3DS Max 2020.2 now available
Autodesk has announced its latest update to 3DS Max. Version 2020.2 adds a new Sketchup importer based on the Autodesk Translation Framework that supports any version of Sketchup. The previous importer only supported Sketchup up to version 2014.
The Chamfer modifier sees another update in this release with the addition of new corner mitring types Patch and Radial which provide higher resolution quadrilateral intersections. Other changes include the ability to use Invert and Open options for all mitre types and a new vertex chamfering implementation that respects any set segment count or depth.
Several new chamfer options are now also available in Editable Poly including Uniform, End Bias, Radial Bias, Tension, and Depth.
There are several improvements to animation and performance specifically when creating keys, in Trackview, the Slate UI, and upon file reset.
This release also sees a new Viewport Background mode that allows the user to automatically use the environment background. If the environment background is left black you will see the usual gradient. As well as viewport display, image-based lighting is now enabled automatically when an environment used, removing the need to add a skylight. Other changes to display include support for Physical material’s roughness parameter in Realistic mode and improved shadows.
You can read more about these features and see preview videos on Autodesk’s 3DS Max blog.
Source: Juang3d
Features post here on AREA – https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/the-3ds-max-blog/3ds-max-20202-feature-updates/
Viewport is getting nicer, also faster. Here my tests on my old laptop: https://youtu.be/l6DfJNyEqD0
Chamfer is becoming a really powerful tool.
videos are already available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJM6TWEMMAA
What they didnt say anywhere is that now progressive viewport is way faster than before refining the image.
Updates are always welcome:
I keep wondering if max will ever get double point precision some day. It has always been a mystery to me how people work on large scales in the software, especially architecture and video game levels!
Anything beyond a few hundred meters in the viewport and your entire project will be unworkable. In a recent one we were forced to scale down everything to microscopic levels in order to move them into place!
Unfortunately this has plagued max the most since it is the only 3d software between all of them from Maya to Cinema4d that suffers from this very serious problem.
Double precision will be very good. I guess is not trivial to do.
I work with some big scene extensions, what we do is 1 unit = 10 cms.
In max it doesn’t matter you could set your scene scale to meters KM, it wont change anything except how you measure things in the software. The single precision point is always working under the hood and will cripple it. For example you can’t move any object after a certain distance without it glitching and snapping. Unfortunately it simply wont work.
Yes it matters and a lot.
Im talking about system units, not display units, people confuse this too. Display units has no difference, but system units yes! Exactly because the single precision metode. Its important to setup this system before working.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2019/ENU/3DSMax-Customizing/files/GUID-22D2D2B9-9A82-47FA-88DD-67B1A91E2337-htm.html
Of course I’m speaking of System units, it does not matter what you set it at, after a certain distance form the origin zero point everything will start snapping and glitching. Try it yourself and find out.
I start getting problems after 100.000 system units.
If you are working with 1 unit = 1mm this means that your area of “safe precision work” are 200K x 200k mm around origin.
Now, if you need to work displaying bigger distances like cities and you set 1 unit = 1meter on your systems, now your area of safe work are 200K x 200k meters! so you will work better with bigger environments. Losing precision on small items.
Single precision can be a problem, but in production working with huge scales some times (half earth sizes) setting it properly I never get the feeling was a constraint.
I used to work with large scenes based on hundreds of CAD models. Large offshore scenes with 400 meter long ships. Or worse, multiple of them. It was hard finding the middle ground. Because we need to go into detail and show the nuts and bolts, but also zoom out and show the grand scale of things. With short turnaround times. Can’t have two different sets of scales, because that messes up the rigs and other things. Not to mention how certain plugins behave. So, we found the ideal middle ground to leave system units at the default inches. It gave us viewport issues in both ends, but at least it did let us be able to work with the least amount of pain. Tried meters at one point, but that gave huge issues on precision rotation. Especially noticeable if you have a long object with the pivot at one end. Been a while though, so maybe some things have changed too. I’m happy I don’t deal with that any more.
As mentioned below we are working on a level, we are experiencing viewport and movement glitches after just 280 meters from zero space! No matter what scene we tried even setting our units to system Meters from centimeters (we work with cm have rigs and characters).
So there you have it. We have to scale down the scene to minuscule levels, work and assemble everything there before scaling back up for exports (in our case game engines).
