3DS Max 2016 review
Alembic support
In this reviewer’s opinion, the breadth of support for the open-source Alembic format is one of the most exciting additions to an already impressive release. Autodesk first revealed their official Alembic implementation in 3DS Max 2015 extension 1, but the additional improvements for Max 2016 are nothing short of astounding. Two fantastic features have been added amongst a tonne of bug fixing and compatibility improvements.
First is the Playback graph. Users familiar with the 3DS Max point cache system’s playback graph will feel right at home. Playback graph allows you to retime, loop, reverse and offset the animation of an alembic cache. This offers extreme power and flexibility and opens the door to many procedural and collaborative workflows.
This video demonstrates how the Alembic Playback Graph can be used to instance animation across hundreds of objects
The video above shows how I recently used the Alembic playback graph to quickly create a river scene full of 200 animated animals – each animal instancing an Alembic animation cache. I was able to easily swap out geometry or animation while retaining each object’s animation offsets.
The second key feature added to Alembic is the Performance Mode and frankly, it has to be seen to be believed. The easiest comparison is After Effect’s RAM Preview; select an alembic cache in your scene, activate performance mode and a green progress bar will begin to fill the 3DS Max timeline as frames are loaded into the video card’s memory. The video card will then be utilized for playback of the cache and insane frame rates can be achieved.
An overview of the new Alembic Performance Mode and how it handles large geometry caches
A crucial lack of finer cache controls lets this feature down a bit and it’s not quite practical with extremely large files, but the video above demonstrates Performance mode playing back a 106GB RealFlow sim at 20 frames per second on modest hardware, which is very impressive.
An example of how Alembic Performance mode can be used in production
The 3DS Max team’s support of the Alembic specification is robust, however they’ve also added support for 3DS Max-specific “material IDs”. Alembic’s been tested in production by many talented members of the 3DS Max beta team over the course of development and while some data such as arbitrary channels currently have limited support, it’s a fantastic addition to every 3DS Max user’s toolkit regardless of your discipline. Time spent investigating Alembic and how it can be utilised in your pipeline is time well spent!
Xref “Renovations”
Alembic is complemented by some much appreciated improvements to 3DS Max’s flawed referencing system. It’s laughable that in this day and age, a core feature such as asset referencing has been so finicky, difficult and unreliable. 3DS Max already offers a range of limited options for file referencing including file links, Containers, XREF Object and XREF scene and users unfortunately have to spend valuable production time researching the limitations of each of these before committing to them for a project.
Thankfully, some serious improvements have been made to the XREF object system in this release. There are now fantastic options for referencing objects, controllers, modifiers and materials into scenes and Autodesk claim that rigged characters can now be correctly referenced into scenes. Yes, this is possible but updating the rig of a referenced character without losing local animation is still very cumbersome.
XREF in 3DS Max still pales in comparison to Maya’s solid referencing system but it’s worth noting that 3DS Max 2016 is a non-SDK breaking release – the developers were very limited in the changes they could make to the XREF system. With this in mind, it’s impressive what has been done and one can only hope that 3DS Max 2017 can deliver on what the team have started. The goal of allowing a very non-destructive workflow has –mostly – been delivered. Though this is the way it should be and the way other DCC apps have operated for years.
The bottom line – XREF-improvements in 3DS Max 2016 are great but they unfortunately do still require a R&D investment on behalf of your team before committing to these new features in production.