3ds max 5: discreet adds global illumination.(Evaluation)

Discreet's 3ds max has found a solid home in gaming, broadcast, and film production. It is strong in the areas of polygonal modeling, subdivision surfaces, and effects and character animation. Version 5 enhances these abilities with the addition of global illumination rendering and some new character animation features.

3ds max runs on Windows-based machines only. As with any high-end 3D package, it is best used on a beefy machine with a decent graphics card. The software is fully multi-threaded to take advantage of dual processors, and can use either OpenGL or DirectX. The latter has the ability to employ Nvidia's vertex and pixel shaders, so game developers can preview their work directly in max.

The interface has been revamped somewhat. The timeline now shows the audio waveform, and a button click expands it to show trackview. One nice little improvement is in the translation gizmos that appear when an item is selected. The gizmos now have little planes that, when highlighted, allow you to easily move an object along two dimensions. One interface feature still missing is some sort of connection editor akin to Maya's Hypergraph. This would allow for more efficient object management and shader construction.

The most important new feature in 3ds max 5 is the addition of global illumination to the renderer, which allows you to duplicate the subtle and realistic lighting effects created by the scattering of light throughout a scene. The software supports true radiosity as well as a technique called light tracing, which provides soft-edged shadows and color bleeding for brightly lit scenes. Unlike radiosity, the Light Tracer does not attempt to create a physically accurate model; thus it can be faster than radiosity for some scenes.

Radiosity is based on a physically accurate real-world lighting interface. instead of specifying lighting intensity with arbitrary values, you can now specify it in photometric units (lumens, candelas, etc.). This is a great feature for architects or anyone involved in real-world modeling. It must be noted, however, that real-world lighting calls for modeling using real-world dimensions. A 100-watt lightbulb, for example, looks a lot different in a room 100 meters across than it does in one that's 100 inches across.

On the opposite end of the realism scale, Discreet has ...