated window back in to view. HIt Enter to see the dialog in its new location.

Who Knew?: I'd read about this trick for years on the webboard, but last year at Autodesk University this very problem happened to a presenterin a mental ray class. I was sitting next to Christopher Grant, who shouted out the answer and saved the day. Chris is an architectural visualizer, and the creator and keeper of scriptspot.com a source of free 3ds maxscripts and tools.

Who Also Knew? Gary Davis. The world's number one expert on "maxbustion", Gary has a script which also can be used to do this. He posts this at least once a year on the 3ds max webboard, it's probably there now. Why type four keys when you can run a maxscript!

Pixellated Bitmap Display in Viewports

I spend time regularly on the Autodesk 3ds max 9 Support Forum and I see people regularly complaining about this issue. They load a background file into their viewport and when they go to zoom into it, it's a low-res version of the bitmap they expected to see. You can correct this easily by going to Customize > Preferences > Viewports and then at the bottom of the dialog choose Configure Driver. If you're using Direct3D (which is encouraged by Autodesk) you'll see a dialog box called Configure Direct3D. In the Appearance Preferences under Background Texture Size you'll see 4 choices (128, 256, 512, 1024). Directly beneath those buttons there is a checkbox for Match Bitmap Size as Closely as Possible. Turn this on and you'll be able to zoom into the bitmap at it's actual resolution. The Download Texture Size group that follows provides the same functionalityif you're mapping a bitmap to a plane or box rather than using a Viewport Background.

Lost Toolbars in TrackView

I was using VIZ this morning and for no good reason I was unable to see any toolbars in Dope Sheet. I thought I knew how tofix this - a right-click in a blank area brings up a menu with Show Toolbars. I turned on ALL to see all the toolbars, but they still failed to show despite the correct setting. Somewhere, some configuration file or ini file has a screwed up setting, what to do? Simple - rename the entire user settings folder.

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\VIZ and rename that folder to anything else. Restart VIZ and voila, toolbars are back. It's a bit of a brute force technique, since you did this to fix one unknown file somewhere in that folder, but hey, if it works, it works.

There is a tendency for us to focus. Intensely. Because you have to do this in order to make the software work and get the job done. A kind of tunnel vision develops and we lose track of the bigger picture. We forget there is anything else but the virtual world we are building and creating. We get absorbed into the latest release, become one with the newest features (I am one with mental ray, I am one with mental ray) and we forget who we are.

I made a career out of traveling around the world pushing 3D Studio. I told everyone "Shhh don't tell you boss, don't tell your spouse, 3D Studio is MORE FUN than what you are doing, I don't care what it is, 3ds max is more fun than that." and everyone laughed at that, but it was true. To a point. In a way.But one of the keys to doing good work, is doing good play

It was Gary Yost that pointed out to me, that in fact Life is more fun than 3D Studio. And so I gave a lecture "Ten things more fun than 3D Studio" which included (in no particular order): dancing the tango, snorkeling with sea turtles, drumming in the moonlight, driving with the top down, bodysurfing in Poipu, kayaking from Hanalei to the Princeville Hotel, riding horses to a waterfall, eating coconut pineapple shave ice and spam musubi (but not together) . And using Character Studio Motion Mixer. Almost made it to 10. In case you haven't guessed, I'm leaving for a week in Hawaii. I'll be doing all of the above, except for the one that requires a computer. Hopefully the only bugs I see will be palmetto.

I'd like to justify my trip to you. The only reason I'm going to Hawaii is to be a better computer guy. I'm getting recharged so I can come back and master photon compactification and lume shaders. Really.

.

Autodesk has released a second service pack for 3ds Max 9.

In case any of your have been following this, 3ds Max 9 came out last October, and shortly thereafter Microsoft released the new Vista Operating System. Many users were surprised that 3ds Max 9 was not all-that-compatible with Vista, and in fact the Autodesk 3ds Max product manager went to great lengths to inform one and all not to try to install Max on Vista at all.

Many reports came back, however, of stubborn individuals doing it anyway and some even making it work, mostly by turning off security features in Vista.

Before too long a Service Pack came out, as they always do. This service pack fixed a good list of bugs, but didn't address the Vista issue.Some months passed, and along came the 3ds Max 9 Productivity Booster, which cleverly made 3ds Max 9 compatible with Vista. Unfortunately it was only available to subscription customers, so many more complaints were voiced.