This is not normal and you shouldnt have to work like this. If you have problems for scale reasons, then on a project you have been working on you change the system units, nothing will change.
Try this: Open an empty scene. Change system units 1 unit = 10cm.
Go to 1000 m from origin, created a CAT, biped whatever. You will not have glitches.
I will try your suggestion, but if you are multiplying one unit then the other question rises if you need to export this into lets say a game engine, how that would affect world scales there. But will investigate.
This was actually proposed in the ‘ideas’ forum and it has gained steam. Although this was a little over 2 years ago. Sounds like it would be a bit of an undertaking to do, but lend your voice and vote to the conversation!
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-ideas/double-precision-for-max/idi-p/6788410
actually double-point precision was being discussed internally at ADSK in 2001, at the time the general consensus was … not gonna happen. I suspect it would be easier to write a new application that was DPP at the core.
I am pretty sure ALL viz software operates with single float precision. Even REvit does so and needs to have a local origo defined in order to not suffer from decimal round off errors. Max suffers no worse than any of it’s piers. At this point I think it’s wishfull thinking to hope for double floating point precision ever being implmented.
I don’t know about Viz software, and It does not matter much within a Viz software since in Autocad or other such software you are only designing one building or two at a time, it is the software were you need to assemble a city that matters.
Maya, Softimage, Cinema4D, Lightwave 3d, all have double precision.
If your scene is bigger than 15-30 km, you probably want to split it into multiple scenes.
Revit has a limitation of 15-30 km.
I wish 15 km! Hell I wish it was 5 km, our experience has been anything above 280 meters!! starts glitching in the viewport on any movement, placement of objects or any other factor in between, also as mentioned above we work with characters and rigs which need to populate these areas and can’t afford to split things up all the time.
i thought we were getting bifrost engine….
We are, but not with this update.
BIFROST IS COMING IN THE NEXT TWO RELEASE I GUESS.
I swear they must have a dev working full time on that chamfer tool… When I saw the headline about the release I went, wouldnt it be funny if there was a chamfer update? And sure enough..lol
Everyone complained about half-baked feature. With continuous delivery, dev will work on a feature until it is considered to be good. Alembic and Fluid was same, too.
3dsMax Chamfer has more than 20,000 lines of code to take care to take care most corner(!) cases.
And yet it still doesn’t do everything the 10 year old Quad Chamfer plugin from Marius Salaghi does! 20k lines of code? LOL! Autodesk should have just bought the plugin so they could’ve spent those resources fixing all the bugs they’ve introduced in the last 10 years, and then finally get Max working correctly with 4k monitors.
viewing Max on a high DPI Monitor is indeed a pain in the….
you’re wrong, native chamfer already surpasses сhamfer from Marius in functionality without this update.
There are some things Marius’s Quad Chamfer does that ours doesn’t, but we also have a lot of things his doesn’t. It’s more than just features though. We spent a lot of time working on the methods in which chamfer handles different scenarios. Chamfering isn’t a easy one condition works for all.
Martin, a really crucial thing that’s missing from the Max implementation of chamfer, is that it doesn’t set explicit normals when using smooth to adjacent. This makes it absolutely useless when exporting to a game engine, or any other application where an optimized mesh is called for. By optimized, I’m referring to a single segment chamfer that looks like a smooth radius. On export or when collapsing the stack, the normals don’t translate and you end up with broken smoothing. Marius understood the importance and usefulness of setting the normals to explicit when he wrote Quad Chamfer.
Yes this was a known issue. I can only recommend getting on beta. 🙂
I’m using Max with 4k monitor.
chamfer is the new MCG
In what way?
because it was features first and died soon.
I guess I don’t understand. How is Chamfer dead?
Don’t feed the trolls Martin! They’re only here to sew the seeds of discord and whine about…well, everything. No good deed goes unpunished!
I use the chamfer mod daily. Already played around with the new features. I’m lovin’ it! Thanks for the hard work on it!
I don’t know. Looks really good to me!
Hi Martin, I mean that the chamfer tool is what you are most advertising in the latest updates and, honestly, it seems to becoming a powerful tool. So it was also for the MCG 2/4 years ago and, honestly, it was a good way that you would have to go year after year so that it would become the game changer you promised. I’m not trolling, it’s a statement (orange is the new black). I think .2 is a good update.
