Discreet has added some new tools that improve on the previous 3ds max software.

Scouring the Web, you will find most of the 3ds max reviews are either sterile press packet regurgitations or generalized reviews. They do not really dig down, revealing the good and bad points of the new software with a day-to day, in-workplace perspective. I hope to be helpful in this respect by giving you my review based on my use of the software package and how it has fared in its use as the main tool for modeling, mapping, rigging and animating in a game development environment.

Vertex Paint
One of the most important improvements that Discreet has made to the 3ds max system is within the Vertex Paint toolset. In 3ds max 5, the vertex paint tools were simple and just sort of shabby. While I still think that the new tools are more of a band-aid than a real paradigm shift, they are quite good. In 3ds max 6, once a Vertex Modifier is added to your model, a new floating toolbox opens up with tools that will seem familiar to both the max and Photoshop users out there. The new interface provides very fast interaction with the 3d paint tools (unlike Maya) and the in-viewport 3d painting is really great. Probably the most amazing improvement to the vertex paint system is the Blur tool. Say goodbye to the typical “triangular”-looking shading that typically plagues vertex painting on low to mid poly objects. Now users can paint their models in a very quick way and a single click of the blur tool smoothes out the paintjob resulting in an incredibly slick, soft vertex color layer. When I say very quick, I mean it. I was amazed at how fast I could just throw down my paint colors, and with a click or two of the blur tool it looked as if I had spend 20 minutes carefully painting.

All images © Discreet, a division of Autodesk Inc. 2004. All screen captures courtesy of Ryan Lesser.

Features such as this are crucial in today’s game development environment. One issue I have is that the blur tool could easily have been a pressure sensitive paint tool that allowed discreet blurring of specific areas. This issue is alleviated somewhat by using another new vertex paint tool, Sub Object Selection.

Imagine blending 3ds max’s sub object vertex select with Photoshop’s lasso tools for selection and masking. This allows you to quickly select the verts that you want painted and omits the others from the selection. There is also the ability to separately shift the Hue, Saturation and Brightness of each vertex paint layer. Speaking of layers, max now lets you add or delete layers of vertex paint as if they were Photoshop layers. These layers appear in the modifier stack as new modifiers, but the paint toolbox allows you to blend these layers together with blend modes like Multiply, Luminosity, Screen, etc. as well as shift their Opacity. Sound Familiar? That is because these modes have become standard in most image editing programs… and now in 3ds max as well. Opacity in a vertex layer is now also animateable, which is a nice advancement but seriously… it is about time that 3ds max allowed users to animate the actual vertex color. The Opacity animation can band-aid over some of developer’s issues, but it is not a perfect fix. Game developers use vertex channels in all sorts of ways, especially during export to their engine. Colors can come through into game as raw color info, transparency, damage areas, etc. One big beef that many people had about the 3ds max5 vertex paint tools was that it was impossible to know what view mode you were in (unshaded, shaded, textured) because the buttons were not toggles and were totally unlabelled. Unfortunately, this is still the case. Discreet... why is it so hard to make these toggle buttons so that we are no longer confused? Recently, the awesome tools programmer at the game company that I work at built a new Vertex Paint Floater for me that fixes the button discrepancy. It rounds out the current improvements nicely. Another beef that I have with the Vertex Paint toolset is that I believe the size of the brush and softness should be controllable in-viewport, with the use of an alt or control-click (similar to Deep Paint). For those unfamiliar, this allows you to hold down alt or control button and drag up or down to change the size of the brush without leaving the 3D viewport.

UVW Unwrap
The UVW Unwrap modifier has also been given some attention. Most notable, the Relax UV Coordinates tool allows users to take knotty areas of UVs (such as nose and eye areas of a face) and with the simple application of the Relax UV Coordinates tool, the UVs start to fall into a clean grid formation. The more you relax the UVs, the more grid-like they become. This is a great tool for my team as previously, many of us would hand tweak these types of UVs. Coordinates on arms and legs can fall into perfect rows for clean Photoshop painting. My main comment here is that this should have been an integrated slider tool instead of a floating dialog that locks out in-editor navigation.