설명
주요 학습
- Learn about developing proficiency in your use of 3ds Max for modeling to create intricate and precise designs.
- Gain expertise in using Arnold for rendering to produce high-quality visualizations.
- Explore Autodesk Flow Capture to enhance collaborative workflows within design projects.
발표자
- Jose Elizardo3ds Max Technical Specialist for the Media and Entertainment division. With over 15 years of industry experience, Jose’s mainly focused on evangelizing and promoting 3ds Max to both the entertainment and design industries.
- Steve MarshallSteve is a Flow Capture Product Specialist Sales Executive at Autodesk, a global leader in design and engineering software. He has over 17 years of experience in SaaS sales for leading California tech companies, and holds the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification, demonstrating his versatility and adaptability. He specializes in the design and implementation of complex, post-production systems and digital pipelines for media and entertainment clients. He leverages his in-depth knowledge of the Flow Capture platform, a feature-rich, secure, and collaborative tool for creatives throughout the production process, to deliver customized solutions that meet the changing needs and expectations of the industry. He is passionate about building strong, lasting customer relationships and providing strategic guidance and necessary resources for successful projects.
JOSE ELIZARDO: So hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our virtual version of our AU class called Design Visualization and Collaboration Workflows with 3ds Max and Flow Capture. My name is Jose Elizardo. I'm a solutions engineer at Autodesk. And with me, I have Steve Marshall, I'll introduce in a second, who is my colleague.
I've been with-- a little bit about myself before we jump in and get into some of the content we're going to show you here today, I'm a Max user at heart. I've been using Max for over 20 years. I've been at Autodesk for almost 20, so I've spent most of my career here.
In my role, I have to show Max, evangelize Max, and promote Max whenever I can. Max is, some of you know who are watching us today, is a very versatile tool used in a lot of different industries. So I consider myself a jack of all trades, master of none. I have to wear a lot of different hats and talk to a lot of different kinds of people in different walks of life that use Max.
I love Max. I got Max tattooed on my heart, and I will always talk about Max whenever I can. And like I said before, with me we have Steve Marshall. Do you want to introduce yourself, Steve?
STEVE MARSHALL: Yeah. Thanks, Jose. I'm Steve Marshall. I'm the Flow Capture Product Specialist. I've been with Autodesk three years. I've been with Flow Capture, formerly Moxion, a little bit longer than that. And although our product primarily is for film and TV, as I've been with Autodesk, showing this product to clients who use 3D Studio Max, Maya, and the rest of the portfolio, we found some really great collaborative tools I'm excited to share with you today with Jose.
JOSE ELIZARDO: Thanks, Steve. All right. So let's jump into the agenda that we have here planned for you guys. We want to talk about visual communication and why it matters in your space. I call it visual communication. Some people call it rendering, some people call it storytelling. Some people call it whatever you want to call it, archivist, designivist. It's just the idea of creating or using visual content to communicate an idea or convey some sort of intent.
And then we're going to look at how Max or 3ds Max-- I always call 3ds Max, Max, by the way. So when you hear me say Max, you know that I'm talking about 3ds Max-- how Max fits into that overall sort of ecosystem and story. We're going to look at some Max workflows. This is an AU class. We couldn't do an AU class without showing workflows.
We're going to look at how Flow Capture can be used for collaboration and review to accelerate that process. And we're going to end with some resources to help you guys get started with 3ds Max and Flow Capture. So let's jump right in.
So I like to set the stage, start really at the highest level, and then onion peel our way down into the nuts and bolts. So why does visual communication matter? Why is it so important in your space, and in every space, really? It's all about storytelling.
Storytelling is the idea and the ability to convey an emotion, to create an emotional experience with other humans. It's no mystery why Hollywood works so well. Stories in Hollywood connect with humans, connect with people. People connect through emotional experiences. And there is no difference between telling the story of Pinocchio and the story of your building or your bridge or your airport or your highway.
So everything has a story. Everything behaves in a certain way. And storytelling allows you to tell the story of your product and to tell that through creating an emotional experience. And like I said, humans connect through emotions, and that's how you can convince stakeholders or city officials or internal approvers, is through creating that emotional connection, connecting your products, the things you make, to the people that are listening to you. Storytelling is really, really important.
So this is a great video that was created by a company called D-BOX down in New York City. I love these guys. I met with them a few years ago. They do really high end architectural visualization rendering, and they use storytelling at their core. Everything they do centers around storytelling.
This particular video is great because they worked with a conduit promoter in Manhattan that wanted to connect and convey the idea of these large, open spaces that his project was going to deliver, which is a little bit rare for New York City or for Manhattan. And so they use the most creative way to convey that idea and tell the story of this building. I'll play back the video.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You wouldn't expect. What you're about to see. What they did is they used zoo animals, very large scale beings, creatures to convey the scale and the sheer size of these spaces, which is a very creative and a really strong way of creating an emotional thing.
I won't let the whole thing played back because it's a bit of a longer video. I just wanted to showcase how creativity and storytelling are not just something that is reserved for Hollywood. We can all benefit from telling our stories in these unique ways.
All right, so how does 3ds Max fit in? And what is 3ds Max? I think a lot of us kind of heard of 3ds Max. Some of us know what it is. Some of us don't know what it is. I like to set the stage a little bit and explain fundamentally what, at its core, Max is, what is the culture of 3ds Max, what is the persona of 3ds Max, and what is the value of 3ds Max, and how you can interpret 3ds Max.
So who is Max for? Max is for everyone. Max is the everybody tool. I call it the average Joe's tool.
You got a lot of tools in 3D content creation on the market, and they all excel in various different ways. Max's strength is its ability to be used by just about anybody. It's about empowering the average user.
And when I say everyone, I mean everyone. We have folks on one end of the spectrum, and I've spoken to these clients and these accounts that use Max, for example, to model cake molds. So they model these molds in Max, and then they send them to 3D printing and they're printed into these silicone molds to create these very kind of designy-type cake molds. And you got folks in Hollywood using, on the other end of the spectrum, using Max to create the craziest blockbuster movies, and everything in between. Max is the everybody tool.
Max is the tool box. It's a giant tool box. It's a Swiss army knife, some people like to call it. I like to call Max the jack of all trades, master of none, the same way I call myself because I relate a lot to Max in that way. And I know you're hearing me, and you're probably thinking, Max is not a person. And it's not, but I do have a strong emotional connection to Max. And so I do find myself in a lot of similar ways to 3ds Max as a tool and as a person.
So Max is a giant tool box. You can do a lot of things. You don't necessarily need every tool in the toolbox. But there is a tool for everything, and it's off the shelf tools. So there's a lot of other packages out there that require customization, heavy scripting, big teams to manage big, heavy pipelines.
That's not Max. Max is a small to medium-sized teams. It's ninjas. It's folks that need to do a lot of things that need to be nimble They need to deliver projects quickly.
Max has a tool ready to do everything quickly. Is it specialized in anything? No. Is it good at everything? Yes.
This is an image that speaks to me a lot because in my role, I have to wear a lot of hats. Like I said at the beginning of this presentation, in my role, I need to wear a lot of hats and speak to a lot of different people of different walks of life. Max is basically that, too.
There's our smaller studios. Artists in smaller studios need to wear a lot of hats. They don't have the luxury of just doing one thing in a production.
Max is a tool that lends itself to that type of a generalist persona, artists that have to do a bit of everything. They model, they light, they shade, they render, they do effects, they animate, they do all of that. That's the Max persona, and that's who Max speaks to. It's the everybody 3D artist.