The Second Service Pack brings the Vista compatibility to all customers, not just the subscription ones. If you buy a new version of Max and a new computer today, you can download the service pack and install under Vista. I don't think I would advise doing that just yet, but you could.

There are some gotchas however. If you are a subscription customer and you installed the Productivity Booster, you CAN'T install the second service pack. Also you MUST uninstall any HotFixes you installed before you install the new Service Pack.

For a long list of fixes that the service pack addresses read Ken Pimentel's blog on The Area.

Despite everyone's best intentions, sometimes 3ds max and VIZ will crash. Much as we would like it never to happen, it does.

If your software crashes you may have a corrupted 3dsmax.ini or 3dsviz.ini file. This file stays open all the time while you work, so it can corrupt during a crash. So it's good practice to delete this file following a crash, to reset it's information.

I did in fact crash yesterday, but I had a heck of a time finding this file. In previous releases of these products, this ini file was located in the root directory of the software installation. But there's been a change in the latest releases. The location of the ini file has shifted.

For some reason the folder that it is now found in is a hidden folder, and also the defaults for searching in Win XP Pro are to skip hidden folders. So Searching for 3dsviz.ini yields only a cartoon dog character looking vaguely nervous. (Free to a good home, anyone need a useless animated pet?)

Fortunately VIZ has a good help system. The index lists 3dsviz.ini as an entry, and right at the top of the topic it told me the following:

You can find your installation's location by going to the Customize Menu > Configure System Path. On the System Tab, look for the Maxdata location.

This will show you the exact location you need. In my case it is in:

C:\Documents and Settings\Mark Gerhard\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\VIZ\9 - 32bit\enu

Insert your name instead of mine and you've got it.

One more time you might want to reset this file -- if you find a dialog box has mysteriously disappeared. In my case, the Type-In Transform dialog had gone missing - it had been exiled to outer space during that aforementioned crash. Deleting the 3dsviz.ini file and restarting did the trick.

It's nice when you know how to outsmart your computer. Feels good for a change.

Autodesk VIZ 2008 is now shipping with many of the same new features and enhancements found in 3ds max 9.

VIZ 2008 includes the new learning tools, tutorial movies that appear from the Welcome Screen. These movies will help those brand new to VIZ understand the basics of the workflow and user interface.

VIZ 2008 now has Hidden Line viewport display mode. Someone tell me how we ever lived without this! If you're working on big dense models this is a dream come through.

VIZ 2008 now has the new mental ray 3.5 improvements so prominent in 3ds max 9. Previous versions of mental ray were very complex and difficult to master, so they have revised the UI in an attempt to simplify the workflow. Final Gather now comes with Presets that make choosing settings a bit easier. Final Gather itself has been reworked so you can use it without doing Global Illumination first. Of course you can still use it combined with Global Illumination if needed.

VIZ 2008 has new Mental Ray Materiasl. There are new Arch and Design materials that will speed up your renderings and give you beautiful materials right out of the box through the new Material Templates. This is a monolithic material that will probably replace most of the usage of the other mental ray materials from previous versions. Another new mental ray material is the Car Paint material that is a 4-in-1 Layered material. It features a paint layer, a metal flake layer, a clear coat layer and a dirt layer. Just like my Jeep! (Who wrote wash me on the back windshield?_

VIZ 2008 has the new Physically based daylight system, the mental ray Daylight. This includes a physical sky with a renderable orb for the sun. It works just like the standard daylight system, but the early morning hours are color tinted toward yellow-orange, and the late afternoon light also has a color tint as well. Listen up folks, this just simply makes beautiful lighting without any sweat on your part.

VIZ 2008 includes support for the new Relative Paths and Project Folders that make it easier to move files from one machine (at work) to another machine (at home). Just what you wanted, now you can work all night long at home instead of having to stay at the office.

If your rendering big files, you can now Split and Stitch from the command line. This lets you render enormous image files on a normal PC.

XRefs have been improved in VIZ 2008. You can now XREF controllers and materials, and you can snap and align to XRefs. Same as in 3ds max 9.

File Linking now supports 2008 DWG from both Revit and AutoCAD 2008, as well as Architecture 2008. They changed a lot here, with new optimizations for memory management that allows for larger files to load faster than before.

