3ds Max Design

Handling heavy scene data Most of the clients often talk of heavy data, and 3ds Max Design capability to handle such heavy data. Hence when a client mentioned of his scene disappearing inside the viewport, it seemed like a simple issue of work process, pipeline, or simply having an old version of 3ds Max Design. As such there are very many factors that needs to get checked and addressed to help such a customer, however, for this document we will cover two vital one (1) Nitrous (2) Container workflow (1) Nitrous : Previous versions 3ds Max Design had an option called adaptive degradation By right clicking the box on the bottom of the Max UI.

This brought up the Viewport Configuration

In this the user could configure how he needed the viewport, to display the object, by setting up a priority. The priority could also be set based on the distance of the objects from the camera, or based on how big the object is terms of screen size. This helped immensely when moving around in the viewport. The current version has an even better approach using Nitrous. While it is set as default, there are times when one may need to change this. For that one has to go to the Preference settings and change the driver.

That will bring up the windows in which Nitrous can be selected.

Using Nitrous has very many advantage including getting a realistic look, stylized look, or mechanical look etc. It allows for lights and shadows in the viewport. It even has Ambient Occlusion within the viewport. Now lets talk of the next part i.e Containers. Container can contain anything, an objects or set of objects. The workflow is that one person can work on the building, and the person creating the entire street that the building stands on. With traditional referencing, it was difficult to transform the referenced data, and one needed to go to the reference editor to load and unload the references. Using containers one easily load or unload based on what part of the scene he really needs to work on

In the previous two pictures we had the first picture with container loaded and the second with the container unloaded. Containers have the box as icon, this works as a placeholder to objects or set of object. These containers can be copied, and basic transformations can be made. Of course switching load/unload containers does take time, unloading is very quick, load does take a bit of time but a marked difference is found when using Nitrous as compared to the old directX driver

Digitally signed by Prem Moraes DN: cn=Prem Moraes, o, ou=ACE, email=prem.moraes@gmail.com, c=IN 'Date: 2011.09.13 16:47:56 +05'30