creative multimedia animation team

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

3ds Max 2008

Model efficiently, animate easily, and achieve stunning
results in less time with Autodesk 3ds Max 2008 software.

3ds Max is a full-featured 3D graphics application developed by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It runs on the Win32 and Win64 platforms. As of October 2007, 3ds Max is in its tenth version, named 3ds Max 2008, which was announced during SIGGRAPH 2007. 3ds Max adds enhanced support for complex pipelines and workflows.

Overview

Accelerate your creative workflow and increase your pipeline efficiency. Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2008 3d modeling, animation, and rendering software helps design visualization professionals, game developers, and visual effects artists maximize productivity by streamlining the process of working with complex scenes.

Easily View and Handle Large, Complex Scenes 3ds Max 2008 software delivers new viewport technology and optimizations that result in vastly improved interaction with even the largest, most complex scenes. Common tasks and operations—selection, material assignment, transform, grouping, cloning, and many more—are now significantly faster, making 3ds Max 2008 the most streamlined version of the software ever. Plus, a new Scene Explorer makes managing large scenes—and interacting with hundreds, or even thousands of objects—far more intuitive.

Streamline Your Rendering Workflows With 3ds Max 2008 software, Autodesk introduces Review—a powerful new toolset that supports
interactive rendering workflows by delivering interactive previewing of shadows, the 3ds Max sun/sky environment, and mental ray® Architectural and Design material settings. This release also provides many new, timesaving 3ds Max/mental ray workflow features, including Sky Portal lighting options, a camera-based interface for exposure settings, and more.

Rapidly Automate and Customize Your Workflows 3ds Max 2008 marks the debut of MAXScript ProEditor. This new MAXScript editor provides script-writers with a professional, intelligent interface for working with MAXScript that streamlines the scripting workflow—making it easier to author scripts that automate and customize 3ds Max. Import Data Quickly and Accurately Deeper support for the DWG™ file format results in faster, more accurate importing of data from other popular Autodesk applications such as AutoCAD®
2008, AutoCAD® Architecture 2008, and Revit® Architecture 2008 software. New features, such as Select Similar, also facilitate working with imported data.

Viewing and Handling of Large, Complex Scenes
3ds Max 2008 software delivers new viewport technology and optimizations that result in vastly improved interactivity of even the largest, most complex scenes. Common tasks and operations—selection, material assignment, transform, grouping, cloning, and many more—are now significantly faster, making 3ds Max 2008 the most streamlined version of the software ever. Plus, a new Scene Explorer makes managing large scenes—and interacting with hundreds or even thousands of objects—far more intuitive.

Review Rendering
Produce stunning photo-real imagery, faster. With the release of 3ds Max 2008, Autodesk unveils Review. This powerful new toolset supports iterative rendering workflows by delivering interactive previewing of shadows, the 3ds Max sun/sky environment, and mental ray® Architectural and Design material settings. Based on the latest game engine technology, Review gives you the instant visual feedback you need to iterate rapidly.

Support for Complex Pipelines and Workflows
Quickly extend 3ds Max or streamline multi-application workflows. The new MAXScript ProEditor provides you with an intuitive interface for working with MAXScript that will streamline the scripting workflow, making it easier to author scripts that automate and customize 3ds Max. Deeper support for the DWG™ and FBX® file formats results in faster, more accurate importing of data from other popular Autodesk applications; plus, new features facilitate working with this imported data.

Artist-Friendly Modeling Enjoy a less menu-dependent modeling experience. 3ds Max 2008 gives you a more streamlined, artist-friendly modeling workflow through a collection of hands-on modeling UI options that let you focus more on the creative process.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Exaggeration

Exaggeration is a very important principle in animation - after all, we're trying to caricature and distill life to it's clearest essence, not reproduce it verbatim. But many students often misunderstand the meaning of exaggeration; they think it always means "bigger" or "faster" or "broader". Not so! It can also mean "smaller", "slower" or "subtler". The key is the "-er": figure out the adjectives that describe the attitudes and actions in your shot, then try to make them "more" like that by adding "er" to the end of the adjectives.

If every pose and action in a performance is extreme then none of them are - the texture becomes even and the audience gets bored. It's important to have big moves AND small moves, fast ones AND slow ones. By varying these elements you give variety to your scene and place emphasis where it needs to be. If you've got three big changes and one small change, the small one will stand out.

The late Chuck Jones was a master of exaggeration. He could achieve more impact with a single eyebrow raise than a lot of animators could with a full-body take. Just look at his work on How The Grinch Stole Christmas and his later Warner Brothers shorts. He knew that less could be much more. He could exaggerate the stillness of a character's pose, so that a change would be isolated to a single small part of the character; perhaps a single muscle. He made a trademark of having a character hold a pose and just glance at the camera with his eyes, as if to say, "what the...?"