A new feature called Select Similar lets you select objects from AutoCAD Architecture based on Styles. If you're using Styles in Architecture 2008, you'll like this one for sure.

NOTE: There is a hotfix for VIZ 2008 available on the support website. It corrects an issue with double byte support for our Japanese users, and an issue with material assignments on files from Architecture 2008.

The long-awaited 3ds max 9 Productivity Booster has been out for over a month now. Available only to subscription customers it offers Vista compatibility to 3ds max 9, as well as about 30 enhancements and improvements to the software.

Here, in no apparent order, are some of the new features and enhancements.

1. Interoperability with AutoCAD 2008 and Revit 2008. You can now import and filelink DWG from those products. Beyond simply supporting files from the latest versions, the import/file link features have been optimized for better memory management. Larger scenes can be loaded with greater numbers of objects than better, and the files will load faster as well.

2. Vista compatibility for both 32 bit and 64 bit max. Vista compatibility includes support for DirectX 10.

3. Revit Cameras and Views now import as Cameras into 3ds max.

4. File Linking includes a new Repath ability so you can change the path for an existing linked drawing.

5. Revit 2008 Normals come in correctly now, the new file link prevents normal fliping.

6. Revit 2008 material assignments can be imported and renamed.

7. Revit 2008 Solids now retain their object properties and come in as instances.

8. Inventor 2008 files are now supported. Note that you still must have Inventor installed on the same system as 3ds max.

9. FBX Support has been extended and enhanced to include lighting, materials, animation and improved mesh compatibility.

10. DWF Support - now you can write DWF directly from Max.

11. Vault 2008 support.

12. 3ds max 9 support.

13. Combustion 4 Support

14 - 19. Biped enhancements - Free, Planted and Sliding keys can be set now on all limbs. The Pivot point is now color coded for different transform types. Biped IK Keys in trackbard are now color coded. There is now a Biped Quad menu. There is also a new Choose Sibling hot key to move laterally to a different hierarchy branch at the same sub-level. That's cool!

20. 3ds max Bones now have the rotational behavior as biped bones - you have a rotate bone chain mode to rotate all the bones in the chain at once.

21. Blobmesh has new limits to allow for smaller values.

22. Controller workflow - double click any controller to get the Properties dialog.

23. Better wire parameter filters.

24. Euler controller filters to prevent flipping.

25. Load/Save Animation from Trackview by right-clicking on a track.

26. DX Materials in Material Editor now display warnings for missing .fx files.

27. The Mixer now allows for Layer Names to be Strip during mapping.

28. Edge Chamfer now has a number of edges option. Awesome!

29. Projection Modifier auto-reset cages, also you can export a cage to a mesh, or import a mesh to create a cage.

30. The Modifier List now accepts sequences of characters (yea!).

31. Render to Texture now can exclude objects from Ambient Occlusion, and you can now render to DDS Half Float.

32. When Rendering to various different file types, the Setup button is now available directly to make adjustments without having to choose a different file type and then return to the original.

33.Skin Weight Load dialog now resizable.

34. Trackview enhancements - Show Animated Filter now displays only leaf tracks, omits branches. Trackview now defaults to show only the selected object track, and a new Hide Global Tracks option is available.

35. There is a new Edit Trajectories shortcut from the quad menu.

36. All color swatches now bring up the Color Picker.

37. Assign Controllers to multiple objects at once.

38. The Rendered Image Window now has a Copy to Clipboard icon for fast cut and paste of renderings into other programs.

Note: The Productivity Booster does not include the bugfixes available in the Service Pack, so you should install that first.

As promised, Autodesk release Service Pack 1 for 3ds max 9 today.

You'll need to have administrator privileges to install this. If you've installed any of the hotfixes, you should uninstall them before installing SP1. It fixes a number of problems, all of which are detailed in an accompanying readme file. Fixes include the following:

Animation Fixes

• Custom Attribute Keyframes in the Trackbar Update correctly now.
• Animation Layer Weights can be wired.

Backburner Fixes

• Assign to Selected Job Option fixes - any workstation can now submit jobs that can be picked up by any slave, using either 32 bit or 64 bt OS. Previously manager and slaves had to be the same OS.

WARNING: Even though you can do this now, it's not recommended, since your renderings are going to look different - the color space in the 64bit calculation is not the same as the 32bit OS. Test first before you decide to do this.

