Did You Know?
From blockbuster films to television episodics, 3ds max? is the world's most widely used professional 3D software used for sophisticated and high-impact film and television animation and effects.
Here is a small list of some known movies titles that Max was used on:
Thru The Moebius Strip Equilibrium The Mummy Returns October Sky A Simple Wish
Undisputed Lewis and Clark Dr. T and the Women Armageddon Con Air
Xmen 2 The Majestic Battlefield Earth Deep Rising Kundun
The Core Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back X-Men I'll Be Home For Christmas The Craft
Panic Room AntiTrust Soul Keeper Soldier The Crow 2: City Of Angels
Quo Vadis Jeepers Creepers Mission Impossible II Mighty Joe Young Casino
Check Into Disaster Swordfish For The Cause Return To Paradise Johnny Mnemonic
The Imposter Driven South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut Lost In Space Virtuosity
Murder By Numbers Tomb Raider The Green Mile The Truman Show ?
Kaena The Prophecy Cats & Dogs Inspector Gadget Great Expectations ?
Minority Report Dr. DoLittle II The Insider The Newton Boys ?
Here is a small list of some known games titles that Max was used on:
Barbarian Batman Vengeance Black & White Pack Expansion Blood Omen 2 Britney's Dance Beat
Cel Damage Command & Conquer: Renegade Dark Age of Camelot Diablo II Dungeon Siege
Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Empire Earth Eternal Darkness Flight Simulator 2002 Grand Theft Auto III
Halo Hunter: The Reckoning Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Max Payne Metal Gear Solid 2
Medal of Honor: Frontline Never Winter Nights New Legends Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee Pac-Man World 2
Rayman Arena Red Faction Return to Castle Wolfenstein Sigma Silent Hill 2
Smuggler's Run Soldier of Fortune II Spiderman: The Movie Game Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds Star Wars Starfighter
State of Emergency Tennis Masters Series Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2X and 3 World of Warcraft
Wreckless
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Tips
You can use 3DSM2.5+ with Win95/98 but you don't want it.
As soon as you start inserting plugins you will start asking why your system crashes for unknown reasons when using 3DSM2.5+ (ie. when moving a camera) or 3DSM2.5 simply doesn't start at all after installing certain plugs. If you can afford 3DSM2.5 you certainly can afford NT as well.
With Win98SE 3DSM2.5 is running a bit more stable an d I suppose same is true for WinME. 3DSM3.x is running conciderably more stable with Win98SE than 3DSM2.5 does.
Kinetix also suggests using NT for reasons of stability. Win2000 proved to be as stable running 3DSMax as NT4 used to be.
If you are using Win95/Win98 and 3DSM2.5+ avoid using Netscape? and Max during the same session
3DSM2.5 tends to crash after using this browser. Crashes occur in combination with all releases for unknown reasons and it seams like this is an OS-problem *sigh*.
I don't know wether or not this is true for other browsers as well.
Forget about the Memory-Usage-Information in the rendering progress window
I don't know what information 3DSM2.5+ gathers here, but it is not what your system actually uses. If you dare to know how much memory is used you should refer to the task-manager (provided you are using NT) and have a look at the systemperformance-tray. The informations provided there are much more reliable. Consider the numbers in the rendering dialog a rough estimation.
Estimating the size of a scene depends on various aspects. The materials used, especially any bitmaps, increase the size. The more vertices and polygons are used in any scene, the more data needs to be stored. The actual size depends on applied modifiers and animations as well.
RAM pays alot more than CPU-power
This is true, if you are having less than 256MB and try to wrestle with more than aprox. 150K faces, since 3DSM25+ swaps everything. Swapping means a dramatic decrease of performance, since accessing HDD is by far slower than accessing RAM.
Look at what your system uses from what is called "virtual memory" while rendering and modelling using the Taskmanager (provided you are using NT). If you are hanging on Win95/Win98, you might be able to estimate this value by observing the size of the pagefile (the Windows swapfile.)
Try to get that much RAM that Max doesn't need to access the "virtual memory" (The later one is actually a portion of your swap-file on your HDD. If you already installed loads of RAM you might notice that Max still swaps to your HDD... thanks to the OS...) Having enough RAM means most of the time an average increment of speed around 10-30%, depending on the configuration of the individual machine and software (see also: "MAX swaps everything to your HDD.")
If you have to keep an eye on your buget you should consider upgrading RAM above upgrading the CPU since the later one is more expensive for the same increment of power.
