3D Studio Max Overview Modeling With Primitives NURMS

3ds Max is one of the most widely-used 3D software today for several reasons, such as its long heritage on the Microsoft Windows platform, its powerful editing capabilities and its ubiquitous plugin architecture. While still supplying most of the needed tools out-of-the-box, there is a plethora of plugins available.

Some previous versions required a special copy prevention device (a dongle) to be plugged into the parallel port while the program was run. Due to the risk of people sharing the dongle (if the people don't use the program at the same time), a software copy prevention method was implemented instead. Registration involving personal information such as name, address and e-mail address is now required.

Currently 3ds Max has a lot of advanced features. Since version 6.0, Mental Ray is included. This is the second advanced renderer included in 3ds Max.

Since version 5.0, 3DS Max has had advanced lighting. Advanced lighting included Radiosity and Light Tracer . These were very user-friendly and not so far behind professional rendering systems such as finalRender, Brazil r/s or V-ray .

3D Studio also includes Havok Reactor 2.0. This is a very powerful solution for realistic dynamic simulation (also used in many games such as Half-life 2, Max Payne 2 and Tribes: Vengeance).

Besides the powerful tools, 3ds Max has an intuitive user interface that is relatively easy to use, featuring a stack-based modifier architecture. There are 4 basic modeling methods:

1.1 Modeling with primitives

This is a basic method. The point is that one is modeling something only with boxes, spheres, cones, cylinders and other predefined objects. One can also subtract, cut, connect primitives together. For example, one can make two spheres which will work as blobs that will connect with each other. This is called "blob-mesh modeling," or "balloon modeling."

1.2 NURMS

This is the 3ds Max implementation of subdivision surface modelling, a methodology that is rapidly displacing NURBS modeling as the methodology of choice for both low- and high- polygonA polygon (from the Greek poly for "many", and gonos for "angle") is a closed planar path composed of a finite number of sequential straight line segments. The straight line segments that make up the polygon are called its sides or edges and the points wh modelling. Point of this method is modeling with polygons(in 3d studio max you are working with editable mesh, or editable poly). After creating approximate model with polygons you apply meshsmooth. Advantage of NURMS meshsmooth is that every vertex and edge has its own weight. Weight symbolizes how much will the final shape affected by that vertex/edge.

One weakness of 3ds max's subdivision surface implementation is that the entire mesh is explicitly tesellated to the same degree at render time, as opposed to 'true' sub-D's, which subdivide only the necessary portions of the model and/or adaptively change subdivision amounts across the model or from frame to frame

1.3 Surface tool

Surface tool was originally a plugin, but Kinetix bought it for version 3.0. The surface tool is for creating common 3ds max's splines, and then applying a modifier called "surface." This modifier makes a surface from every 3 or 4 vertices in a grid.

1.4 NURBS

NURBS stands for Non-Uniformal Rational B-Splines.

See: NURBS

Scanline renderingScanline rendering is a rendering algorithm in 3D computer graphics that works on a point-by-point basis rather than polygon-by-polygon basis. Some point in a line is calculated, followed by successive points in the line. When the line is finished, render is 3ds Max's default. Max's scanline renderer is fairly robust compared to many similar packages' out-of-box offerings ( LightwaveLightWave (or, more properly, LightWave 3D is a computer graphics program for 3D modeling, rendering, and animation. Although the program originated on the Commodore Amiga, it has since been ported to support Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux platforms. It was's default renderer being one exception). While several advanced features have been piggy-backed onto the scanliner over the years, such as global illuminationGlobal illumination algorithms used in 3D computer graphics are those which, when determining the light falling on a surface, take into account not only the light which has taken a path directly from a light source local illumination , but also light whic, radiosity and ray tracingRay tracing is one of the most popular methods used in 3D computer graphics to render an image. It works by tracing the path taken by a ray of light through the scene, and calculating reflection, refraction, or absorption of the ray whenever it intersects, advanced users may wish to consider using one of the many 3rd-party renderers available for Max, or make use of the somewhat limited connection to mental ray. A 3rd-party connection tool to Renderman pipelines is also available for those that need to integrate Max into Renderman shops.

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