It's powerful. It's well designed. It's cheaper than its closest competitor. And it's fun. What more could you ask of a high-end 3-D animation package? Depending on your needs, the answer is either nothing or lots. Kinetix's 3D Studio MAX fronts professional-level modeling and animation tools with an interface that really takes advantage of Windows' conventions, then packs it all into a (relatively) inexpensive $3,495 package.
Beware of falling into the trap of regarding 3D Studio MAX as a David to Softimage 3D's Goliath. The slingshot lessons that this David needs to bring it up to feature parity with Goliath--in the form of third-party plug-ins--cost money. But on the price/performance scale, we see 3D Studio MAX as a highly scalable product with a lower entry cost, making it a great solution for many animators.
This Year's Modeler
3D Studio MAX comes with most of the basics--with the glaring exceptions of
NURBS support and a ray-trace renderer--but it really stands out in the way it
implements tools. 3D Studio MAX sports both the drop-down menus and icons that
Windows users are accustomed to and the programmable shortcut keys that
professional animators depend on.
In addition, however, 3D Studio MAX also surfaces about 80 or 90 percent of its functions on a customizable, sliding panel that occupies the right side of the screen. Through it, you access primitives, modifiers, and hierarchy controls. You perform modeling, layout, and animation in the same screen, and instead of switching modules, you simply pick a tab on the panel with different controls on it.
This panel also contains the modifier stack, Kinetix's most useful contribution to 3-D software design. In essence, the program saves a list of all the parameter changes for every modification you perform. You can go back at any time to any transformation and change it.
Kinetix's plug-ins integrate in a similarly elegant way. We downloaded the free free-form deformation modifier from the company's Web site; after installation, we added it as a button on the modifier panel and it behaved the same way as any built-in modifier.
3D Studio MAX contains a wealth of animation tools, including traditional hierarchies and inverse kinematics, function-curve editing, and the ability to change almost anything over time. Keep in mind that mastering the inverse kinematics and other advanced animation controls takes some time; once you've grasped them, however, you have lots of ways to achieve a given effect.
For example, when we were animating our bouncing ball in the lamp-following bouncing-ball test, we chose to simulate the effects of gravity with a Displace space warp (so the ball would squash as it entered the warp's proximity). We could also have created a squashed version of the ball and used morphing. Of course, if 3D Studio MAX let you apply gravity the way Softimage does, we could have accomplished the task in an easier fashion. Unfortunately, you can apply some of 3D Studio MAX's space warps, such as Gravity and Deflect, only to particle systems (for rainfall and explosions, for example).
The product supports both keyframe and path animation, both of which are easy to use. We keyframed the bouncing ball for more precise positioning but assigned our spaceship to a spline path--with banking--for a more free-form flight.
Setting up the inverse kinematics for the lamp to follow the ball was fairly easy, too. To create an inverse kinematics chain or a standard hierarchical chain, you simply select the parent object, click on the link icon, and drag a connection between that and the child object. You set inheritance and locking parameters for rotation, translation, and scaling on an axis-by-axis basis via checkboxes on the hierarchy panel.
Setting up inverse kinematics chains is easier than editing them, however. 3D Studio MAX provides a collapsible outlinelike view from which you can manage almost every aspect of your scene, from materials to hierarchies to function curves. But unlike Softimage's Schematic view, in which you can drag and drop chains from one parent to another, 3D Studio MAX's Hierarchy view forces you to break and re-create chains (unless you simply want to reverse the order of an entire subchain).
Render Redux
If 3D Studio MAX has a weakness, it's the renderer. We found, however, that
working interactively in shaded views was sufficiently zippy, thanks to
Kinetix's proprietary Heidi display engine.
We also liked the materials editor, which provides a broad, easily accessible array of textures and procedural shaders, as well as lighting, mapping, and alpha channel controls. The program offers an adequate range of options for output to both PC graphics and video devices.
But 3D Studio MAX's basic scanline renderer provides substandard quality for a product aimed at the professional market. The product doesn't even offer a basic ray tracer, but we expect to see good plug-in renderers in the near future.
3D Studio MAX makes a great choice for small shops that want to add capabilities as their budgets allow, and supplements the modeling capabilities of programs such as Softimage, which don't have the flexibility of 3D Studio MAX's modifier stack