Some other key Poly features are still missing too. Why is there still no Slide tool? Where is the clean Edgeloop Eraser and why doesn’t the Cut tool stay active while rotating the viewport? (I have written a max plug-in that can be downloaded free.)

On the up side, though, there is now a Bridge function in the poly toolset that allows the user to model parts of a model and then connect them very quickly using Bridge on their open borders. Without seeing it in person, it is hard to get a sense of how cool and useful this tool is. Thanks to such parameters as Bias, Taper and Twist, it is possible to create clean, convincing geometry without hand building. It is also important to note that this tool does not need the borders to have the same amount of verts. As you can see in my illustration, it handles the transitions really well.

The bridge tool can create tons of good looking geometry, fast.

A new addition to the Poly toolset is Preserve UVs, which is a plain as it sounds. This is a great tool in the production pipelines since so many times an “approved” art asset needs reworking later down the road. Typically mesh changes would result in a loss of UV coordinates… but not anymore. By checking this option, you can now make significant changes to your mesh without losing your UV information. That’s right… add or delete verts, scoot edges around without losing the texture mapping that you spent so much time perfecting.

Next is the Skin Wrap modifier. With the advent of the new tool Skin Wrap, Discreet has really made a huge step in the right direction. Skin Wrap allows the artist to take mesh “A” and quickly align it with mesh “B” and use the skin weighting from mesh “A” to set the weights for mesh “B.” In video game production, this means that an artist can skin a hi-res mesh, dupe it, turn the dupe into a low-res LOD and in seconds have the entire new mesh skinned and weighted with near perfection. Once you have applied the Skin Wrap modifier and adjusted it to your liking you can hit the Convert to Skin button, which applies a Skin modifier above the Skin Wrap. Once this is in place just delete the now unnecessary Skin Wrap and you have a well-skinned LOD in moments. Pretty cool. There are lots of applications of this tool. You can easily make alternate skins or outfits for a character and in seconds have it totally set up. Additionally, you could make accessories and/or clothes and place them on a character and Skin Wrap makes quick work of them.

UV editing took a few steps forward with this release too. An especially helpful advancement is the inclusion of in-viewport rendering of UV seams. These green lines show up in both the UV editor and the viewport to help the artist visualize where their mapping clusters fall in 3D space, without the need for test grids or other such maps. In addition, a few smaller enhancements were added as well. You can now use both relative and absolute transforms when using the type-in (or slider) abilities of the uv editor. Until this release, Max only used absolute, so if you selected a bunch of UVs and tried to slide them around using the sliders, they would all conform to the same coordinate. Now, they shift but stay in relative positions to where they began. You can also now use Edgeloop select inside the UV editor (um… why is there no Edgering select?), which is a great timesaver for selecting UVs, as is the new paint selection function.

Navigation controls received a tune up too, most notably the addition of a “First Person Mode” similar to PC video games. While I can imagine that to some, the first person camera might seem like a silly addition, this is another area where Discreet is really keeping an eye out for the game developers. When my team of level artists were shown this new navigation mode during a 3ds max 7 intro, the sighs of relief were easy to appreciate. This camera mode is a real plus for those of us making large, interior levels where first person camera is both really intuitive (to the PC gamer) and also a bit easier to navigate with in these level-based 3D files.