There comes a time when everyone download's the 3D studio Max trial edition...big mistake. I'm addicted. In spite of all the confusion of a polygonal/NURBS modeller, I seem to have become addicted to learning its secrets. Behold my first image. Yes, that is a teapot (included in primitives for some reason) illuminated by several spotlights and an offscreen skylight surrounded by Y-extruded splines over a red plane. Has this ever happened to you? * Pardon the "Warez d00dz 31337 HaXorz" dialect.

I do not understand 3d studio max... It seems so non intuitive to me and elitist.

I know, just compare the interface to Bryce's.

Yeah... I opened it up and saw the little car on the side panel with seemingly no use. Pressed some of the other buttons, no effect... Spent a while to render some pretty ugly 'radiosity' render and ended up sorely disapointed.

Can you import 3dmax files and export them as 3ds? I have some ships I need converted...;]

I love 3ds max, the teapot harks back to the early days of CG 3d, a teapot was hard to model so lots were done using bezier patches or horribly complex booleans. The max authors just included one to save time :)

Zhann - what version Max are the files? I have Unwrap3d, which imports/exports lots of different file formats. It has plugins for Max5 & Max6. If you send me the files I'll have a go at converting them. daveya * utvinternet * com

"Yeah... I opened it up and saw the little car on the side panel with seemingly no use. Pressed some of the other buttons, no effect... Spent a while to render some pretty ugly 'radiosity' render and ended up sorely disapointed." Ornlu, with all due respect, there's a word for this: RTFM. IMHO, you cannot ask to a production-level prog with that complexity to not have a steep learning curve... :)

Luckily I got into Max in version 1 so I've had plenty of time. Max and I just 'clicked'. The way it's laid out is the way I think. It's like any other program, once you 'get' the workflow, it becomes much easier. Spending a few thousand dollars on a program MAKES you commit yourself to it. Patience and commitment are the key to learning, it doesn't happen overnight.

Well, I got the same thing with SILO. It just 'felt' right. Some of it is still a puzzle to me but I'm making fewer and fewer mistakes now. I've also learnt to 'check' my progress in Bryce, which isn't as much of a pain as you might think.

Blaufeld I was being largely sarcastic. Apparently that was missed.

i just dled gmax. ive been playing in wings the last week or so but i missed some of the max features which are available in gmax, like lofting and soft-selection - which my 'noobness' in wings doesnt allow. (not even sure if it has those features) gmax is a full on modeler with some of the more extensively used modifiers like bending and such. thank god! i thought i was gona be stuck in wings. lol. though ill still use it. wings IS good for some simple and fast 'gorilla modeling'.

I'm not sure what lofting (something hipsters in New York do?..;), and soft-selection are..but if you like, stop by the Wings forum, we have some real rocket scientists over there..;) hey, use what works; I have a Lightwave 7 demo that came on one of those Brit mags..30 days' use, and a 400-poly limitation..never got around to using it..;)

lofting is simple way to create polygon objects but with splines.

example: creat an s-line with a spline. then create a spline circle. select the circle, select loft, select the s-line you made previoulsy and the 2d spline circle will expand into a polygon s-tube.

soft-selection is when you choose a vert or edge or poly and move it in a direction and it will affect surrounding (verts or edges or polys) based on the soft-selection drop-off value.

Message edited on: 11/09/2004 10:43

heres lofting...

heres softselection

just found out you can export from gmax.. but there is a work-around. if anyone is interested, pm me and ill send you the link. ill try it out later. gota go play with the gf ;)

Ummm. That's not Loft. That's Sweep, whatever they say. And it looks completely weird. In Rhino, you just click on Loft and select cross-section curves. Or, in the case in question, you can draw a curve and then pipe it.

This is Pipe.

actually erlik, if you look to the right of the image, youll see - its a loft. the selected object is labeled Loft1. i used the 'loft' modifier to extrude the spline circle along the spline-line path.

And this is Loft. BTW, I could create both shapes by using Rail Sweep, I just had to add the cross-section curve to the pipe, and the path curve to the cross-section curves in this. Loft can also use open curves, but I forgot to do that before I fired up my modem.

Exactly my point. You used a path curve and a cross section curve to create the shape. I know two programs that call it sweep, and I think Discreet messed this one.

erlik you mixing up alot of tid-bits from different applications and just causing confusion. it is what it is. a 2d spline 'LOFTED' along a single spline. (if using the word 'path' makes it easier for you to understand then by all means, call it what you want) I called them splines because they ARE splines. you cant create objects from 'paths' in max. in max, you can connect these splines, overlap them, add vertices and weld them. to me, using the term 'path' is not the best use of the word to explain what 'I' was explaining. And since the actions are not called a 'path curve' or a 'sweep' it MUST mean Discreet messed it up, for every version that the 'lofting' function has been available. yup, they mustah!

Wings doesn't have lofting, but that soft selection thing appears to be similar to what can be done with magnets. It's just that Wings doesn't graphically show how strong the influence area is, you just have to move stuff around to find out. There is a way to do a kind of lofting manually, but it's tedious and time consuming. (Make a shape. Extract region. Extrude region, rotate, etc., repeat.) It does get the job done though. (See fancy ring or the moebius figure 8 model at my freebies website.)

uh..now I know why I still use Wings..;) splines and nurbs are presently beyond me..but then so is the new intersect command in Wings..;) still hafta use the old Mark 1 eyeball..;)

Well, isnt this a topic? I use both. Loft= to estrude along a path using different shapes and Rhino (the Johny-come-lately) calls it a sweep. Theyre both the same thing but lofting came before NURBS (Rhino is mostly all NURBS) and both systems serve the same purpose.