So I like to showcase this video. I have a couple of videos that are coming up. And they might be coming up choppy on your end, and I apologize for that in advance. There's really two ways of seeing how the kinds of content you can output from 3ds Max, or from any content creation tool really. You're either rendering, so you're creating a photorealistic image or video sequence of something, or you're creating real time.
This first video here shows-- these first three videos, sorry, show rendering for different industries and different use cases. Doesn't really matter what industry you're in, whether you're in archviz, like we saw in the beginning, or you're making trailers for video games, like we just saw, or you're a scanline VFX and creating blockbuster visual effects for movies. It's all about generating rendered content, photorealistic, ray traced content. Max obviously excels in that a lot. And again, it doesn't matter what industry you're in. Rendering is a universal need.
Then you have the other aspect, the other type of content you can produce, which is real-time content. Real time, when we say real time, we mean product configurators. We mean augmented reality experiences. We mean models hosted on the web.
We also mean video games. All these pieces of content that you're looking at in this video are all real-time experiences. Doesn't matter if it's a game or if it's an augmented reality experience. It's a model running in real time or a scene running in real time.
Obviously, Max, on a real-time engine to produce these experiences, these games, these try before you buy experiences, or these configurators, you need an engine, a real-time engine, or some people call it a game engine. You need Unity, you need Unreal, and there's a few others out there.
But those engines need 3D models, need content to be able to run in real time. And those 3D models come from products like 3ds Max. So Max becomes the hub for any real time content output. You get the models ready in Max, either you're importing them or you're making them in Max, and you're outputting them into a format that an engine can consume and then can create that runtime experience, that real-time runtime experience.
Max is also part of every collection that Autodesk delivers and puts out there. It really speaks to the versatility of Max. Max is not an entertainment tool. Max is not a design use tool.
Max is not a product design tool. Max is an everything tool, and it's a everybody tool. It's also got relatively small learning curve, which is one of the reasons why it gets picked up quite a bit in lots of different industries.
So we're here to talk about architectural visualization specifically. This is a session that was put into the track at AU, and so we want to make sure that we're speaking to the right audience. That being said, we're going to look at workflows in and around archviz. There's lots of workflows, like those videos I showed you before where we saw the Wayfair stuff and the Ubisoft stuff. It's meant to convey the idea that whether you're doesn't matter what industry you're in. The sort of workflows and needs are the same depending on the output type that you're creating.
So some just a quick overview of why Max excels in archviz. What is it about Max that works well in archviz? Max has a massive support for CAD data and CAD file formats. You can import CAD data from pretty much any CAD application directly into 3ds Max. It's got one of the largest lists of file formats that it supports in Autodesk. In fact, I think it is the largest.
Max has physically based everything. So Max is built in CAD from the ground up. Max was designed 30 years ago in CAD, so it's got all these CAD sort of notions and paradigms, real-world physics, physically based lights, cameras, materials. They're all based on the physicality of things.
That being said, you're not constrained to the physicality of things. You can break out of that mold and do anything you want. But Max does have those sort of notions and those constructs that are based on the physicality.
Photorealistic rendering. Max has a very strong SDK software development kit that allows it to-- and rendering bridges and rendering APIs. So a lot of render plugins that are on the market today, like Arnold and Corona and V-Ray and RedShift and you name it, they're all born in Max.
Max has the most robust rendering API, and so we see a lot of these engines, either they're born in Max and they go elsewhere or they're born in Max and they stay in Max. There's about 20 render plugins that are out there that are pretty popular across different industries that all run inside of Max. Max out of the box ships with Arnold, which is a plugin that I'll talk about a little bit later in this presentation.
You also have full control over artistic intent, and this is probably the most important point to make here. Yes, you have the physicality of things you can rely on if you need that, but you're not bound to that. You're not constrained by the physicality of the real world. You can do whatever you want.
And I always say, and it sounds a bit cliche to say, but your imagination is the limits. If you can think it and you can imagine it, you can create it. Now, some things are harder to create than others, but there is nothing you cannot create, model, simulate, animate, render inside of Max. All of anything that your mind can think can be done in Max.
You have a path to game engines, which is to create those real-time experiences that I mentioned before. Whether it's creating and sort of preparing models, real-time engines require have very special needs in terms of the kinds of models that they can consume and the complexity of models and whatnot. And so you need to prepare things for real-time consumption and real-time experiences. Max can help you prepare those assets for that, but also, of course, we have the file formats necessary to send everything out properly into real-time world.
Huge plugin community. I shouldn't even call this plugin. Max has a huge community, period.
Max has the second largest user base in Autodesk next to AutoCAD, so there's users all over the world. There are artists all over the world. There are plugin makers all over the world. There are content creators, there are YouTubers, there are influencers, there's all sorts of folks from all walks of life that have made a living in some shape, or form off of 3ds Max, based on 3ds Max it's a huge community.
The plugin community is ginormous. It's one of the biggest plugin communities for any VCC tool out there. In fact, it's kind of a double-edged sword because Max native, vanilla, is great. You can extend it with so many awesome plugins. A lot of them are free, a lot of them you pay for.
Some consider that to be software bloat, so it is a double-edged sword. I think it's a great-- I see Max as a platform. It's a development platform. So you got a strong core, lots of great out-of-the-box tools, and lots of SDKs and APIs to create to help plugin makers create their own custom tools or customize parts of Max for pipelines that are not even necessarily to be sold, just pipelines that are-- people that are customizing Max for their pipeline needs. And of course, lots of renderers, like I said before, and then there are VCC packages on the market.
All right. So just to summarize, so massive support for CAD data, photorealistic rendering out of the box, which is really important in today's world. Industry-leading modeling tools. I didn't mention in the previous slide, but Max has an industry-leading modeling toolset or toolkit, and storytelling at your fingertips, which is really essential to anything in my mind, in my opinion. Doesn't matter if you're making a shoe, a building, a bridge, or the next blockbuster movie. It's all about storytelling.
So let's take a quick overview of the workflow itself from A to Z at a high level. So you guys that are listening to us are most likely designing your spaces in Revit or in AutoCAD, and Max can consume all of this. So you can send all of this into 3ds Max natively, which is really great. So you don't have to export it into some intermediate format. Max has AutoCAD support directly, so CAD files come directly into Max.
We got the Revit engine running in Max, so you can just save your RVT files, bring them into 3ds Max. You can output to FBX if you wanted to, but honestly, it's not recommended. Our support for RVT files and CAD files are just really, really phenomenal.
If you're creating another CAD application, there's most likely a way to get into Max. I'm not sure what that would be. It depends on the CAD application you're using. But like I said, Max has a huge list of file formats it supports, and usually FBX is the go-to file format when the native format is not supported.
In Max, this is where all the magic happens. This is where you take a boring CAD file or a boring 2D drawing and you bring it to life. You embellish it. You put some cameras, you create some angles, some dramatic angles.
You bring in vegetation. You bring in walking people, people that are walking around. You bring in animated vehicles. You bring your design to life, and this is where all the storytelling starts to happen.
You will, of course, assign all of your materials where you make plastics just like plastics and concrete and hardwood and glass and metals. Max has a giant system for authoring, generating, and creating any type of material that you can think of, either based on real world or not. So you can go full creative or you can base it on the physicality of how metal behaves, the BRDF curve of a metal shader, how light reflects on the surface of metal based on your grazing angle. You can define all of that in true physicality.
Lighting as well, so lighting is all around us. It's the most important part of CGI. If you don't have lighting, then you don't see anything, just like in the real world. So you can simulate any kind of lighting, day lighting, night lighting, moon lighting. You can simulate artificial lighting.