Ah gotcha. Yeah the way we release is different now. Instead of delivering a feature as one big release, we deliver when there is enough value and as we complete more of the work we roll out to you guys. I like it because you don’t have to wait for everything to be finished in order to get some benifit. On the dev side, we don’t have to push stuff out that isn’t ready. If something isn’t complete we have multiple times per year to push out updates. I like this method much better.
I think most people don’t understand that these are incremental updates, not full feature releases, hence a lot of the confusion and negative reaction to seeing only a few new features/updates at a time. Whereas if you did a major release, you’d see a laundry list of all these new things which would appear to be more valuable to people. I don’t think this was ever really presented well to the public at large.
Be that as it may, I joined the beta recently so I’m looking forward to interacting with you guys and helping to improve Max! Keep up the good work Martin! Appreciate you and the teams’ work!
Fantastic! Looking forward to discussions on beta. 🙂
3ds Max roadmap has been updated, too!
Edit: I tried to include the link but apparently using the link tag is broken! Thanks for taking the lead on that, blenderman!
Thanks for the hint https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/the-3ds-max-blog/3ds-max-20202-and-public-road-map/
Soo, according to this document, they are working hard on cloth silmulator to extend fire/smoke abilities in max. wtf?
Explanation there is a little weird. The idea is that with bifrost graph max will have access to a lot of new solvers, mpm, smoke, etc… they will create tools using this as a base, its possible to do already cloth based on the mpm solver.
@ELOI, does this now mean we’d have all of that with the bifrost engine?…cloth,fire and smoke?
During siggraph presentations they make sure that the first focus and first implementations of bifrost in max will be instancing, world building and vertex deformation. You have that right now on the beta, full Bifrost board is implemented and ready, but a lot of things need to be “connected” to max, this are all the solvers. First we will get instancing (if you saw my videos, its really impressive right now performance wise), and after we will get all the solvers that bifrost has and the new ones to come. When? I dont know.
@ELOI. sounds really interresting. and so far, its been good.
can u elaborate a little on the vertex deformation, please.
You can check the siggraph talks about bifrost, they showcase some examples in maya manipulating vertex. You can think about what its possible in genome in max, but open the options to use it time dependent or time independent, mix it with particles, deform geo based on sims, mix and match, this type of things. Also similar to what mcg does, just orders of magnitud faster.
do i still have to click twice to get into a spinner on the render dialogue?
is the modifier stack highlight still the wrong way round – used to highlight when in sub object mode.
I’ve noticed that issue recently, too. Lots of double-clicking to activate and then use a spinner/checkbox. And most often in the V-Ray dialog. After checking that, it doesn’t seem to happen anymore. It wasn’t addressed in their list of fixes, but it appears to be fine now.
Also yes, the colors issue is annoying, but you could just customize that in the UI customization -> colors tab! That’s what I did and it is all back to ‘normal’ now (blue inactive, red active).
That issue is partly on 3rd party.
What’s happening is Legacy tab UI requires 1 click for activation. If you try on Arnold or ART render dialog. It doesn’t have the issue because they are Qt. But, Common and Render Elements still have that issue.
3dsMax team could solve Common and Render Element in the future. But, the 3rd party renderer dialog need to be addressed by plugin developer by converting UI to Qt.
Yes, that would explain why it was really only a problem in the V-Ray menus, then.
I just got into the Max beta so I’ll see you on the beta forums, Changsoo! 🙂
Has there been any clarity on the indie licensing? As in is it something we can do indefintely?
Nah, it’s probably just a gimmick/trick to get the remaining perpetual license holders to not renew and then they’ll cancel the indie plan because “it just didn’t make sense.” Autodesk has teams of people making calls to perpetual license holders trying to trick them into converting to subscription plans. I overheard an entire hour plus long conversation between an Autodesk rep. and my boss. It was disgusting how misleading and dishonest the Autodesk representatives were. Autodesk is desperate to weasel out from their commitments to customers. Autodesk are universally despised in the creative industries. I was working in a LA film studio when it was publicly announced that Autodesk had purchased Shotgun. There was literally a collective sigh heard throughout the entire company.
Just to show another enhancement, here is how we handle support edges when using patch or radial mitering.
https://youtu.be/iu-meZEbYsY
Very cool Martin!