Then what do you call this? Lofted from open curves, that is, splines. Rhino calls this loft, just like those closed splines. You cannot use both types together. To confuse the matter further, there's an action called From Network Curves, where you have to have 3 curves in one direction (U) and 3 in the other (V). There's also Patch, where you can use both open and closed curves. Finally, there's the abovementioned pipe, where you need just the path curve and the program creates a pipe around it, according to the radius. I can create a tube by using Pipe around a curve, by sweeping a circle around a curve and by arranging circles around an _imaginary_ path curve for loft. :-) Apropos Johnny-come-lately, it's interesting that Cinema uses the same meaning for Sweep. And IIRC, it's not that young, regardless of not being as widely used as Max. BTW, anybody remembers an old 3D program called Lathe? Couldn't do anything except, surprisingly :-), lathing.

rolls eyes they mustah stolen that from the woodworkers of the time! or was it the other way around?

Erlik: I used to have Lathe. Would have been handy now, but no matter. SILO has a lathe function but I haven't tried it out yet.

They are both, Rhino and CD4 much, much younger on the scene than Max and to complicate the matter even further 3D Studio Max uses a 1-rail and 2-rail NURBS surface creation method comparable to Rhinos loft not to mention a U-loft and UV-loft NURBS system also compatible to network curves feature in Rhino besides the standard mesh-loft and the old standby patch and mesh systems. I find Rhino a more intuitive, user friendly NURBS program than Max but Max will certainly do the same things.

If I may nitpick... These posts made me dig around for history. 3D Studio R1, for DOS and by Kinetix, was introduced at Siggraph in 1990, with version 3 apparently appearing, again at Siggraph, in 1993. 3D Studio Max R1, for Windows, appeared in 1996. (It came under Discreet in 1999. IINW.) Cinema 4D 1 appeared in 1994, which is, incidentally, the same year that KPT Bryce 1 appeared, too. (Funny, I would have sworn that Bryce appeared in 1992, but my recollection is obviously wrong.) But it doesn't invalidate your points about Rhino. :-)

Hmmmm I remember having avidly used POVRay, when Bryce came out it was like wow, no more text editor...... Anyway, started using Max with version 3.1 in 1999 and I love it, yet I still find myself using Bryce too.....

"IMHO, you cannot ask to a production-level prog with that complexity to not have a steep learning curve... :) " Oh, yes you can, Cinema4D is just that !!! :)

Maybe it is time to clarify some misunderstandings here. Twisted Symmetry is correct when he says that this is a loft, simply because in Max(Probably GMax to) the loft begins as what some programs calls a Sweep, extrusion of a spline along a path. In Max they have basically merged the two tools. When you have extruded the spline along its path (Sweep), you can go into subobject level and insert new and different splines and then you have a loft.... And to compare Rhino with Max is pointless, since the NURBS tools in Max are almost useless (They implemented them in version_? and haven`t touched them since). It is like comparing Rhino and Max on a Poly basis....

Are you sure Kemal? it may be because I've been using Max for a few years, but every time I open C4D, I get frustrated because I don't know how to do what I want. I may just need to RTFM, but haven't had time to devote to it and don't see it as a priority, but nevertheless, I don't find C4D any more intuitive then I did Max

Well, I should be more familiar with Cinema, seeing I come from Rhino, but its modelling tools leave stuff to be desired. OTOH, maybe I don't know Max, but Cinema has some things in its workflow that leave Max standing. For instance, if you boolean two meshes, you can leave it like that and change the meshes to your heart's content, and finally fix it when you're completely satisfied. It's not like the history in Max. I was able to find out commands in Cinema just like in Bryce. (Which is a double-edged comment, ain't it? :-)) OTTH, if you can texture and light in Bryce, the same things in Cinema will be easy. Yes, the lights have more options, but they are not cryptic or difficult to adjust. Texturing channels have some different results, but they are easy.

cog, your funny! RTFM <--- ive never seen that one, im gona add that one to my list (: i think lights are a highly underrated part of 3d. well, in the rendering part, anyways. ive never used cinema or rhino. i started with anim8tor and thats what kicked it off for me - im just a bryce/max/poser user now. peppered with the odd demo. i think maxes lighting-kit is pretty good, but i think i like bryces, over all the programs ive used. i dont think its so much that i know it so well, but rather, it was so easy to learn, imo. (if i may) having come from an early schooling in film and video and being exposed to rl lighting of sets and people, i find the bryce kit to be the most user friendly kit, for me. (take that with a grain of salt since i done have alot of 'other' software exp) the volumetric factor alone, its just a few clicks and BAM you got it. (i never did figure it out in max, though never researched either ((so i should say that i never did come 'across' it)). poser is little finicky, though ive had good experiences with it) ive always had a LOVE for volumetrics in rl. even had my own fog-machine. on the rendering side of things, i understand theres some 2d plugins, but nothing beats cutting the light, for me. (just my humble opinion on lighting though i dont know if its a statement on bryces lighting-kit, per-say, or rendering capabilities)

Apropos the lights in Bryce, I've recently read a comment by one of the guys who worked on 5 and who said that when you put soft shadows on one light, the render time goes up 16 times. Yep, it's sixteen. So, multiply that by the number of lights you put in and you've got days and weeks of rendering.

To knitpic; Autodesk was founded in 1982 Gary Yost and Tom Hudson began work on 3D Studio revision 1 in 1988 it was released in October 1990 under Autodesk patent. passagen Autodesk releases Kinetix didnt come into the picture until 1996 and Discreet in 1999. The next generation, 3D Studio Max didnt start until 1996. Antics-1 Antics-2 Antics-3 Software comp