Now you have a USD file. How would we consume in 3dsMax? Traditionally, you would just “import” the data from the file, and native 3dsmax data would have been created.We have used .obj, .fbx, .iges, and other CAD formats in this way. Another way is referencing the file through a “container” object. Instead of generating max native data in the max scene, the data will be generated on-the-fly as it needed. Many renderers’ proxy object and 3dsMax native alembic import uses these methods. Scene Xref is the same concept. The obvious advantage of this workflow is that It makes your max scene lighter ..read more

USD for 3dsMAx 0.5 has been released. You can see how it has progressed in the What’s new section of the official documentation. Even tho it is still in a beta stage, it is actually pretty production-ready in terms of both features and stability. I think it is a good time to review what USD for 3dsMax can do at this point. Also, we probably need to have some time to understand what USD is, how different it is compare to other data exchange formats. USD is a little bit complicated animal. Then, we also need to see what kinds of new workflow it would bring. So, I decided to have a few blog post ..read more

I know a lot of 3dsMax users uses maxstart.max to set their default working environment. While that is certainly a convenient method. I haven’t used that for more than 10 years. Here is why. It replaces everything. It is a load/save. I can’t pick and choose what to set. For example, all the renderer settings are saved and loaded. If the renderer developer changes some default value for their new feature. Your maxstart.max from the older version will override all that settings. It is hard to know what you actually have set. There is no trace whatsoever what you have changed. If someone acciden ..read more

First check this video. 4.7 million tris/2.4 million verts playing @ 49fps on GTX960/Ryzen 2700X I know you can not believe this. So, what’s the secret sauce? Alembic Performance Mode. 3dsMax 2016 introduced alembic import/export into 3dsMax. One of the feature was Performance Mode in Alembic Container object, the auto generated root object when you import alembic. It does 2 thing. Generate a Nitrous ready animated GPU cache of all children. Temporarily hide all children from scene to clock any evaluation. Even tho it was originally developed for only alembic cache, it added support for any ..read more

Often the riggers skin a low res character and use it to drive hires version of character with SkinWrap modifier. When you use SkinWrap, your driver object need to be Mesh object. If it is not, it will convert to poly under the hood. The mesh <> poly conversion price is very high.When I tested this originally in 3dsMax 2014. The test result was 9.75fps vs 17.89fps. I retested other file in 2021.3. The difference was 10.8fps vs 13.1 fps. So, I guess there has been some progress. It is still taxing 30%. Skin modifier doesn’t care about poly or mesh. Therefore, if your base object is Editab ..read more

Max’s New Remesher is INSANE! Simple Trick for Perfect Retopology in Max Introduction to Retopology Tools for 3ds Max®: Retopologizing CAD datal Introduction to Retopology Tools for 3ds Max®: Retopologizing a Booleaned Model Introduction to Retopology Tools for 3ds Max®: Retopologizing a Scanned Mesh Retopology in 3ds Max. Tips & Tricks 3ds Max Retopology 3ds Max Retopology from Jose M. Elizardo Boolean Mesh Retopoly pitfalls Miro Retopo Gladiator Hulk Retopo 3D Studio MAX 2021 Retopology Tools – Adán Martín Now time to check renderStacks ..read more

This post is from the recent discussion on Stack Facebook group The original question was… has someone experienced that a rotation script controller gets broken/stops calculating properly when it was created with the timerange set e.g. 0-100f and afterwards timeline gets extended to let’s say 0-500f and you start animating with autokey the affected objects, which have the script controller? I had the experience, too. This could happen in all procedural controllers like Script, Noise controller or Expression controller. What is the solution? One of the most Sr. 3dsMax developer Larry Minton c ..read more

UPDATE! Fully multi-threaded explicit normal calculation has been implemented in 3dsMax 2022.1. Now, the explicit normal version of model is deforming at 2.8fps( was 0.6 fps). That’s almost 450% improvement. BUT, please remember still the best way to make the deformation faster is not having 11 million extra normals. converting explicit normal as smoothing group will give you 17fps. The models I have been dealing with in 3dsMax have been mostly internally made or purchased as .max file, which means I usually do not have explicit normals on my model. If you make a model in 3dsMax, you usually s ..read more

When your cursor is hovering over an object in the viewport, you can see that a tooltip pops up and shows object name. 3dsMax 2017+ allow you to customize the viewport tooltip of the active viewport. You can not only show any data you want but also have a custom style using a subset of html tags. This is a template code for a custom viewport tooltip. global genTooltip fn genTooltip = ( local obj = callbacks.notificationParam() -- Getting the objects under cursor from callback local nodeName = obj.name local mtlName = (if obj.material == undefined then ("undefined") el ..read more

As you know, 3dsMax searches a few folder to find your asset or map files. I personally do not set any of these search folder. Either having assets in a correct folder or not. But, I know some users rely on this behaviors and even having 100s(!) of search folders. When you save a max file, 3dsMax will try to resolve all this path which means it will try to search all these folders until it finds the map. As you can imagine, it could take some time if you have a lot of maps and especially a lot of user folders. 3dsMax need to resolve path for 2 reasons. First, there is the asset meta data strea ..read more