Discreet 3D Studio Max 5

A much improved, feature-packed rendering and animation package.

3D Studio Max is the most popular high-end 3D rendering and animation package for the PC, and its developer Discreet claims version 5 is one of its most significant upgrades.

The changes fall mainly into three categories, each of which improves either the software's ease of use or the realism that can be created.

Two of these consist of modules that were previously available - at additional cost - as plugins to earlier versions of Max.

The first of these new modules is Reactor, a set of functions for adding real-world behaviour to objects - essentially adding rules of physics.

For example, if you want to animate a bouncing ball, you no longer need to position it at various keyframes throughout an animation, and then allow the software to fill in intermediate positions, which becomes very difficult in complex scenes.

With Reactor, you assign properties to the ball, then allow the animation to run, and it will bounce as nature intended.

The end result is not as predictable as keyframing, but makes complex animations - perhaps many balls, bouncing off each other as well as walls, floor, etc - vastly easier to set up and far more realistic.

The next area improves the realism of lighting effects and includes the previous plug-in Lightscape.

There are three aspects to this. First, lights placed in scenes can have properties - colour, temperature and so forth - defined for them to match those of real lights.

Files defining these characteristics can be supplied by lighting manufacturers and used in Max.

This feature can be used by architects, among others, to show as closely as possible what a design would look like when implemented.

When light falls on walls, floors and so on, it would normally reflect, changing colour, and fall on and illuminate other surfaces that are perhaps not directly lit.

Using radiosity, Max incorporates these effects to give more realistic results, particularly inside buildings where the effect would be most striking in the real world.

The obvious example is of a single light source - sunlight - streaming through a window into a room.

Without radiosity the ceiling and upper walls would appear unnaturally dark, if they were visible at all. In the past modellers have often artificially added small extra lights into models to illuminate such dark areas.

The final improvement to lighting effects concerns the cameras that are placed in a scene. For the first time, these now have realistic exposure control.

Without this, in an image of, say, a person in front of a sunlit window, the window will appear white, but not particularly bright. With these new controls it could appear over-exposed, as it would in a real photo, with the window flushing the scene with light.

The general modelling functions of Max have also been improved. Packing this many features into any software package is difficult and, as functions become more difficult to access, the overall package could become harder to use.

In general, Discreet has done a good job here, for example, improving the selection method when picking an object to rotate or scale.

This used to be something of a hit or miss affair, as the axes were difficult to select properly. The way these now appear on screen is much more intuitive.

The way you select faces and parts of objects for editing has been improved and expanded. New methods include enabling cutting and slicing of objects.

The methods for selecting the parts you want to work on are all reasonably intuitive, making complex modelling easier and faster.

It's not all perfect, though. One area, for instance, that has not been improved is the weak handling of the libraries that define the surfaces of objects in a model. This remains clumsy and difficult to customise to a particular project.

Overall, though, this is a significant upgrade, and is very good value for money.

DETAILS
Price: £3,166.63 (£2,695 ex VAT)

Contact: Discreet 020 7851 8000
www.discreet.com

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• 300MHz processor
• 256MB of Ram
• 300MB of free hard disk space
• Graphics card