3ds Max 2010 includes more than 100 additions to the modeling toolset, and is a good value for first-time buyers. Courtesy of Autodesk.

This week I received the new 3ds Max 2010. I will be putting it through the paces, paying specific attention to the new additions. As you may have seen in Autodesk's press notes for the product, there are more than 100 new additions to the modeling toolset alone, so I will have lots to cover. 3ds Max 2010 is available as of this week for $3,495 or as an upgrade from 3ds Max 2009 for $895.

The Ribbon
While I will be touching on many of the new aspects of 3ds Max 2010, it would seem appropriate to first dive into the meat of the matter... the 100 new modeling tools now known as "Graphite." However, I will instead touch on the thing that hits you the very first second that you open the new application. Autodesk is inheriting the Microsoft-style "Ribbon" interface. This is the giant icon in the top left corner and the long horizontal interface that rides across the top of your screen. Personally, I am finding it hard to warm up to this new interface decision.

Now don't get me wrong: I appreciate the reworking of the user interface so that things are context sensitive, carefully laid out and icon-driven (which they are), but there are some qualities here that are just really rubbing me the wrong way. For instance, why tease us with an OS X visual look but only for the Graphite tools? It seems strange that there is now an orphaned white interface within the gray interface of 3ds Max. Next, the ribbon is a terrible waste of space. When collapsed, the Graphite ribbon takes up about 45 pixels of vertical space. When expanded, which is how you would naturally have it while working, the ribbon takes up almost 125 pixels. That may not sound like much to you , but if you look at the accompanying images you will see that this is only the height dimension. This 125 pixels stretches all of the way across the screen taking up a whopping 1440x125 on my 1440x900 resolution monitor. You can also see in my images that most of the time the Graphite toolbar is not even fully occupied, which seems wasteful. I did find a tweak in the Customize Interface option that lets you place a button in the toolbar to hide the Graphite ribbon or, even better, move it to the side. I can see that if you are one of those artists with a mega-monitor set to super high resolution this may be less annoying, but 1440x900 is not too shabby and is as high as I can go on my laptop, which up until now has always been an amazing 3D platform.

The user interface has been reworked into a Microsoft-style "Ribbon" that takes up a lot of pixel space on-screen. Unless noted, all images courtesy of Ryan Lesser. 

I am not quite sure why we still need the old sidebar Command Panel, the Quad Menu, the Toolbars and this new Ribbon interface. I would think that with one really well done version of this side Ribbon, Autodesk could get rid of at least the Menu Bar and the Command Panel and give us more working space. Oh, also, Autodesk... please let the scroll wheel on my mouse move all of these interface elements... please?

Graphite Tools
Now let's look at what is actually in this Graphite ribbon. To the lay user, I would think that all of these new tools will be an amazing and somewhat daunting addition to 3ds Max. To the experienced user, however, it is clear that possibly all of these new features are from PolyBoost. PolyBoost was a $150 plug-in for the previous versions of 3ds Max created by game developer Carl-Mikael Lagnecrantz, and many hardcore 3ds Max modelers already have the plug-in. Certainly the interface has been cleaned up and the context-sensitive nature of the ribbon helps a lot, but there is not much "brand new" here if you are already a PolyBoost user. New to you or not, this toolset is extremely powerful and to me is the main thing keeping the Max modeling toolset modern. I think it is great that it is now officially included in the software.