max in movies

[aor]

along those lines, what movies in particular was max used? games also, but i'm much more interested in movies;)

thanks!:buttrock:

[Dr-spline]

check discreets site

[googlo]

I think part of the reason is because Max didn't evolve from within the movie industry; programs like Maya and XSI/3D were almost exclusive to movie use, they were built for it (to run on the special operating systems and special computers), so they naturally dominated that market (they weren't even available for window pc's until only a few years ago relatively speaking). Max on the other hand evolved 'outside' from the film industry. It's kind of ironic because as the movie CGI programs are trying to migrate into a broader market like the gaming industry/broadcast and stuff, Max is starting to be used more and more in movies as it improves with each new version. It's like they are coming at each other from opposites ends and where they are meeting now is where all the sofware wars come from :).
Like the problems that Max is having now is directly the results (in my opinion) of not being initially designed for movie use (like having trouble in handling very large polycount scenes, or having a scripting language that isn't as dynamic as XSI's or Maya's, or having a material editor that isn't as dynamic as other tradionally movie CGI programs like XSI or Maya). It's rumoured that Max 6.0 is going to be a new construct. Max was the first to begin the plugin type of architecture and objecct oriented nature though. I'm not saying Max is incapable though. I've seen stuff produced soley with Max that rival Maya and XSI. They are all kind of becoming the same now as they compete against each other, I think.

Here's a link to listing of movies Max has been used in so far if you're curious.

http://www.groundzerofx.com/maxinfilm

[Dr-spline]

wow thats acually inciteful thanks now if max would just get some better dynamics

[googlo]

Yeah I can't really comment about that. I'm still learning Max. From what I hear though Reactor ( a dynamics simulation program) is going to being integrated into Max 5.0, as opposed to remaining as a stand alone plug-in it was before.

[thomaspecht]

>why is it that max is used mostly for games and rarely in movies?

probably because max is not really a rock-solid application running in a stable operating system environment in comparison to the "classic" high-end apps out there when it's pushed to the limits. at least that's what i hear from co-workers who have previous professional experience with maya and softimage in this field. and i hear it several times every day (along with rather rude comments about discreet's crash-happy masterpiece).
for game-development features like character studio are very nice and unmatched in other applications - and the poly modelling is also quite good (esp. with the meshtools). but looking at the price tag, maya complete becomes more interesting every day that passes by...

[Ronski]

I was just about to post a link to my site thanks Googlo.

I think Max does have a particular advantage in rendering off-the-shelf atmospherics (dust, smoke etc) & the amount of films per year that use Max seems to be on the up expecially with the new 3rd party renderers that are coming out for it. Major companies will not change platforms that easily though especially with many commited to Linux & their staff trained with Maya & Soft but I am hopeful more work will be done in the mid range markets & also pre-vis as well.

Cheers,
Kieron

[Daxx]

If you want know what 3dsmax have do for the Cinema and Games find on discreet site.....

Film : Deep Rising
Lost in Space
etc....

Games : Prince of Persia 3D
Rayman
Age of Empires
All Games of Blizzard (Diablo, Warcraft & starcraft,etc..)
etc.....

[Dr-spline]

well i really wish max would fix some of there crashing problems the the whole point is that maxs's modelinf(in my openion) is superior in its simplicity althought it does have a few things to learn from maya like independant increase of illiterations insted of just taking it up a notch. I also use maya and xsi but i just think they are getting messy with all there tools... get a few tools and master them(my advise to the comps)

[Lunatique]

Daxx- I worked on Prince of Persia 3D, and lots of it were done in Lightwave. Max was used by the level designers, but the modellers and animators all used Lightwave. All the cinematics were done in Lightwave also.

[Flypaper]

I wish Max could pour me a cup of coffee.

[cgSquad]

i think max was laso used in commandos series. Which has great 4 4 angle large maps.

[JuRrAsStOiL]

And max was used for the WarCraft 3 INTROS not only
for the game. The intros are rendered with max native
renderer and just use plugins like, shag:hair, afterburn
and simcloth .... amazing :buttrock:

[thinKer3D]

:: 3ds max is among some of the most stable applications on Windows. Some of you who seem to be experiencing stability problems with max must have suck ass hardware. I've been using Max since 1996 and the only times I had problems was with a Cyrix chip. 3ds max is a very stable application. I've had it running day-in-day-out sometimes for an entire week (24/7). It's that solid. I dont think discreet would offer holywood an unstable software for big time movie production expecially on tight deadlines. And if you've never experienced max rendering over a network of 40 computers for days, then you don't know just how stable it is.
::

[Dominique]

There's DRIVEN, LW run with the honour but 85% including rendering was done with Max, (could someone really confirm this please, )

Check the airplane-Crash: www.scanline.de
this is great and they did render everything out in ONE 1 UNO UN pass, almost incredible

Check out as well www.cortolefilm.com , giving the hint as I was more than glad to work on the movie, (love Corto Maltese), did al the 3D and compositing (2.5 and AfterEffects)
Trailer = Bande Annonce

personnally, Max4 gives me finally the tools I was so happy with in Softimage, and glad they finally changed their FCurve editor,
charStud4 seems to be extremely powerful now, (FCurves, yes)

:surprised

[Das]

Remember also that the big special effects houses have been doing CGI for quite a while, and Max didn't have a professional renderer available until recently.