• For network rendering, you can now define the rendering platform (32 or 64bit) in the Advanced Settings tab of the Network Job Assignment dialog. You want to set the OS to match he render farm to the creation OS. In other words if you build the scene on 32 bit max, render it with 32 bit max.

BATCH Render

• Strips are now saved properly in "stitch" rendering.

BIPED

• FBX import onto Biped now works.
• XRef'ed bipeds will now accept new BIP files.
• Keyframe selection in Dopesheet stabilized..
• Crowd simulations now solve in correct plane.
• Bipeds will now display max trajectories. This used to crash max, so they turned off the feature. Users complained, so you can turn it back on. You have to edit your 3dsmax.ini file and add this to it:
  • [Trajectory]
  • ShowBiped=1

Notice that nobody said they fixed this, they just turned it back on due to user complaints. I wouldn't do this myself, I've had more than enough biped crashes due to this myself.

FILE I/O

• File Paths of Files imported through File Link now update correctly if you move the source files.
• Materials imported from DWG files no longer have shininess automatically set to 100.

MATERIALS

• Arch and Design Materials now display correct shadows when using cutouts.
• Direct X Materials can use Map Channels greater than 1.
• Fractal mode in Cellular procedurals now works again.
• Rendering Displacement Maps crash bug fixed.

There are lots more (30 ish) fixes in the readme.

Download the Service Pack here.

I went to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and ran into two old friends. In the far reaches at the very back of the show, I spotted Gary Yost and Rolf Berteig. Gary Yost was the founder of the Yost Group, the creators of the original 3D Studio. Rolf was a key developer in the early days of the 3D Studio software and a principal designer/inventor of 3ds max. Now Gary is working with mental images, the developers of the mental ray rendering engine.

Rolf was demoing mental mill Artist's Edition, an artist's tool for creating shaders using a graph interface that can be used with any hardware rendering specification (Cg FX, HLSL FX, etc) or even with mental ray (version 3.6 and above). He showed me a shader material that looked like ocean water, layered with patterns of caustic reflected light, and a rippled sandy bottom that showed the effect of the waves. It was unbelievable when he rotated in the viewport to reveal the entire thing was merely a shader on a plane. I asked for fish objects.

The price for mental mill? It's free, it comes with soon to be available Nvidia FX Composer, a free development tool for Nvidia directx shaders.

Rolf demonstrated the visual graphical programming interface. The artist basically drags entries from lists into a workspace where they are wired together. Real time feedback is provided at every step of the way. A artist can generate extremely realistic effects quickly without any programming knowledge required.

http://www.mentalimages.com/1 _1_news/news_texte/070307.html for complete information about Artist's Edition of mental mill.

I can't wait.

Other Game Developer notes:

Shane Griffith showed me mental ray tricks - crank up those numbers to 150 in Final Gather to kill the flicker problems in animations.  It's going to take some time to render those frames, that's the price you pay for beauty.  Might be time to get a 64 bit machine so you can use more than 3 gigs of memory. 

While the first instinct may be to run screaming from the room, there are some things you can do. You're not going to like these, however, but hey that's the way it is.

First and most obvious issues: Memory.

If you use up all the physical memory in your system, 3ds max/Viz will swap out hard disk space as virtual memory. Make sure your virtual memory is set to 3 or 4 x your physical RAM. That can be a lot of virtual swa-space, and it needs to be contiguous memory.

One simple way to save memory is to change your Undo levels from 20 (the default) to 1. Go to Preferences > General to change the Undo Levels. You lose the undo, but max doesn't try to remember multiple copies of your already gargantuan file.

If max can't find enough virtual memory, game over. Max will decide to head south of the border and runs screaming back to the desktop. On it's way it will try to save a recover file, if it can (Thanks Pete Samson for writing that in max 4.2).

OK, so now you know why max crashes some of the time. But that's not the only reason. You may also have file corruption. Something somehow has sprung loose, some loose characters in a line of code, some stray vertices crisscrossing into illegal self-intersecting surfaces, some dirt in the information machine making your file blowup and die.