We have support for user-defined artificial lights, or you can bring in light profiles for lighting manufacturers. So if you go on any lighting manufacturer's website, you can grab any IS files. They usually ship IS profiles with all the lights that they make, and you can import those into Max and use those to light your scenes.
Then when you're ready with all this, you send it over to Arnold. So Arnold is inside of Max. I want to just debunk the mystery of what is Arnold. Is it a separate product? Do you have to export?
No, no. Arnold is a plugin for Max, so Arnold is inside of Max. It is a render engine that runs-- either the rendering engine itself can run in Max or outside of Max, but the UI of Arnold is in Max. So when you define how Arnold will behave, what kind look and feel will you generate, you do that in Max. You can then render the process of rendering inside of Max or outside of Max. That's up to you.
But Arnold is where you find the look and feel, like I said. Arnold will generate very photorealistic-looking rendering out of the box with very little control, which is really nice. It doesn't bog you down with a ton of knobs and spinners. But if you want to create an NPR look, a non-photorealistic look, Arnold has a ton of control in there for that as well. So great render engine that is now part of the 3ds Max family.
Some examples of folks rendering with Max, I have a lot of eye candy in this deck. I love this image, by the way. I think it's my favorite image in the entire deck, and the reason is because it has so much emotion. It has so much mood.
Mood translates to emotion. If you can put in mood-- and there's some studios that are out there, they're doing some crazy work where the architectural building is almost secondary to the overall mood and environment and feeling that is generated just by looking at an image. I love this image too, for different reasons. It's a less moody. It's more stylized than laid out.
But the way it's been framed and the way everything is placed properly, it's just really appealing. It's really pleasant to look at. This is what you're really after.
And all these images are just gorgeous. I can go on. Max is industry standard rendering toolset, and rendering and modeling toolset. All the great renderings you see for any product or architectural project have all been done in Max, and we love it.
So a couple of studios out there, just to name a few, Neoscape, D-BOX, Gensler and Binyan, great studios, great firms, creating really gorgeous-looking stuff. All the images you saw in this deck come from one of these four companies.
All right. So we're going to jump into some workflows. I'm going to pause here and catch my breath, and we're going to now jump into workflows in and around 3ds Max, Flow Capture for collaboration and review. We're going to look at some rendering stuff with Arnold. Like I said, this next section here is really around modeling and layout, which is where I typically start.
And the way I frame this up is that I'm approaching the deck in this presentation, this class, from how I typically approach a project. You start with modeling layout, then you get into rendering. You might throw in some effects and then-- well, shading, and then you throw in effects, and then you throw in some rendering. You get your project rendered out.
So let's take a look at some features and workflows that are available in Max. First up here is what we call Select And Place. So Select And Place is a feature that allows you to some people call it dynamic or magnetic modeling. Select And Place allows you to take an object, and when you have Select And Place enabled, it basically snaps any object to the surface of another object. So it's very, very easy to create layout very quickly without having to worry on is my geometry penetrating, am I on the right surface, am I in the right z-axis.
It's very, very quick. You see I have one Viewport up on top of the assets I want to populate. I just drag and drop it right into my scene, and very quickly I'm laying things out really nicely. I can hold the Shift key and create a clone of that really nicely too. I can realign two different axes, like here.
And now I'm taking the z instead. Or we're taking the-- yeah, I believe we're taking the z instead to create a stack of books. You can group them together. You can create parent and child relationships directly from within this tool, so an awesome tool for quick layout of a scene with objects that you already have access to.
This video here showcases cloth. Max has great simulation tools. Here we have the Cloth Modifier that is used to simulate fabrics, plush objects, pillows. It's super easy to set up. Just take any model, throw in a Cloth Modifier, give it some settings. We have a lot of presets for different types of fabrics or plush objects you're creating, and you basically just hit the Simulate button and just simulates.
You can add collision objects. You can have parts of your mesh that are static, that don't simulate. You can create clusters like that and groups like that. So the Cloth Modifier, really awesome tool in 3ds Max.
We also have the Array Modifier. The Array Modifier is more recently added. This is a tool that allows you to instantiate and create clones of your objects or your scene elements with a ton of control. So you can do grid array, linear array, radial array, spline array, so arraying along a spline or cloning along a spline.
You can also do surface arraying, where you can take objects and raycast them down to a geometric surface and have them follow the contours of that surface. I'll give you guys a couple of more concrete examples. We're going to create these cobblestones in this next video here.
So what I like to do often when I show workflows in Max, I like to show new stuff mixed with old stuff. Max has been around for a long time, 30 years, probably over 30 years now. And Max has some very robust fundamental paradigms, like the Modifier Stack that we don't tell the story of enough. And so when I've shown you things like the Array Modifier, I like to mix and match it with existing workflows.
So here we're going to build out an actual cobblestone. So we've got a box. It's a standard box. We're going to throw on, on that box, we're going to throw on a Taper Modifier. Taper Modifier is going to create that sort of tapered effect.
On top of that, we can throw a Chamfer Modifier to bevel out or chamfer my edges to create some smoothed edges. We can stack on top of that a Turbosmooth Modifier to smooth things out even further.
Then we can take a Displace Modifier, which allows me to create that surface sort of distortion that a cobblestone would have based on an input black and white image, mapped spherically to my cobblestone. What's really great with the Modifier Stack in Max is if I go back and change, for example, my taper value, everything up the stack will be affected. If I go back and change my chamfer value, how much I'm chamfering my edges, everything up the stack will consume that change. That's the power of the Max Modifier stack, fully non-destructive and completely procedural.
So let's keep going here. We're going to go ahead and throw the Array Modifier on. It's set to Grid Array, so just x and y. We can also create an XYZ array going upwards as well, but that would make no sense. So we're just going to stick with x and y, create a couple of clones on both x and y.
We're going to change the pattern, the position pattern, to alternating, so we can offset each second row to create that stone effect, that brick pattern effect. And what's really powerful about the Array Modifier specifically is all the randomization. So randomization is super important in CGI because it's what makes the difference between something that looks real and not.
Everything in this world is random, and so this tool has so much randomized control, it's kind of insane. You can randomize position, rotation, and scale over x, y, and z on each. And you can lock x, y, and z, or you can separate x, y, and z. There's so much control in here.
So here, we're just going to go ahead and add some randomization on the position, on the rotation, and on the scale to create that sort of organic, natural, realistic, not one block is the same as the other type of effect. When we say there's no two snowflakes the same, it's the same thing with concrete blocks. There's no difference. There's nothing in this world that is exactly the same. Of course, this gets a bit more cartoony the more you exaggerate that, but you get what I'm saying trying to do here.
Then we can throw in a Bend Modifier, and then bend the entire thing and follow a path if I wanted to. Right now, I'm just bending it across this curve. But if I wanted this whole thing to follow a path, I can also do that.
You also have the ability to remove blocks randomly. Max always has this concept of a seed value. If you're not familiar with what "seed" means in Max, you see seeds everywhere. Seeds are a way of-- whenever there's something that's random, whenever a tool produces a random effect, you can change that randomness by increasing or decreasing the seed value.
The seed concept is everywhere all over Max. It's not just in the Array Modifier. And so here we're just increasing or decreasing the seed value to create a brand new random distribution of the removal effect, which is really, really neat.
OK, let's keep going here. I want to show you how to build out grass. I'm using this on a bunny rabbit, but you could take that and extrapolate that onto a terrain. So here we have these grass strands, and what we're going to do is what we want is we want the grass to appear only on the faces of the bunny rabbit that are pointing upwards with a bit of a gradient effect. So how do we extract those faces and use those faces as a selection to then instantiate or array our grass strands?
