Autodesk® Character Studio® integration

One key feature of 3ds Max 7 is the complete integration of the award-winning advanced character motion toolset— Character Studio—into the core feature set. 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 gives all animators the power and flexibility to rig and animate high-quality characters and create crowd scenes with the ease and efficiency customers have come to expect of Autodesk solutions.

 

Highlights of the Character Studio toolset

  Behavioral crowd system: Groundbreaking research in the field of behavioral animation yields a rich set of tools and controls for intelligent, behavioral animation of large systems of arbitrary characters.

 1-Click parametric skeletons: Artists can generate ready-to-animate, parametric character rigs extremely fast, removing the costly setup times associated with hand-building IK associations and joint constraints.

 Kinematic blending: Forward and Inverse Kinematics can be used together on the same character to enable animators to use the approach best suited to the task at hand. IK Blend tools allow for hands and feet to have weighted attachments to scene objects – this makes throwing and catching a ball, rowing a boat, or dancing with another character easier than ever.

 Visual clipboard: A highly intuitive way of managing large amounts of animation tracks and character poses, the visual clipboard allows animators to quickly identify and apply animation and pose data between limbs, entire characters and even scenes.

 The workbench: A BIPED-specific keyframe editing, analysis, and motion fixing tool that gives animators access to Acceleration, Speed and “Jerk” motion properties as well as a powerful system for analyzing and correcting motion properties.

 Animation mixdown: Traditional NLA systems are not able to completely blend vastly different animation tracks together whilst taking foot location/knee joint angle into account to ensure a smooth, realistic looking result. Character Studio is the first system to mix down non-linear mixes into a single clip while satisfying feet IK and knee joint motion constraints.

 

mental ray®  : powerful realistic rendering

Experience the power, beauty and photo-realistic quality of the industry's top rendering solutions, mental ray.

Available as an integrated rendering solution within Autodesk 3ds Max, mental ray is recognized for its advanced 3D rendering and is used by top film, television, and visualization 3D artists around the world. Find out more about mental ray in the FAQ.

Features and benefits

mental ray is a film-quality rendering solution, fully integrated with 3ds Max 6, that brings a highly flexible approach to creating surfaces, cameras, lights, and volumetrics.

mental ray for 3ds Max includes full support for the mental ray shading language specifications as well as native 3ds Max materials, and also allows for unique network management of the mental ray rendering process via Autodesk® Backburner™.

User interface

Completely control mental ray from within 3ds Max

Built-in shader mirrors standard functions in 3ds Max

Familiar UI minimizes learning curve for experienced users

Indirect illumination: global illumination

Enhances realism by simulating light interreflection within a scene

Calculates light reflected off any diffuse objects onto other objects

Handles color bleeding effects, for example, where a white shirt against a red wall takes on a slight red tint

Indirect illumination: caustics

Enhances realism by simulating light reflection and refraction

Creates the effects of light cast onto an object via reflection off or refraction through another object

Achieves challenging effects such as light bending through glass, or light bouncing off a pool of water and against a wall

Soft shadows

mental ray can generate shadows by ray tracing

Ray-traced shadows normally have sharp edges, but mental ray provides accurate area lights and corresponding shadows

Create and easily control ray-traced shadows with soft edges

Area lights

Area lights help simulate real world lighting and natural shadows

Lights larger than a point in space make soft lighting and soft shadows easy to create

Greatly enhances the natural look of images created with mental ray

Advanced motion blur: vector-based motion blur

Enhances realism by simulating a real-world camera shutter

If significant movement occurs while camera shutter is open, film image is blurred; simulating this effect creates far more realistic animations

Motion blur is generated in full 3D using vector information for extremely believable results

Advanced motion blur: motion-blurred shadows

mental ray applies motion blur to shadows of any objects that are motion blurred

Only possible in systems that can render vector-based motion blur

Depth of field

Enhances realism by simulating a real-world camera lens

Generates depth of field in full 3D to eliminate any rendering and aliasing errors for extremely believable results

Robust shader language

Users can extend mental ray's functionality using shaders, runtime linked subroutines written in C or CC++

Shaders help create geometric elements, procedural textures, materials, atmosphere and other volume rendering effects, environments, camera lenses, and light sources

Robust SDK makes it easy to represent shaders in 3ds Max interface

Source code examples make shader writing as easy as possible

High-performance rendering: Multi-Threaded and Network Rendering

Link numerous processors together in a single system or across networks

Individual images are broken down into smaller squares or buckets sent to all available processors, then reassembled on the host computer

Supports very fast preview rendering of highly complex scenes

Achieves high-performance speed in final rendering

High-performance rendering: Multi-platform rendering

Runs across almost all professional platforms

Enables studios to use existing Windows NT and non- NT platforms

Supported platforms include Windows NT Alpha, Linux-alpha, Linux-x86, SGI, AIX 4, DEC UNIX 4, HP-UX 11, SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris

Incremental Scene Changes

Only the changes needed to process the next frame are transferred to rendering systems

Dramatically reduces time spent handling data transfers