Here's what to do:

1. Go find your 3dsmax.ini (or 3dsviz.ini) file and rename it to something like OldBad3dsmax.ini file. You are renaming this so 3dsmax or VIZ will create a brand-new ini file to flush any corruption from this. TIP: IN 3ds max 9 they moved the location of this file. In VIZ and 3ds max 8 it's in the root installation directory with the 3dsmax.exe file. In 3ds max 9 its in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\3dsmax\9 - 32bit\enu or something like that. You can't find it using Search unless you make sure you are searching in Hidden Folders for Hidden System Files. Thanks Bill Gates.

2. Restart 3ds max or VIZ.

3. Choose File > Merge and go find an earlier version of your file. Preferably one that didn't crash when you rendered. Speaking of which, did you remember to render while you worked? It's a really really really good idea as you model to render frequently. You can catch a lot of modeling mistakes that way, as well as be the first on your block to know that your file is crashing.

4. For each object in the scene merge it in and render. Sooner or later you're going to find the troublemaker. It may be the geometry is too dense (try Optimize modifier on these). Or it may be the material - look out for reflection/refraction and luminance values that are requiring complex calculations.

5. In the worst of cases, rebuild the geometry. Lots of times geometry that is created within 3ds max or VIZ will work when imported CAD based geometry refuses to cooperate. Whether it's some unwelded edges or vertices, coplanar surface or face normal confusion, the simple fix is do it over in 3ds max. That will usually fix any problem with surfaces behaving badly.

6. One more approach is to use Xrefs for things like the terrain and landscaping. You used to take your life in your own hands by voluntarily using XRefs, but nowadays, they've gotten some attention and I think they're worth a try. If you don't use XRefs, try using Layers, it will help you hide and unhide large collections of elements quickly.

In 1990, I left a perfectly good job to come to Autodesk. I had been the Presentation Graphics Department Manager at a Fortune 500 company, but I threw that away so I could grow my hair long, go to work barefoot and bring an armadillo to the office with me.

I found myself hired as an artist in the software testing department. They put me on the new 3D Animation Product. I remember asking Gary Yost in a meeting: "Who is this product for?" I don't remember his answer exactly - "Don't worry about that" or "It's for everybody", something like that. Well I finally found out who this product is for.

I had the recent opportunity to visit the office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) in New York City and see how 3ds Max is now being used to design and visualize the new Freedom Tower at Ground Zero. It was a perfect day with snow flurries in midtown Manhattan when I woke up.

I was led to the Wall Street offices of SOM by Keith Hughes, accompanied by Glen Whelden (my IMAGINiT counterpart in the East Coast).

We met with Neil Katz, associate. A most gracious host. Neil and I traded Unix and IBM-XT credentials and then he gave us some of the history of computers and architecture at SOM. He said that he'd in his early days he wrote LSP routines. There was a book on AutoLSP on his desk.

We didn't meet in a conference room, since we were in open cubicle space others naturally fell into our conversations. I was joking that one of the problems with 3ds Max is that it lets you design anything, whether you can build it or not. I also remarked that 15 years ago I told people that in the future we'd be working in bent and twisted skyscrapers, because 3ds max had the Bend and Twist Modifiers.

A nearby associate chirped up sayiing that the Future is Now and indeed he has to design twisted structures and what a challenge it is. "Bent buildings, not yet. Hard to keep them standing." I think I heard from behind a stack of paper blueprints.

Neil took us on a tour of the facility, we saw the model shop with a trio of sculptors gluing bits of basswood into a beautiful scale model of a project. We also saw the laser cutting devices and stereo-lithographic printer that lets SOM build model parts directly from computer files. We saw a library of actual materials, bits and pieces of tile, stone and flooring. Someone let me scan all these in a 3ds max library, please!

The halls of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill are lined with large format prints of apartments and offices of glass, steel and concrete, all virtual buildings visualized, merged into the existing cityscape. I was continually impressed with the artistry of the compositions, and the obvious delight the designer was experiencing in the ability to do that kind of work, and the power it put in his grasp.

We saw an animazing animation of Bahrain Bay on a widescreen display. Buildings with great sweeping wings of glass over so much water - someone's vision of corporate live-work paradise. And more RPC people than you've ever seen in your life.

We saw a wonderful acrylic sculpture of the inital freedom tower design. Like a giant crystal from Superman's Fortress of Solitude, a hefty piece of clear and frosted solid translucent shape, rising upwards. Really powerful. Katz explained that after the initial design, the police and others came in and asked the Tower be moved away from the street, and it changed the whole design.