So for that, we're going to use something called the Data Channel Modifier. The Data Channel Modifier allows you to basically extract mesh information, convert that information into something using operators that you see here, and then output some other type of data. And that data can then be used up to stream in the modifier stack to be used however you want it.
In this case here, we're going to use a series of operator operators that are going to allow us to basically extract faces that are pointing upwards with a bit of tapering or a curve. We call it a-- we're going to be using the scale factor here, the scale operator. You see how whatever is red is pointing upwards? And I can accentuate that or I can exaggerate that or lower that using my scale operator.
Now, this is being outputted as a face output, so a selection of faces. See how the stack goes from top to bottom? I'm vertex inputting, and I'm outputting a face output, a selection of faces.
I'm going to take that selection of faces, pass it up the stack into the Array Modifier. So now the Array Modifier on my grass strands knows to only be applied wherever the faces are selected on the bunny rabbit, which are driven by the Data Channel Modifier. I can make changes to my data channel anytime I want by using the scale factor, and the instance grass strands will update based on that new gradient selection of faces.
Super powerful, very procedural, very non-destructive. Really great way to make a scene. And then hey, later on, someone changes the terrain, this is not what I want anymore. I want this hill to be somewhere else. I don't have to rebuild everything manually. I just change the terrain the way I want. Everything's connected downstream and everything comes along for the ride.
We also integrated a new Boolean system into Max. If you're not familiar, if you haven't been following us, we've been upgrading Booleans for a bit now quite a few times. That's why this is a bit of a tongue in cheek slide. We had the new Booleans a few years ago, then went to newer Booleans two years ago, and now we have the newest Booleans.
I'm quite proud of what we've done more recently than what we've done in the past because the fundamental change to workflows that this new Boolean system brings is really groundbreaking, in my opinion. It's bringing Booleans into a modifier. If you know anything about Booleans in Max, it's a very destructive workflow.
So if I take an object that has a modifier stack, like we just saw, all those different modifiers doing things, and I make it a Boolean object, I destroy that stack. I squash it. It's gone.
Now, with Booleans as a modifier, all of that is maintained. So when I make any change at one point, I consume it all downstream. So here we have a cylinder, and we have a chamfer modifier on top of the cylinder that's responsible for creating these beveled edges. In the middle of these two, I'm going to add a Boolean modifier.
In here, I'm going to grab my tube. I'm going to bring it as an operand to create a union. And already, immediately you see the benefits of having the Boolean as a modifier. The Boolean is able to consume the chamfer on top of it to create beveled edges on the operands that I'm bringing in. This was not possible before.
This is fundamentally a game changer in the world of Booleans, in my mind. So here, using the Shift key, I can create multiple clones of this tube. I can go back to the tube settings and change settings on the tube and have the Boolean modifier consume all that. And all I'm doing is creating different copies, and I'm creating extrusions and unions, so subtractions and unions based on my reference image.
I also have a selection set saved on these tubes that I brought in. Basically, a selection set is a series of faces on the outer perimeter of my tube that was stored as a selection on the object itself. All of that is also maintained. It is not destroyed in the Boolean system.
So here I'm going to go ahead and just select, double click in my operand, in my Boolean stack, which is what we did right over here. So we're just double click the operand. You see all have all my operands right here. Double click any one of these to access its modifier stack.
In there, I'm going to go to Edit Poly. I'm going to go into Poly Subobject mode. I'm going to select my Ribs Selection selection set. These are faces, again, on the outer perimeter of my tube.
From here, I can do things like I can extrude by face to create these dimples. I'm extruding by local polygon normal. I can set myself to local align to scale these faces along their own local axis.
I can convert that selection of faces into vertices by clicking one button. I can collapse those vertices together to create my pyramids. On this operand tube, I can add an array modifier and I can clone it one more time. And you see how the Boolean system is just taking it all in and creating and adding the chamfer on top of it and just doing the entire Boolean system.
I'm going to repeat the same process with these blocks that I'm going to use an array modifier to set to a radial array to create my grips. I'm going to bring those into the Boolean system as well. And you notice that as I'm adjusting the clone count on the array modifier, the Boolean modifier is consuming all that downstream and updating everything nicely. So this workflow is just not possible before, and now this is native 3ds Max behavior.
OK. We also integrated-- I know I'm going on a modifier high here, but the modifiers in Max are awesome, and the modifier system in Max is awesome. So I geek out on this a lot.
So the modifiers in Max, this new Conform Modifier allows you to take an object and conform it to the surface normals of another object. So think about decals or taking ornaments, putting it onto something, and having them follow that curvature really, really nicely. There's two different ways of conforming. You can conform via surface conforming, which basically-- or sorry, volume conforming, which maintains the volume of the object you're conforming.
Or you can do a Shrinkwrap, which basically removes all volume and just shrink wraps one object to the other. But for taking one object and having it follow the surfaces of another object, this is a really, really cool tool. We're going to use it to conform-- sorry-- the great skin on these wires. These wires, by the way, were created using the array modifier, all the different strands of the wire.
So we're going to open up our Modify panel. We're selecting our tube here. We're going to add a Conform Modifier. We're going to set ourselves to Shrinkwrap in our method, and we're going to pick, of course, our helix objects as the object to conform to in our target list. We're going to set ourselves a Shrinkwrap and, boom, you see how it just goes ahead and follows all that surface curvature.
We can add a Relax Modifier on top of it. We can, of course, offset it a bit, out of relax a little bit. We don't want it to be super tight. A skin of a wire wouldn't look that way. But now it starts to look a little bit more realistic.
We can give it some thickness using a Shell Modifier. I can move it around. It's very snappy. It's very real time. I know it's not coming back real time on your side, but I promise you it is.
And there's one thing I want everyone to grasp about everything I'm showing so far. We're doing a lot of modifications and we're performing a lot of actions to our models and a lot of modifiers and effectors. We're not actually modifying vertices and going in and pushing and pulling vertices. We're creating very sophisticated shapes and forms in a very programmatic way and a very procedural way without ever having to go in and at the subobject level move things. This is the future of 3D, in my mind, powerful, high level control, to be able to create the shapes and forms you need without having to go in and, like I said, push and pull vertices.
All right. So next up is we're going to shift gears a little bit and talk about creating visuals. So again, modeling layout, that's the first place I start. I get everything set up. I create some models if I need some. I bring in models if I need some. I effect models if I need to.
Then we get into visuals. I like to start off by showcasing the Max Viewports because they're great. I think some people don't know how great the Max Viewport is. This shot is captured entirely in the Max Viewport.
And you see, you've got depth of field going on in here. You got some bloom, you got some great shaders. The Max Viewport has full support for PBR shading.
And so this is another kind of workflow to get the Max Viewports up. I won't play the whole video back because it's a bit long winded, but this is, these are headphones that I brought into 3ds Max from TurboSquid that I purchased. And I shaded it all nicely, and you see how great they look in the Max Viewport.
These are just some basic physical materials set up. And Max, like I said, has full support for PBR. So you got your roughness, your metalness, your AO. It's got ambient occlusion built in and lots of other really cool tricks in there.
Some renders from the Viewport. These are just Viewport captures. I didn't render any of this to create a sort of fake Bose commercial.
Another great example where you see wonderful-looking Viewport results. I mean, at this point, they're practically-- this is almost render ready in a lot of situations. There's a lot of cases where Max Viewport doesn't shine very well, especially with bigger scenes, interior lighting, but for product shots or for just rendering an asset to do a look down on an asset, does a really great job.
