Visible UV Seams in both the UV Editor and 3D Viewport.

Materials, Rendering and mental ray have also been a focus for Discreet with this release, and for me the most exciting part of this is the inclusion of Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) materials. 3ds max now has a handful of shaders for use in simulating SSS, the most accessible being the SSS Fast Skin material. In the accompanying images, you can see the results of about five minutes worth of work. In the first one the object is using the SSS Fast Skin material right out-of-the-box. The second one has a few minor tweaks to some of the sub-dermal layers to create a more wax-like surface. If you have seen the new Pixar movie The Incredibles, then you have seen how cool SSS can be.

Discreet has also improved a ton of small workflow and usability features that they call “grab bag” features. While not full-fledged features, these grab bag fixes really make a big difference. Now windows are resizable, there are checkboxes to toggle off warnings for good, floating windows are toggleable, selected vertex colors are more easily readable, the Cut tool no longer leaves extra visible edges, Paint functionality is now included in object selection, Quick Align and so on. There are also pages of new, smaller features such as Turbosmooth and Object Display culling that are too numerous to list here. Check the discreet Website (www.discreet.com) for a full set of new features.

Two examples of Sub Surface Scattering in mental ray using the SSS Fast Skin material.

While I still think that 3ds max needs a facelift in the UI department (see modo and ZBrush), the functionality and usability of this package is getting better and better. As a game developer, almost every addition to this version of 3ds max is useful on almost a daily basis, which is not something I can say for other recent software package releases.

Ryan Lesser teaches animation at his alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). His animation company (Mammoth Studios) has worked on projects for Phish, Sony, MTV, De La Soul, Madison Square Garden and others. Since 1999, Ryan has served as art director at Harmonix, a Playstation2 and Xbox videogame developer. Here he has helped produce award-winning games such as Frequency, Amplitude and the Karaoke Revolution series. Ryan also maintains a Providence, Rhode Island-only underground music site, lotsofnoise.com.