Now the Tower is much narrower, a structure with a dense lattice pattern with a ring of communication transmitters with a beam of light at the top. I actually held a STL model of the tower for a brief moment in my hand (or I imagine I did). It felt a little like a Tibetan Dorge or Thunderbolt. Like Zeus might have in his hand.

Neil introduced us to Ajmal Aqtash, who is visualizing the Freedom Tower using 3ds max. I told him that I had been around 3ds Max since it's inception in 1990.

"On behalf of the architects of the world, I want to thank you for making this product. It is changing the way design is being done," Aqtash told me. I saw the model of the Freedom Tower against the dark grey viewports on his two monitors. "We're visualizing the effects of light, how the tower will look at night. You've given us the tools to do this."

I was really touched. It seems like it was just a little while ago I was asking "Who is this product for? Now I finally got an answer. He's the guy. Ajmal. He's the guy they made Max for.

On my way out I picked up a postcard from the skyscraper museum, and sure enough there are those twisted tapered buildings. No bent ones. At least not yet.

It's one thing to teach a class, it's another to produce quality work on time without killing yourself. The last part is the hardest (not killing yourself). Not that the other parts are all that easy. But there's no reason to work harder than you have to.

I see people using 3ds max all the time doing things that could be done faster and easier, if they only knew. Over the years I've collected these tidbits of information. Some are things to do, other are things to avoid.

TIP #1. Don't use Large Fonts. 3ds max doesn't support Large Fonts. Menus can be cut off if you use them, menus can even go missing. 3ds max requires that you use Small Fonts (96 dpi).

TIP #2. Viewport Backgrounds and Rendering Backgrounds. They're different animals. Setting up one doesn't automatically set up the other. If you want to quickly set up both, drag and drop a bitmap from Windows Explorer into the viewport background. A dialog will appear asking if you want to use this as a rendering background, or viewport background or both. Neat trick.

Tip #3. Viewport Clipping. Frequently when you import CAD files from ADT, Revit or any other CAD source, you run into strange viewport behavior. As you zoom into your file, it appears to disappear in the viewport, which can be disconcerting and annoying. To counteract this, right-click the viewport label and choose Viewport Clipping. You don't really want to use Viewport Clipping, you just want to enable it so you can set it to it's lowest value. When enabled, a yellow slider appears on the side of the viewport, drag the bottom arrow as low as it will go, and you'll have better luck with zooming on your CAD file.

Tip #4. For years it's bothered me that when I zoom in the viewport, the zoom goes straight into the center of the viewport. Well, after 17 years of using this software, I just stumbled onto the feature that fixes this. Go to Customize > Preferences > Viewports > Zoom About Mouse Point (Perspective). Once you turn this on, the zoom will honor the position of the cursor on the screen, so you can hover over any object and then zoom directly into that spot. CAVEAT: Doesn't work with the wheel zoom. Use ALT+Z for hotkey to Zoom.

Tip #5. Safe Frame. 3ds max's viewport offers a very nice display of your scene, and after a while you might forget that there is a difference between your viewport display and your rendering. We tend to make all our design decisions based on what we see in the viewport. If you turn on Safe Frame, the link between the rendering output and the viewport is revived, so the proportions of the rendering output are displayed in the viewport as concentric rectangles in yellow, blue and gold. Since you can adjust your viewport proportions to any size, it's a smart move to keep Safe Frame turned on to remind you of the framing of your shot. This is especially important if you're using viewport backgrounds for camera match or site specific design.

Tip #6. When to change versions? This should probably go without saying, but it's not a smart idea to change versions in the middle of a job. I don't care if the new version fixes your problem, it may very well introduce new ones. Wait until the job is over, then my advice is to do a test run with the new software. Change is inevitable, but you should be judicious in your timing. I got no sympathy for people that say they have a deadline, if you had a deadline why did you stop and install new software? Resistance is not futile, it's the right thing to do in the middle of a job.

Tip #7. "Q" for Select. I don't know why it is, but 3ds max seems to put you into Select and Move mode without telling you about it while you are modeling using Editable Poly and Edit Poly. You go to select something, and you cleverly select and MOVE something on the backside of your building, which you don't see until you're rendering 600 frames at midnight. Get in the habit of pounding on the Q key, to change from Select and Move to Select. The "W" key will turn on Select and Move when you need it.