Max also has the ability to have more than four viewports now. So you can have docking viewports, floating viewports, you can dock viewports on different monitors. Max's Viewport also has styles built in, so non-photorealistic rendering, basically drawing style or hand drawing or pastel or you name it. We have all these different filters that you can apply to the Max Viewport if that's what you're after. Some renders from the Max Viewport, or screen captures, I should say, just using different HDR images. Yeah, we love the Max Viewport.
So there's also rendering. So Viewport is great. But if you need more and you have bigger stuff to render, which you guys will, you need the power of Arnold, and not Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the power of the Arnold render engine. So a little bit about Arnold, before we jump in.
Arnold is a technology that was developed by a company called Solid Angle out in Spain. It's been around for almost 20 years, and the funny anecdote there is that it was actually born in Max. The first prototypes of Arnold-- and they're on YouTube, these videos-- are in Max.
And then the Solid Angle company decided to shift development into Maya, and so it was developed for Maya for many years. And then it was used all over Hollywood. And when we acquired them in 2016, we went back and built also a Max-- we finished the work on the Max version that was started 20 years ago, based on our new render bridge and our new modern render bridge, and now we have Arnold for Max and Maya.
It's state of the art. It's production proven. It's adopted all over Hollywood. It's got a lot of strengths. It's based on Arnold.
Doesn't only render the physicality of things. You can cheat and render things that are not physically correct, but at its core, it's built on the physical accuracy of the real world. It's got awesome IPR, which is Interactive Progressive Rendering. It scales linearly, which is great. If you give it twice as more cores, it renders twice as fast.
It also is supported on GPUs, so there's GPU rendering with Arnold as well. And it's very, very predictable. Like I said, used all over Hollywood. You'd be hard pressed to find at least a blockbuster movie that wasn't rendered with Arnold.
It's got plugins for all main DCCs that are out there, so of course, Max, but Houdini, Maya, Katana, Cinema 4D. I believe Blender is probably the only tool we don't have a plugin for. But Arnold is everywhere. I have to show Arnold, of course, and an archivist context, so you guys can of relate to it and make sense.
But a lot of architectural firms now are using it. Like I said, it is one of the newer kids on the block in terms of a render plugin for Max. So we are seeing that adoption take off, which is really nice.
So I'll show you guys a couple of workflows to set up materials and get those rendered with Viewport and Arnold. So I want to start off with materials that we're going to get into lighting. So this is I want to create a leather shader. So I'm going to use a physical material, which is the Max base model based on the standard surface shader that is universally understood shader by all DCCs out there.
It's a white paper shader that Autodesk put out. Max's integration of it is the physical material. And we're going to go ahead and just bring in some textures.
So I brought in textures to represent leather off the web. These are PBR textures. If you're not familiar with the concept, stands for Physically Based Rendering. It's the idea of defining the final look of what you're creating based on texture inputs. So we got your base input, which is your diffuse, you got your roughness, you got your metalness, you got your normals, you got your AO, and a few other different bells and whistles that are based on texture maps that generate that final look.
So we're going to go ahead and create three bitmap input nodes that'll allow me to bring in those textures. So in this texture package that we got, we have diffuse, we have roughness, and we have normals. Roughness basically is how shiny something is or not. Some people call it glossiness.
So we're going to plug those into the appropriate channels of my physical material. We're doing all this in Slate, a graph editor. When plugging in a normal map, we need to use a normal node first, an intermediate node. We can lay it out.
And you see that we have a really nice representation of this leather material directly in the Max Viewport. As I said a little bit earlier, the Max Viewport is a great look dev environment, and sometimes it's a great final output environment. Now, because I have textures in three nodes, if I wanted to scale this texture up and down, I'd have to modify the scaling on three different textures.
That's a bit annoying. So one little tip and trick that I like to show is to use an OSL UV transform node. So plug that into the UV inputs of each texture input. And now I have one-stop shop for up scaling and down scaling my tiling on my shaders. So this is one little trick. There's so many of these kinds of programs you can build, program your-- I like to say "program" because it makes more sense-- your shader trees.
You can store materials in a material library. Here, I just created a material library. I'm just going to go in and drag the output of this shader into the material library that I created.
Material libraries can be shared and shared across members of your team. You can store it in different places. It's not tied to the Max scene.
And here what we're doing is we're adding a color correction node in between my diffuse and my physical material. The reason why I'm doing this is I want to create variations of this leather. I don't want just a black leather. I want a green leather. I want a red leather. I want a pink leather. I want a white leather.
I can use the color correction node to create those variations. And every time I create a variation, I can store it in my material library with the new name, and I can create very quickly multiple different versions of this one shader. So just some examples of some renders of this in action. Again, this is just one example among many that we can show you on how to set up shaders.
I have a longer-winded version of this on my YouTube channel, which I'll talk to you guys a little bit about later, where we show you how to break models up to have different textures onto different surfaces. You have chrome here. You have a different type of leather than this one. You have stitches here.
How do you manage all this? I cover all that in the YouTube channel, which I'll plug a little bit later. Some more eye candy. Eye candy, eye candy.
All right. Let's shift gears and get into lighting with Arnold. This is where all the magic happens. The first thing we're going to look at is interior lighting.
This is pretty straightforward. We have an interior bedroom here-- or a kitchen, I should say-- that came in, I believe, from Revit. We embellished it inside of Max, added some shaders. But I want to light it up.
So I'm going to use an Arnold light. We're going to set it to a direct. This is an Arnold direct light, so it points light in its specific direction. When you render it off the bat, out the gate, it looks like this. It's not very good.
So we can go into the Arnold render light settings, we can adjust our intensity, our exposure, our sampling, even the color and lots of other the temperature, lots of other settings in there. In this case here, we're just going to go ahead and adjust our exposure, tone it down a bit, and we are going to give it a bit of a contribution to the indirect so it bounces out or bounces around the scene a little bit more. We can move the light itself, and you see that the great RPR of Arnold is giving that feedback right away.
Here, I'm going to add an exposure control, which is a very camera-like type feature where you can basically adjust the tonalities of the scene using exposure settings. And I can just go back, tweak my lighting, tweak my exposure, move around my light until I get to the right mood that I want.
We also have the ability to do exterior lighting, of course, in the form of day lighting. So we're going to add our sun positioner, which is a light-type object inside of Max. The sun position is great, and it could also be used in the context we just saw before. You can use a sun positioner as an exterior light that's lighting an interior space.
What I want to do here today is show you different examples or different use cases or different paths you can take. Then you mix and match whatever it makes sense for you. Daylight, the sun positioner is a great feature for generating physically accurate lighting. And what I mean by that is where the direct light is kind of artistic, it's not based on physicality.
It's got exposure and things like that, but is it really a sun? How bright is it, those kinds of things? That's hard to control with the direct light. It's very artistic.
The day lighting or sun positioner and day lighting in Max is actually based on real-world data. So you can position your sun-- you can have your building in your space, the thing you're rendering, have it positioned on a specific place on Earth and a specific time of year and a specific time of day-- sorry, day of year and time of day. So here, we're just going to bring it out. We're going to set it up, just draw it in the Viewport.
I go into my map here, location on Earth. I'm going to select which area I want. In this case here, I'm not sure what-- I think we picked Balti-- I can't even read that. Raleigh?
I think we picked-- I'm not sure we say we picked it. We picked a city. And then so now we're there.
