Discreet will publicly unveil 3ds max 7 -- the newest version of its acclaimed 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software at SIGGRAPH 2004, Aug. 10-12 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
3ds max 7 is expected to ship in fall 2004 for $3,495. Localized versions are planned to be available later in 2004 and 2005. Upgrade pricing from 3ds max 6 is $795; and 3ds max 5 is $1,295.
Responding to the ever-increasing industry need for powerful yet approachable non-linear animation tools, Discreet is integrating its award-winning advanced character motion toolset character studio into the core feature set of 3ds max 7. With a unique constraint-based non-linear animation mixer, highly scalable behavioral crowd simulation capabilities, and extensive motion capture filtering and editing facilities, character studio brings industry leading price/performance capabilities to the existing 3ds max character toolset. The result of the integration of character studio and 3ds max is the widespread accessibility of character animation functionality, which up until now has been found in solutions costing two to three times more than 3ds max.
3ds max 7 also offers a wide range of newly developed core functionality including industry-first Normal Mapping, a workflow accelerator for gaming; and Edit Poly Modifier, designed to improve ease of use and speed of animation. Such groundbreaking features as Normal Mapping continue Discreet's legacy of cross-pollinating innovative technologies between market segments, where features originally designed for one market segment such as games can have a significant impact on other segments such as film or design visualization.
"NVIDIA and Discreet have worked together for years to deliver the highest performance graphics creation solutions for professional 3D animation artists," said Jeff Brown, general manager of professional graphics at NVIDIA. "With Discreet's acute focus on high-end realtime shading in 3ds max 7, it takes a powerful professional graphics solution with true 128-bit floating point frame buffers and Shader Model 3.0 support like the NVIDIA Quadro FX workstation graphics solutions to unleash its full potential. Together, Discreet and NVIDIA have ensured that the full power and feature sets of our respective products give 3D game developers and visual effects artists a sophisticated, but approachable hardware and software duo that optimizes productivity."
"3ds max 7 is designed to deliver the optimized performance required for the large data sets of today's increasingly complex 3D production environments," added Marc Petit, vp of product development, Discreet. "Major innovations in 3ds max 7 focus on delivering the most productive and customizable workflow to date, support for next-generation PC/console and mobile platforms, as well as powerful new creative tools. Furthermore, the integration of advanced character animation capabilities as a part of the core functionality of 3ds max will provide fast, efficient and intuitive character tools for the benefit of all 3ds max 7 users."
Built in conjunction with industry artists and facilities, Discreet maintained that 3ds max 7 is aimed at boosting facility productivity and meeting the demanding production requirements set by today's highly competitive environment.
"We're always excited to be part of Discreet's development process," said Greg Zeschuk, joint ceo of BioWare. "With 3ds max 7, we are seeing some great improvements in performance. The character animation advancements have reaffirmed our commitment to 3ds max 7 as our core development platform. Discreet's advancements for improved visual feedback have paid off in a significant way - giving us the ability to handle larger amounts of polygons as well as more objects than ever before.
Ray Muzyka, joint ceo of BioWare, also added, "As we are in the home stretch for bringing JADE EMPIRE already an award winner at E3 to market in the first quarter of 2005, we will definitely be utilizing all of the features of 3ds max, both to ensure JADE EMPIRE is visually stunning and also to help us get the artwork done quickly and efficiently; we're confident that JADE EMPIRE will be BioWare's best game yet!"
Additional major new features in 3ds max 7 include:* Normal Mapping - industry first revolutionary workflow developed for gaming adds extreme detail to low-polygon models with high-resolution maps - and with complete rendering support normal mapping brings great timesaving benefits to film production and cinematic visualizations.* mental ray 3.3 - enhanced integration in 3ds max with accelerated performance and memory efficient Global Illumination, Render to Texture support, full Normal Mapping and Sub-Surface Scattering that disperses light for amazingly realistic skin and dense translucent object rendering.* Custom Attributes Collector - a new, unified interface that improves efficiency when animating multiple custom attributes for any character setup.* Edit Poly Modifier - significantly increases the rapidity and ease at which complex polygonal surfaces can be created, modified and then animated improving the creative process.* Skin Wrap Deformer - greatly improved character animation workflow with easy application of props and clothing to pre-skinned 3D models. * Snapping Workflow - improved accuracy and viewport feedback for the underlying snapping system in 3ds max.* Paint Selections - an intuitive and interactive method for building selections with a brush-based interface. * Enhanced Interactive Performance and Scalability - an ongoing program to enable 3ds max to scale to very large datasets including smart object culling for high performance manipulation of large numbers of objects.* TurboSmooth - a highly optimized smoothing algorithm for increased performance of high-resolution models.* Mobile Gaming Development Tools - native mobile 3D asset creation with new JSR 184 exporter and per camera diagnostic tools.
Discreet's (www.discreet.com) award-winning solutions are designed for digital media creation, management and delivery - across all disciplines from film and television visual effects, color grading and editing to animation, game development, Web/interactive and design visualization. Montreal-based Discreet is a division of Autodesk Inc. (www.autodesk.com), the leading design and digital media creation, management and distribution company.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
