Discreet 3ds max 6: a popular tool continues to impress.(Product/Service Evaluation)

Discreet's 3ds max is a very popular and robust 3D animation and rendering package. Over the years, it has found a solid home in the gaming community and become popular in film, broadcast, and visualization. Version 6 of the software provides a number of excellent updates to existing features and adds some new features, such as a robust particle system and mental ray rendering.

Unlike most 3D packages on the market, 3ds max runs only on Windows. Installation is quite easy, and the interface has been reworked slightly. The left side of the screen contains a new toolbar with Reactor-based tools. Reactor, a nice physics and dynamics engine introduced last year, is now bundled with 3ds max. The render dialogs also have been revamped by adding a tabbed interface to help organize the wealth of new rendering options. The schematic editor, having been totally rewritten, is much more robust. With the new editor, users can view roughly any sort of relationship between objects, as well as an object's modifier stack and controllers.

One completely new interface feature is the Layer Manager, which enables users to separate a scene into discrete layers for easy management. Layers are controlled through a floating toolbar. With layers, it's possible to divide complex scenes into parts that can be hidden at the touch of a button. Users could separate a character's mesh from the skeleton to speed animation and rigging, for example. Layers also work with the renderer, enabling the rendering of certain parts of a scene and not others.

One important addition to 3ds max is the bundling of mental images' mental ray with the software. Discreet offered a version of mental ray for max a few years ago, but the implementation was not nearly as complete as the new port. The new mental ray fits smoothly into the max pipeline and can easily substitute for the standard renderer.

Mental ray provides a number of advantages to max users, such as excellent global illumination, motion blur, depth of field, and programmable shaders. Third-party mental ray shaders can be used with max. Discreet bundles a few of the more popular ones, including Lume Tools' glass, water, and glow shaders. I loaded a few of my own mental ray shaders into the software and they worked great.

Mental ray offers max users yet another excellent renderer, and allows it to be used alongside other mental ray-based applications, such as Softimage and Alias Systems' Maya. Max supports the export of .MI files, so mental ray renders can be sent to existing render farms.