So the sun will rotate along the sky based on where we are in that part of the Earth. And we can tell it the time of day, like I said. So you have very accurate lighting based on where you're trying to render this building. And this matters for you guys, for architects, because oftentimes your buildings, a lot of times, all the time, your building is summer on Earth. It's not just some random artistic space. It's somewhere on Earth, and you want the lighting to simulate exactly what it's going to look like in that position on Earth.
You can take your sun shader, bring it into the Slate editor, and you have a bit more artistic control in here. You're still based on-- the position of the sun in the sky is still based on data, but you can affect the sun disk, the sun disk size, what you see in the background, the color of the sky, how bright the sun is. All that can be fine tuned in a very artistic way as well, again, combining real world data with artistic control.
A lot of folks in your space like to do lighting simulations. So you can animate everything in Max. Everything is animatable in Max. Every spinner can be animated. Here, we animated from morning till night, and here are just some different shots from that simulation that we just produced.
And let's take one last look at lighting in the context of night lights. So here we're going to grab an HDR image of a night sky. We're going to put it into our background.
Max, again, I'm using HDR to show night lighting, but you can also use HDR to do outdoor day lighting. Again, it's another way of lighting, and it's a pick your poison kind of thing. I often like to use HDRs, actually. HDRs are files that contain lots of luminance values, so you can use them, tone map them, and they can really light your scene up as if you were in the place where that image was captured, which is really awesome.
So here we're going to just pop it in. It's a bit too bright, so what I'm going to do is take that shader, I'm going to bring it into my Slate editor. And from there, I'm going to connect it into a color correction node and take that and give it to my environment. So now I have a color correction node in between my HDR and my environment, so I can go in and adjust the exposure or the tint or the color and have my final result pick that up.
I can offset it. I can turn it in space if I wanted to. It's a 360 image, so I can turn it around. So now I'm going to unhide my lampposts, and I'm going to go ahead and just bring in an Arnold point light, which is like an Omni light, if you know Max's lights, basically illuminates lights in all directions.
We can set it to a spotlight, if you wanted to. It's really up to you. But the lamppost physical metal top there will block the light from going upwards. And we're going to create some instances of this.
We want to create instances because we don't want to tweak the lighting to make changes in every single light. With an instance, I make a change one place, everything comes along for the ride. So here we're just going to rerender, and now we're going to make changes as Arnold's rendering. We're going to adjust the color of the light, the temperature of the light, the intensity of the light, the exposure of the light, and I'm adjusting all of my lampposts posts equally.
I can always break the instance connection if I wanted to, if I wanted to create a unique light. But for the most part, you want to stay in world of instances. I also want to hit these other lights that are inside of the building. They're already in my scene. They were just hidden and turned off.
But I'm going to enable them, and they're going to help illuminate my building by creating a sort of lobby lights that we saw there. They're set to spotlights. And again, just like I did with my lampposts and every other light that I've shown you so far, we're going to go ahead and just adjust that.
Here, what I'm doing is I'm unhiding these tubes that I created just by instancing them very quickly and laying them out. These are geometric cylinders that are in every room in that building. I'm going to take those and I'm going to use it to light. So what Arnold can also do, we're going to go ahead and create an Arnold light again.
Again, just to be clear, there's only one Arnold light. There's only one light object. There's not 1,700 of them. There's one. And an Arnold light can then be-- its format can then be changed to a spotlight, to a skylight, to an Omni light, to a point light, or whatever you want.
So in here, we're going to create our Arnold light and then we're going to set it to mesh. When we set it to mesh, the CY appears. It allows me to pick geometry in my scene, and that geometry then becomes an emissive object. It's emitting light. So all of these tubes will be emitting light because I set them to be mesh lights.
So bring back my geometry, start rendering again. And now I can start adjusting those mesh lights to bring life into the inside of the building, to illuminate the interior of the building. Now, of course, some adjustments need to be made. Things get blown out very quickly and then you adjust the exposure.
And all of a sudden, you can feel that there is something going on in this building. It's not just a dead building with nothing in there. So we got some light going on, different tonalities. You can adjust things procedurally to have some parts be less, some parts be more lit than others.
Some shots of this building in different contexts, different times of days. So denoising, Arnold is a Path Tracer, so it is faced with a lot of noise, and it's all about denoising. And although it does a great job of denoising itself, we have different ways of denoising.
I think the fundamental thing to understand about denoising and noise is you have to understand where it's coming from. In a renderer like Arnold, noise can be coming from a lot of different places. There is a few main places that are the usual suspects, direct lights, indirect lights, your environments. Everything is a question of sampling in Arnold. There is a sampling spinner everywhere.
Now, you don't want to go buckwild crazy and just start increasing sampling everywhere because you're going to throw your render times through the roof. That's not any better. So if you are strategic and careful about where you increase your samples, you get noiseless images very, very fast.
So I'll show you guys how to find where noise is in your scene. So in Arnold, we have this concept called AOVs. These are basically render elements in Max or render passes. They extract parts of your image, like everything that is direct lighting, everything that's indirect, lighting, everything that's shadows.
You can extract all those into AOVs. This is a very important workflow usually for Comp. When you take all your images and you send them over into Comp to create comping effects, you need to have those different passes.
We're going to leverage AOVs in a slightly different way. We're going to look at AOVs and see which AOVs have the most noise because they always, like I said, just contain one piece of rendering information. So we're isolating different parts of the render in AOVs to determine and identify which part of the render is causing noise versus another part.
So let's go ahead and get that started, jump into AOVs. Here we have-- I can't pause the video. OK, there we go.
So we're going to go ahead and just open up our AOV list. We're going to bring in direct diffuse and indirect. These are two very specific things, and I'll show you how to solve the noise of these two specific problematic areas. And these are typically where your noise is.
We're going to add those to the render. We're going to hit Render. And as you see in the render frame window, I can access, there under RGB, I can access those two passes and see what parts-- and see those individual AOVs or render passes. And I can then start to look at what parts are noisier.
See, my direct diffuse is super noisy. It's super, super noisy. This is definitely contributing to the final noise and grain in my image.
So how do I solve this? And my diffuse indirect, not as noisy. It's still noisy, but not as noisy.
So this is very, very noisy. How do I solve this? Diffuse direct is your lights, your artificial lights in your scene. Wherever you have an artificial light in your scene, go to its sampling inside of its modify panel and adjust the sampling.
You see that by default, it's set to 1. Obviously, it's noisy. It's got one sample. We need more samples to have less noise.
So I'm going to bump that up to 8. I think I even go up to 16 at some point. And 16 would be a lot if I put it everywhere, in all the sampling rollouts of every part of Arnold. I would never finish the render. But if I just increase the sampling of my diffuse lights or my direct lights, I know that I'm not going to increase my render times by that much and I'm going to get a clean image.
Indirect-- sorry, oop, I want to go faster. To solve indirect illumination lighting, that's in the Render panel. So in the Render panel, you go under Arnold Setup or Arnold Render, and you go to your Diffuse Samples here. This handles all of your indirect illumination, light bouncing samples. So every time a light hits a racer, hits a surface, a ray hits a surface, it bounces. If it doesn't have enough samples, it creates noise on that secondary bounce.
So we're going to go ahead and increase that up to something like 3 or 4, and now we'll see that my indirect pass is going to get a lot cleaner. You see a side by-- up and down. You see how that's way cleaner.
You combine all that together, and you have a very noiseless image. Some examples of this, so raw render denoised through the mechanism that I showed you. We also have denoisers that are post-processing effects that are applied on top of your image in the form of optics and a few other different NVIDIA-provided an Intel-provided denoisers.