Purchasing RAM: Keep in mind how many RAMslots your MotherBoard has and and how they are epuiped now. Make up your mind about how much RAM (in MB) you are going to buy and how to get the most outof what you already have. Compare this to the amount of RAM you want to have in the next time: stay flexible and calculate the loss of value. Bigger modules are more expensive but you can instal a larger total of MBs into your system. Also keep in mind that RAM is a gimmick with dramtic changes in price. Although prices tend to fall over the time the market has proven to be jumpy with sudden increases up to doubling the price within days and slowly lowering later. Check the vendors when you are out to purchase RAM and ask somebody you know to buy hardware on a regular basis to get a good price.
MAX swaps everything to your HDD
Due to the OS Max will transfer data to the swapfile from time to time, regardless of the amount of physical RAM you have in your machine.
So a fast HDD will pay, too. It is usually overkill to invest into an UltraSCSI-subsystem unless you already own vast CPU-power and loads of RAM (see also: "RAM pays a lot more than CPU-power.") It also pays to have your swap-space on a different HDD (perhaps a complete HDD on it's own). 500MB of swapspace is a good start but this might be to small for heavy face-counts and intense submaterials and is certainly to small for heavy use of particle systems.
A common rule of thumb is to make the swap-space three times + 10% the size of the installed physical RAM to be on safe ground.
Modern MotherBoards and (E)IDE HDDs can talk together via UltraDMA, but this is known to cause problems with NT4 (eg. computer refuses to boot or UDMA-HDD not present after booting.) IMHO you should prefere using SCSI over IDE since SCSI has several advantages compared to (E)IDE but is on the other hand more costly.
With HDDs like Seagates 20.4GB Baracuda one might consider purchasing such an ATA66 drive above SCSI drives. This might be a good choice, but depends on the task you are out to head the HDD to.
To give a hint: Max needs to write files usually between a few 100 kB and some 2-5 MB. I rarely encountered Max writing files above 5MB, but I'm not that deep into the ultra-high polycount region. What you should do is a regular save, preferably autosave, along with an increment of the filenumber (ie. test.01.max, test.02.max, ...). This gives you a (increasing) bunch of relatively small files. Same is true for your Materials (mostly a few kB) and your mapfiles (some 200 kB to some 2-3 MB). Working with Max means you will need to access small files of some 500 kB (roughly) average size.
Max loads mapfiles at first rendertime and when opening the materialeditor. Sceneries load "on demand", ie. when you load them. Saving occurs occassionally. Usually standard IDE drives can handle this task "left handed and one eye shut". What gives the thread is swapping. Using virtual memory needs a HDD as fast as possible. Ok, ATA66 Drives are fast. To get the most out of this, you should place the swapspace (pagefile) close to the inner tracks of your HDD, since transfer and access have best ratings here. Try to find out, how many individual discs and heads there are in your (desired) HDD. Estimate a partitioning pattern, that makes your swapspace close to the inner regions of the HDD. Remember Windows usually likes the very first partition to be drive "C:\". Calculate enough space for the first partition to hold your operating system and some software (2GB is good but...).
If you start building complex scenes (like "My Room" or "Sat Dish"), use several files
You should design each object in an individual file and merge them later into the final scene. The reason is, that huge face-counts easily wrestle your system to its knees. Consequently huge scenes are not editable comfortably - if at all.
When designing objects in separate files you are less likely to mess up a whole scenery if you make a mistake. Further, you can reuse objects later much easier in other scenes.
If you start building complicated scenes (like "My Room" or "Sat Dish"), you should learn to use basic geometries as positional dummies
This makes it a whole lot easier to build your scene while specific objects are not ready or even don't exist at all and saves RAM and CPU-power during test-renderings which means a dramatic increase in speed.
Give them a simple dummy-material like grey plastic without any submaps. This way you can check out the distribution of the objects in your scene more easily.
Adding attenuation-ranges to your lights speeds up rendering
This is because the rendering engine does not have to calculate the lights areas up to infinity (in worst case). Although using attenuations might not speed up your renderings noticeable in every scene it will do so in many cases.
Decay continues to calculate dimmer and dimmer values as the distance of the light throw increases. Attenuate at least the end of the light to eliminate unnecessary calculations!
Using "inverse" or "inverse square" will make it necessarry to increase the light's multiplier or make the color of the emitted light brighter. When making the light's color brighter make sure you do not exceed the allowed color-values for the media you are intending to use, especially if you are out to render to VCR-tape. Also refer to "Using lights with fall-offs makes your scenes look more realistic." for more information.
http://www.techiwarehouse.com/cms/www.arnelmation.150m.com Some of my models using 3D Studio Max.
http://www.image-in-air3d.com/ 2D and 3D galleries, backgrounds, free stuff, awards each month.
