Content area
Full text
3ds Max 8, the latest version of Autodesk's 3D modeling and animation software, includes significant advances for every stage of the 3D production pipeline, including modeling, character animation, texture mapping, version control, rendering and MAXScript coding. Here's a look at some of the new features.
PELT MAPPING
Applying image files to complex 3D objects to achieve a particular surface appearance has traditionally been a painstaking and time-consuming task. It's not unusual for an artist to spend a day or more just "fitting" an image map to an object. The basic problem is that the image map is two-dimensional, while the surface of a 3D object is defined in a three-dimensional space.
Max addresses this problem with the "Unwrap UVW" modifier (introduced several versions back), which presents the artist with a flattened version of the surface superimposed over the image map. In order to flatten without distorting, Max cuts the surface into several pieces along specified seams. The artist then edits those pieces-reshaping, rotating, moving-until surface and image are aligned at every point.
The new Pelt Mapping feature in Max 8, an enhancement to Unwrap UVW, takes a "bearskin rug" approach to flattening and adjusting the surface. It allows you to define the seams along which the object is "cut," giving you complete and relatively easy control over this phase of the process. Then it "pulls" the surface on a stretcher. With just a few minutes' work, this process may take you 80 or 90 percent of the way to your goal. You can then work with the "springs" (the pulling direction) of the stretcher, a process that facilitates global adjustments of the whole surface as well as local adjustments in any direction. Finally, you can "relax" the UV coordinates that determine whether and how the map is locally distorted at each point on the surface. Relaxing incrementally reduces distortion, allowing you to leave as much or as little as you like.
"I will never go back," says Jerome Denjean, CG supervisor at Blur Studio. "The old [UVW] Unwrap was designed for games' lower poly characters. Our 'low poly' character is 30,000 polys. There's no way to push and pull that by hand."
NONLINEAR ANIMATION
Max takes a keyframe-centric approach to animating: You work with individual...