We also have Arnold directly as a Viewport mode. So if you go into Active Shade Arnold, your Viewport becomes Arnold. You can select objects, move them around, and all the while things are rendering as you're going.
I love this video because I'm a big matrix fan, first of all. But also, I hope by now you're a little bit more familiar with Arnold, probably not as familiar as Neo was with Kung Fu, but at least a little bit more familiar.
So now we're going to jump into some collaborative workflows with Steve Marshall, where he's going to walk us through how you can use Flow Capture to accelerate your collaborative and review workflows. Steve, take it away.
STEVE MARSHALL: Yeah, thanks. So first off, here's a little fun slide we have. So we had a rebrand earlier this year. You may have heard of something called Moxion.
And if you've been with us a long time, when it launched originally in New Zealand, it was called Motion. So we're on our third name change, if you will. So now we're Flow Capture. And next slide, there we go.
So what's really neat about Flow Capture is originally we were built for some of the top blockbuster films and TV shows in Hollywood as a dailies platform. But we've grown to a complete collaborative sharing program, whether it's a real-time review, which I'm going to share with you today, or even asynchronous, where we take all that metadata. The media and entertainment cloud for Autodesk is called Flow and-- back one, Jose.
And we've started off integrating our product. So with the name rebrand to Flow Capture, we also took ShotGrid and renamed it Production Tracking. And Flow's this thing in the middle that's going to connect everything. We're continuing to build it out.
Today, I want to talk about how Max can also take advantage of some of those tools. Coming to Autodesk. I worked with a lot of VFX clients and animators and whatnot who had very different workflows, and in those conversations with these clients and watching them use Maya and Max, I thought, hey Jose, let's talk a little bit more about how we can make life easier for some folks. We can go next slide.
So here's Flow Capture, and we can go to the next slide. So we really want to connect everyone, whether you're an artist, an animator, videographer, colorist, a Revit artist who needs to work with their 3D Studio Max counterpart across the world. How can we look at these tools and these shadings and all these amazing things Jose just showed you in real time and have that conversation.
So we'll go to the next slide. We did a session yesterday. We brought Jordan in, who is our producer, if you will, and we give Jose some notes on this scene. So he's going to go in and we're going to play some lighting. Bathroom light's going to go off, on.
And you may be saying, well, this is just like Zoom. Well, kind of. But we've done some magical work. We want the focus and the clarity and the quality to be on the content we're reviewing.
So everyone in the room has a synchronized playhead. We're able to push full 10-bit data and annotate these things live. As we talked about earlier, renders can take time if you have a single computer. If you don't have access to a big render farm, well, to share that content can be challenging. We can do it all live right here, right out of 3D Studio Max in a secure, shared environment.
JOSE ELIZARDO: Can I'll just add that I hadn't seen Flow Capture in action. And when we practiced all this and put this all together for our AU class, I was like, OK, this changes everything. Having everyone looking at the same thing and having everyone the ability to look at everything and comment at the same time and annotate was pretty wild.
And I don't know if you're seeing it here, but we're in Flow Capture, this UI on the right, you see some faces popping in and out, those are us and our colleague Jordan, who's our supervisor. But I think it that was really awesome. Steve, sorry.
STEVE MARSHALL: Yeah. And the great thing about the platform is the folks reviewing it, there's no software to install. Works great on an iPad, works great on your Apple TV or your Fire Stick or your iPhone. Pretty much however you connect to the internet, you can jump on, and with the security we have built around it, the DRM, you have the confidence that your projects are going to be secure.
And it's easy for your folks to jump in. You may have to bring legal in last minute to view something real easily. They get a link in their email, and they're in.
But after the session, come see us, we'll do some more testing with this. We can do these live if you'd like. Very, very powerful tool. We think it's really going to help your workflows and your collaboration moving forward.
JOSE ELIZARDO: Thanks, Steve. OK, that was awesome. And I'm really happy we got to do this and integrate this into our workflows because I really do think this is solving a lot of problems that some of our folks in this space are having with these type of review environments.
All right. I know we're running out of time. I'm going to go through this a little bit quickly. Max has lots of simulation tools in there to simulate things, like for example, you can take cloth, and you can drag it just by pushing and pulling some vertices. And it's like taking the whole thing and making it behave like cloth.
This is using mCloth inside of 3ds Max, which is another great feature. Again, I talk about this in more length on my YouTube channel. These are just some great shots from that particular data set that came from a customer of ours.
I built this last year, I think, for a customer, how to simulate snow. So we have a particle system in Max that allows you to basically define how particles are being-- particles are often understood as snow specks, but particles are just point instances in space. You can use them to display snow, but they can display whatever you want. And we have very sophisticated particle system inside of Max.
We have fluids inside of Max, a full fluid simulation system to simulate any kind of liquid, viscous or not, body of water, splashes, boats, wakes, foam, you name it. We also have presets that ship with our fluid system. That's one of the things that makes Max great is that great preset system overall. Everything in Max has a preset, a starting point, a jumping off point.
3D content creation is intimidating. Something a jumping off point helps lower that learning curve. And that's a big part of the Max mantra.
I thought this video was great. It's gorgeous. I mean, this looks so realistic. This is all done in Max with Max fluids.
This one, too, is a bit more maybe in line with some folks that are listening to us today. These types of vessels on the boat, on the water, on an ocean with full foam and wake and everything, all this can be simulated inside of Max.
This is another section that I thought was kind of fun to build. It's a show and tell at this point. We have a studio called Neoscape. They're based in Boston. I love them. They're very close friends of mine.
They create very nice-looking architectural visualization renders with Max, and one of the latest things they integrated was 3D characters. So they actually have a full motion capture studio in their Boston facility that they had me visit, where actors come in with motion capture suits and they act out these things that the director or the producers have determined to be necessary for the visualization output. And they bring that into Motion Builder, which is another application that we have here at Autodesk and M&E, and it's a character animation and motion capture tool. And all of that motion capture data is cleaned up, fixed, and sent into 3ds Max.
So if you think about a situation like this, where you have characters on the lower right-hand side, these are human actors with motion capture suits acting something out. And then we retarget that animation onto 3D characters that are rigged, sent, and then rent over on the left-hand side, and then brought into the final render over in the upper right-hand side. It really helps bring your environments to life.
Now, they don't look super realistic. These characters could look a lot better, but it does give you the idea of that motion is very realistic because it's based on motion capture. This is that final render.
Another example here, characters acting something out and then that mapped to, retargeted to a Motion Builder rig right here. Basically, the same thing, the rig the characters, and then you see that in those characters, those people are now in a CGI environment. So that workflow is very powerful and awesome.
I would say the sort newest kid on the block to all this character workflow or fast character workflows is Wonder Studios or Wonder Dynamics. We acquired Wonder Dynamics about two or three months ago was announced. So Wonder Dynamics is based on AI, AI-based animation tool that allows you to basically-- a lot of the workflows that I showed you are no longer necessary in this environment. All you need is a phone, a person moving, and that's all you need, really.
So you film someone doing something. You take that footage, you bring it into the Wonder Studio environment. You give it a 3D character, and it does all the magic behind the curtains.
So you can take any motion from any human and map it onto any 3D mesh based on AI. It's really powerful. It's really impressive. This is all cloud-based technology, so it's not Max, it's not Maya. It works for both. All the outputs can come into Max and Maya as content, that Max data that Max and Maya can consume.