For example, Alias had PowerAnimator which used PRRenderMan for professional output. This is a top-notch professional renderer: fast, capable of handling film resolution renders, easily set up in a renderfarm.

Now if you were an effects house that had been using Alias PowerAnimator for years, and Alias offered you their new tool Maya for a nice upgrade price, wouldn't you tend to stick with the company you know? Especially since it still uses PRRenderMan, so you get to keep your renderfarm and all your custom RenderMan-specific shaders.

Actually, Max still doesn't have a top-notch pro renderer available. The two big renderers are PRRenderMan and Mental Ray. Max doesn't support RenderMan except through third-party tools (which don't support custom shaders very well), and if you use Mental Ray you're stuck with old-as-hell version 2.1 (I got stuck with that - who knew Discreet would never upgrade the connection to 3.0?).

SoftImage XSI is tightly connected to Mental Ray 3.0, and Maya has an excellent connection to RenderMan.

[Dominique]

There's the Cebas Plug out now, (for Max),

Final Rendering new version,
just amazing and maybe the strongest rendering engine out now,

Maya for sure is going for Renderman, and it's just a pity that thy don't work to hard on their own renderingengine, this for students in schools where they don't have renderman,
no Renderman, no Quality for Maya,
at least MentalRay comes standard with XSI,

:bounce: :bounce:

[frog]

Actually, Max still doesn't have a top-notch pro renderer available.

Check out FinalRender, I believe that's all the top-notch pro renderer anyone could need. Very tightly intergrated into Max.

As an aside, those stills from Corto Maltese look excellent, what were they rendered with, was it CartoonReyes?

edit: Ooops, dominique we must have been typing that at the same time!! :)

[ReneAlex]

LO IMPORTANTE ES EL INDIO NO EL ARCO Y LA FLECHA

THE IMPORTANT THING IS THE INDIAN...
NOT THE BOW, NOT THE ARROW

-----------------------------
:annoyed:
-----------------------------

AND THE DATABASE ADMINISTRATION :hmm:

[Dominique]

Nope, not CartoonReyes, Illustrate 4,

tried out Comicshop, CartoonReyes and took finally Illustrate,
and for my next production I think I will choose FinalRenders new toonshader, the more Images I see from FinalRender; the more I would love to have the package,

thanks and au revoir

:bounce: :bounce:

[sumatra]

Dominique, u said that u were in softimage before Max., i may have to go the other way around, can you tell me what to expect?

[Dominique]

Good Luck, I have that free Demoversion of XSI2.0, and tried it,
it's great but it's a whole other philosophy, the one that made SI so big in time; different than Max,

You will have the three mouseButtons for XYZ,
and shortcuts are a bit different, you don't release them in XSI as in SI (the keyboard),

What's so great is the refresh rate and the windows, clean and precise (I lack this still in MAX4, Maya is very cool to look at, a cool and soft colorsheme and a very clean wireframe window, the same for textures!!! please discreet, get us some nice refreshments in the 5)

What was the most important thing in SI, were those bloody great FCurves, (While Max4 still has those from 3DStudio, they changed them for Max5),

We did Insektors on SI-unix, I had to change (company-strategy) and go on Max-windows,
It took me (13 years ago) 2 days(no kidding) to learn SI, it took me three years to find back a certain habit (as animator) coming from SI on Max, really had a hard time, Max was so 'light' in animation, and windows, ohlalala, LINUX PLEASE FOR MAX,
times have changed and for any good animator there aren't any problems anymore going one way or another, just the Windows/Unix pass could be hard,

Bonne Chance, make great images and funny animations

[cdinic]

flypaper: I am finishing up a script now that MAX uses to active
my coffe maker down stairs!

I have some killer hardware and still am having stability issues. what would you consider none-suck-ass-hardware?

-Chris

[cdinic]

opps.. well I posted that last post thinking the first page of this thread was the last.. sorry about that

[Dr-spline]

frog i agree final render is my fav rendering app ever!

[Das]

Dang you people!

Telling me to check out Final Render ... now I'm going to end up buying the thing, lol. Looks very sharp. Wish they had a demo.