Tip #8. "ALT+Q" hotkey for Isolate Selection. Working on a big file? select the objects you need to work with, and Isolate using ALT+Q. Quicker than hiding and unhiding using layers or anything. Only thing I wish they'd add -- ALT+Q isnt a toggle, you have to click the "End Isolation" button to return to your full scene.

I was recently in Chicago teaching Autodesk 3ds Max, and I had the opportunity to have dinner with Tom Hudson, the father of Autodesk 3d Studio.

Autodesk 3ds Studio code name THUD
I first worked with Tom in 1990 on the very first release of Autodesk 3ds Studio for the PC at Autodesk. At that time, I was the first artist hired to test the software, which was codenamed "THUD". I thought that was an odd codename to use and that perhaps some irony was at work here. I was worried the product would launch with a "thud" and be a "dud" and I would be out of a job. I was relieved to find the name came from the "T" in Tom and the "HUD" in Hudson. It turned out the Autodesk 3d Studio was not an ordinary software package and Tom Hudson was not an ordinary software programmer.

Created to make cartoons
"I created Autodesk 3d Studio because I wanted to make cartoons," Tom told me over our salads. "Now its 30 years later and that's just what I'm doing."

Tom originally developed the program for the Atari ST as CAD 3D and CyberSculpt. He described how he was demonstrating at a trade show in Las Vegas when he was approached by Eric Lyons and David Kalish, one of the founders of Autodesk. "They saw the software and asked if I wanted a job," stated Tom. Tom was pretty happy working for himself, but before long, he teamed up with Gary Yost and Dan Silva as the Yost Group, and they signed an agreement to produce a version for the IBM PC.

3ds Studio release one was a truly revolutionary modeling and animation package, because the creator (Tom) stopped programming every day at 6 pm, and then spent the evening animating. The next morning, Tom would know which tools were missing and what was broken, before any tester (namely me) even got into work.

Klanky the Robot

Tom told me the storyline of a cartoon he had developed 25 years ago. It was the story of Klanky the robot, and a boy named Joey. Joey discovered Klanky in his attic, a discarded robot that his grandfather had developed. Joey learns how to bring Klanky back to life and discovered hidden secrets of the past, present, and future.

After dinner, Tom brought out his laptop and launched Autodesk 3ds Max 8. He opened the scene file of Klanky the robot. He showed me how he was using Andy Murdock's new Automatron plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max 8 to animate Klanky. "I got excited with what Andy was doing, so I started beta testing for him." Tom showed me a pose library he had built for Klanky, I watched as Klanky did calisthenics before my eyes.

Armed and Dangerous
Tom explained that he was working on a three minute short called "Armed and Dangerous", with a shot that required thousands and thousands of robotic arms to whoosh into place around Klanky. For that shot, Tom wrote a plug-in he called "Armory" which created random sized arms that had all secondary motion proportionate to their length. I watched and in seconds Tom created an array of random robot arms, all wiggling back and forth at different speeds. It looked very, very cool.

"I'm a programmer, so my approach to many problems is to write a plug-in. Autodesk 3ds Max is so fantastic because it's designed to be pluggable; it's the ultimate tool in that regard. This software is really getting to be pretty good. I was playing with Autodesk 3ds Max 9 and had 17 MILLION POLYGONS with Motion Blur and it rendered, no problem, with the Autodesk 3ds Max scan-line renderer," said Tom.

Tom showed me a Mars Rover vehicle he created and animated moving over a moonscape for a shot in his movie. "I love the things that have been added to Autodesk 3ds Max, like parameter wiring for example. It lets me do things so easily and quickly; it's great."

Tom picked my brain about his IK setup for the Mars Rover. "I used to know every line of code in this software, now it's gotten so vast, no one person can be master of it all."

Tom told me, "It blows my mind, all the different uses for this product. Architects, engineers, game developers, forensic animations, and movies! The fact that Neil Blevins at Pixar did shots for The Incredibles using Autodesk 3ds Max; it's hard to believe sometimes, we've come this far."

It says something about Tom Hudson, that he dreamt up his story of Klanky the Robot in the mid-seventies, and now 30 years later, he's hard at work, building the models and rigging the characters, and still using the software he fathered so long ago.