And more recently, we announced Golaem acquisition. Golaem is a crowd simulation--
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Golaem is massive crowd simulation. It's primarily built for Maya. The reason why I'm showing it here is that you can output this into data, again, that Max can consume and render, and you can make some adjustments at render time, swap meshes, swap characters, that kind of thing, really an integration into Max with the full-fledged simulation engine that is neither Max nor Maya.
That said, there is a way to get on this as well. But like I said, for you guys out there, who are creating your [INAUDIBLE] want to see characters, you got populated Max, but you can always render in Golaem and [INAUDIBLE] integrate that into your pipeline today.
XR experiences are big, are going mainstream. It's not just games. A lot of folks want to create condo walkthroughs or just any kind of real-time experience is something that does not exist yet, but will exist soon. But going from Revit into real time is not easy. I mean, there's ways to do it now with Datasmith and some of the Unreal connections, but for the most part, serious users creating serious AR or VR experiences with Revit data, they're going to want to go into a product like 3ds Max, get it cleaned up, get it setup ready, unwrapped, and get it texture baked and get it all kind of ready to go.
When you're outputting to an engine, you need to be cognizant of the fact that the engine is real time, it's running everything in real time. You need to give it lighter weight models. Depending on your target platform, that resolution, that mesh resolution changes.
For something like Mobile AR, for example, it's got to be real lightweight. Just a few years ago, the Microsoft HoloLens, your models were, like, boxes, basically, all you can get in there, not today anymore.
And so we do a lot of that with retopology with decimation. So you can go from a scan mesh that's all triangles and not very real time friendly and very, very dense down to something that's all squad-based and very clean and very lightweight. We do that with the Retopology Modifier. We also do that with the Pro Optimizer Modifier.
Or going for maybe a ZBrush Sculpt, a sculpted mesh, down to something that's more manageable and consumable. And then you extract textures. You extract all of that high-res geometric detail into texture maps.
So here's a workflow where this is seen in action. We have this sculpt of this tiger mask. We're going to go ahead and just remove half of it because we're going to do is a bit process intensive. And so because it's symmetrical model, we need to do it on all of it.
So we're going to throw in a Retopologize Modifier-- sorry, a Pro Optimizer Modifier first to reduce its complexity down. We're going to decimate it down to something more manageable. And then from this we're going to smooth it out and then we're going to throw on a weighted normals to increase the smoothing, get rid of some of those visual artifacts that their Pro Optimizer left behind.
And then, again, we're going to throw a Retopologize Modifier onto this to take those triangles that the Pro Optimizer left behind, and convert all of that into quads. Again, this is based on a reform technology. It's really awesome. It's technology we built ourselves. It's inside of Maya as well.
So, see, now you have really nice, clean, quad-based geometry. From here, we're going to go ahead and just unwrap it using our UV Editor. We're going to flatten map it very quickly. I'm not messing around with UV islands. I'm just saying, hey, flatten map and maximize my UV space, and don't have any overlapping faces.
And then we are going to use texture baking. So texture baking is a new tool that was added two or three releases ago, and it allows you to basically extract information from another mesh, whether it's, like I said, geometric details or diffuse color or normals or roughness or whatever it is. So we're going to use it to basically take all the information from that mesh, the high-res mesh. You didn't see the high-res mesh in the beginning, but it had a nice shader on it, a nice metal shader.
So we're going to grab the albedo, which is our diffuse, our metalness, our roughness and our normals. We're going to extract all that into texture map information, rather than living as a shader information. This requires a cage. So we have the high-res model, we have the low-res model, and we're basically extracting all the high-res detail, like I said, based on this cage. This is a raycasting cage, so it's looking kind of in all directions to make sure it's encompassing everything.
We're going to plug all of these maps that we're going to generate into a physical material into the appropriate slots. All of this is handled right here in the texture baking tool. We're going to hit Render. And as it passes through those different passes in Arnold, we can get to a complete result where on one side, you have the original scan, not very usable, hard to bring into real time, too dense, and way too triangulated. And on the right-hand side-- and all of its shading is based on a shader that is native to Max only. The physical material is not understood elsewhere.
We're taking all of that information, the shading information and all of the geometric finer details, storing all that into a normal map. And these are all maps now that are basically exportable. The mesh is more digestible. It's lighter weight, it's all quad-based using retopology. So we're mixing and matching a few different tools here to create a portable model that can leave 3ds Max and that will look exactly like this anywhere it goes.
We also integrated glTF into 3ds Max. If you're creating any try before you buy experience where you want to have a model on the web, glTF is the de facto industry standard file format for displaying 3D models, either on web pages through WebGL, or in augmented reality experiences on your phone. We integrated glTF into Max, so you can, for example, take this model, drag and drop it into a glTF viewer after exporting it into glTF format, and now we have this model, just like you have it in Max, displayed in all it's glory in there.
We actually did this last year where we took a bunch of Max models and optimized them and texture baked them, retopologized them, and exported them in glTF, and we can see them all in AR. I think Drake's super impressed.
So what we saw so far is a lot around AR and augmented reality experiences. But of course, you also have virtual reality that you can create, not for Max. Again, this requires the engine, but all the models you see here, this is a virtual reality experience that I built a couple of years ago for another project. This uses the real-time engine, but the ability to create these triggers where you're basically turning on and off certain things, initiating certain actions, navigating the model, experiencing the model, this is very popular in the AC space.
I'll skip through this a little bit to get some of the fun parts. We programmed a bunch of different paint colors and furniture layouts and wallpaper layouts with these icons that float in space that appear when you get next to them, where you can just basically hit them with your laser on your HTC VIVE, and now you're basically just swapping between different wallpapers. All of this is doable in engine, but all these assets come from 3ds Max. All of this behavior is programmed in engine. But like I said, the models, the shading, all of that comes from 3ds Max.
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If I just kind go to the end a little bit. We can have music built in. We can change the lighting. Using Shania Twain. There is no such thing as a good demo without a bit of Shania Twain.
OK, let's end here with some resources as we wrap it up. So I want to make sure-- I talked a bit at the beginning of this deck about how great the Max community is and how great how many great tools there are. There's a few really awesome plugins that almost are staples in the Max world. I2 software makes a tool called ForestPack.
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[INAUDIBLE] But for adding vegetation [INAUDIBLE] vegetation [INAUDIBLE] which is totally awesome [INAUDIBLE] plugin is native to Max [INAUDIBLE] and it works in Max, and every Max Studio has it.
They also make RailClone for--
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We're creating procedural environments. And again, very programmatic, very, very Max-like. Again, another tool that you'd be hard pressed to find a Max [INAUDIBLE] without or Max [INAUDIBLE] using.
There's also tyFlow. TyFlow is the newest kid on the block. This is for creating-- it's basically a very advanced particle system that's available for 3ds Max as an external plugin. This is an example of it used in architectural space, but it's also used in the film space or the effect space.
We have resources. There's YouTube channels. We have a YouTube Learning Channel. You got ScriptSpot for free plugins for Max. You got the Facebook stack group, a great community of Max users.
You have the Autodesk 3ds Max Learning Channel and Facebook group. You have my Facebook groups. Look up my name, I have-- my Facebook channel, sorry. I have-- sorry, my YouTube channel. I have a ton of videos there.
You have libraries of shaders you can buy. CGAxis has a great library of materials. And we're going to wrap it up, so the storytelling at your fingertips with 3ds Max, Arnold, and Flow Capture. I want to thank everyone for listening in. Steve, you have some final words for everyone?
STEVE MARSHALL: No, this was great. Thanks, Jose.
JOSE ELIZARDO: Thank you, guys. Thanks for watching. See you in San Diego.