[Dr-spline]

yea its definatly the best raytracer

[Dominique]

Hi Das, there are 5 streming videos, more than impressive, overhere,

www.trinity3d.com/productinfo/siggraph2002/Sig_MovieGallery.shtml

it's really a full integrated renderer for MAX

[Das]

Thanks, I'll check them out at home (don't want to use the bandwidth here at work).

I've pretty much decided to buy it, since Trinity is offering such a sweet deal (buy stage-0 for $100 less than stage-1 will cost, and get stage-1 for free when it comes out).

[Dominique]

Still 200$ more than a couple of months ago in CGI, here's the article (April)

http://www.cgimag.com/reviews/finalrender.shtml

[Das]

$200?

The article lists it at £395, which was about $570 at the exchange rate on April 15th. Trinity is selling it for $695 with the free upgrade to Stage-1. Went up about $125, yes?

And, if I'd bought it back then, I would have to pay the upgrade price to Stage-1 of $145 (pre-order) so I still come out ahead! :thumbsup:

[frog]

Didn't take long to convince you, did it?

:D

[Dominique]

I count in € overhere,

you're right, ..., but they doubled the price in a one year-timelapse (that's what guys from discreet told me), they had a lot of succes apparently, and Arnold and Brazil still haven't released a final commercial version, ..., tough market, will be hard to get them 'back'

the ToonRender seems amazing, makes me think back at what I saw 5 Years ago at Siggraph, ...., curious what it looks like on an animated sequence...,

[Das]

Yeah, I was jazzed about Brazil when it seemed like he'd actually release a final product in a semi-reasonable time. I've given up on that, though. I'm only so patient ;)

The toonshader in FR does seem pretty sharp. The whole thing seems pretty impressive, especially the improvements from stage-0 to stage-1.

[googlo]

I think some of the things that has catapulted FinalRender into the eyes of 3DS Max people over the others are features like Micro-poly displacement, network bucketrendering, COMPLETE integration into Max, besides all other kinds of advanced features and also integrated BucnhesofVolumes and the luma engine, full featured toonshader. Ceba has really done an excellent job with what they are providing at the price it's going for.
Isn't surprising how it seemed that in the community no one took FR to be serious as a renderer for Max and suddenly now it's really huge. It's really odd to me how quite things have been about it. It's like everyone just talked about Brazil and that was it!

[Das]

Just finished ordering Final Render :)

[Black&White]

Arnold will may never releasr as a comercial renderer. instead you can by messiah:render which will have max support.

Arnold is different from Messiah:Render

[censored]

Brazil has been in *usable* beta form for a very long time now, available for purchase with receipt of 1.0 when it is officially released. Speaking of which, that will happen VERY soon.
:airguitar

[Dominique]

and what is Brazils' price??? Do they have as well several price offers?? and a Website, I'm comparing them,

(Glad Brazil won the soccer-WorldCup, they were great)

[censored]

Brazil is $1200USD for 'Artist's bundle' which is one workstation license and two render node licenses, and $750USD for the 'Renderfarm Bundle' of four render node licenses.

Each license is not per CPU but rather per machine as each machine is allowed up to four CPUs with each license.

The website is http://www.splutterfish.com

[Flypaper]

.. After carefully reading all of the posts in this thread, and evaluating my financial situation I've opted for the following rendering solution at the following cost:

I've poured a can of jolt cola (Retail: $1.10) into my tower, with hopes that the sudden caffiene rush will cause my default scan line renderer to do amazing things.

[Das]

I did a comparison before buying:

Brazil - been in beta damn near forever (seems to me, anyway - I've been following it from the beginning - when it hadn't even gotten the name Ghost). The current beta is non-timelocked, but incredibly crippled compared to the yet-to-be-released full version. Specifically, I don't want to plunk down $1200 when I haven't seen how thier photon-mapping or luma materials work. $1200 is very pricy for a Max renderer. I'm also not confident how soon 1.0 will actually ship. Steve always makes it sound like things are going to be done way before they really do get done.

Messiah:Render is just about as expensive as Brazil ($1145). No solid ship date (Coming soon!). No demo.

VRay is more expensive than finalRender ($799 - limited time offer of $599 is still listed on the site, but expired in July). It has a full demo, which I've tried and like (especially the glass fog colors). finalRender stage-0 seems to have more features than VRay, however, and stage-1 looks to blow it away (imo, of course).

finalRender is the cheapest of all these I've listed (except VRay's $300 Basic, which was too limited to interest me). It's quite a bit faster than Brazil or Messiah, as far as I can see (gallery images on some user sites list really short render times for some really impressive images). finalRender stage-0 is available now, with training materials and all, and stage-1 comes free.

For me, I couldn't justify spending nearly twice the price for Brazil or Messiah when the example images don't look that much better than VRay or finalRender. And they aren't shipping yet anyway. I'm also not nearly as impressed with Brazil's current beta as I was with the earlier ones (it hasn't gotten worse, but VRay is comparable and much cheaper).

Between VRay and finalRender, I chose finalRender because the images I see on the web look better for finalRender stage-0 than for VRay Advanced, stage-1 should be even better than stage-0, and finalRender is cheaper than VRay Advanced.

[Mahlon]

Those of you using FR --does final render handle high poly scenes well? If not, will Stage 01 handle them well?

Thanks,
Mahlon

[Das]

stage-0 can't be a real high-poly renderer, because it's not an actual renderer. It's a set of materials that work within Max's scanline renderer. Since Max has known issues with extremely high-poly scenes, I imagine it would choke even earlier with stage-0.

Stage-1 is another matter :)

Here's (http://www.finalrender.com/finalrender/default.htm) a link to a news article on the site, where they rendered a 1.44 trillion poly scene with an unoptimized alpha of stage-1

[censored]

One can't base their opinion of Brazil off the public test.

Das, you did recognize that the public test is severely crippled, but it is severely crippled not only in terms of regular features but also speed enhancements (including but not solely composed of, photon maps).

Brazil r/s 1.0 will be out sooner than one thinks, and there could be a demo in the future (can't give any time frame to that however). In addition, owners of 1.0 will have access free 1.x upgrades and bug fixes, including new features as they become available. On the Splutterfish website IES file support and development of a shader language are listed as expected features between the releases of 1.0 and 2.0.

[Das]

Steve has always implied that he was much closer to completion of various targets than he really was. After dozens of failures to meet estimates, I'm not going to believe Brazil is close to 1.0 status until after it hits 1.0 status.

Seriously, he's been promising a luma material since the early days of Ghost, and it's still not in the beta.

I did know that the public beta is speed-crippled. It's everything-crippled really. That's the problem. Fire up a beta from a year ago and compare it to the latest one. Not much difference. Is he testing all the new features in-house? What's the point of a beta if all your beta testers are testing old solid code?

I'm seriously beginning to think all the 'cool stuff' is still non-functional. Even Neil's gallery doesn't mention anything about luma materials or photon maps in Brazil, and he always has the absolute latest version. The only 'new' feature I see in Neil's gallery is the toon shader, and the image is just solid black line illustration. It's also months old.

Don't get me wrong, I think Brazil will be a great renderer when it ships. I just wouldn't want to bet on when it ships.

Edit: I notice that they were showing Brazil at Siggraph. Anyone see if it's actually got the whiz-bang stuff working? Or anyone here actually have the pre-release?

[censored]

I've been using the whiz-bang stuff, and I assure you it works just fine.

:cool:

The new features are tested first by the cadre of testers (they're not just inhouse) and then the prerelease customers recieve it in their builds. The public aren't the only testers ;). As far as a luma material goes, there is no luma material per se but the functionality is there in other Brazil materials (thus luma is unneeded).


Remember, just because it's not in the public test dosen't mean it dosen't exist :P

[Das]

Is there an NDA or something? As I said, I've been following Brazil for ages, and I haven't seen anyone posting any images of the 'whiz-bang' stuff.

If you've been using it, that gets rid of my worries that they just plain weren't there.

Still seems too expensive (at $1500) to buy it unless it's much better than its lower-priced competitors. I'm not willing to buy it at $1200 because:
a - As I said, I've seen Steve push stuff back for ages, and I don't want to be stuck with a prerelease for ages.
b - I still haven't actually seen any of the whiz-bang stuff. People just aren't posting it (that I've seen). fR stage-1 images are all over the place, and look great. Without some reviews and example images, I have no way to know that Brazil is worth the extra price.

[drewbie]

Ask anyone that went to siggraph and saw the Brazil stuff at the discreet booth. There have been posts from pre-release users on the SplutterFish boards for a while, it's just been mixed in with all the general public stuff. I can't believe that you've been following as avidly as you say without seeing any of the extra stuff that's in the prerelease version. Also keep in mind that many of the customers can't post things until they get clearance from clients, etc. so they can't always show their work. It's out there though. :)

BTW, Brazil will be released this month. That I know for sure.

[censored]

you haven't been looking :)

http://www.trinisica.com/sub_view.asp?lv=1&mode=4
http://www.utzweb.com/uindex.cfm?nav=gallery&subnav=brazil
http://www.nikclark.com/
http://home.online.no/%7Erune-sp/index2.htm
http://www.3dluvr.com/gunnah/html/images/images.htm

[thinKer3D]

:: I've tried both Brazil and finalRender and I must say, they both are amazine. finalRender is a bit faster and seems to be have extemely tight integration with max. I mean you completely just replace max 4 renderer. As for features and technology RenderMan seems old and a waste in comparision to finalRender and Brazil! ::

:: Cebas & Splutterfish rock! :buttrock: ::

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