New colorful icons are easier to see and the layout has been redesigned to accommodate regrouping of existing and new tools. The overall look and feel of the Unwrap UVW modifier (editor and command panel) has been updated and reorganized. However, 3ds Max 2012 features a revamped Unwrap UVW modifier, but does the new UI and new tools really make UV mapping less mind numbing?
UV mapping is a tedious and thankless job and previous versions of 3ds Max didn’t do much to make things easier. UV mapping has gotten easier with a revamped Unwrap UVW modifier that features a reorganized UI and new tools. Further, there are no parameters to refine the Non-photorealistic effects. However, natural media such as colored pencil, ink, and acrylics are in reality badly simulated, often having little to no similarity to the real thing. Seemingly an after thought Nitrous’ Stylized effects supposedly can display Non-photorealistic effects. However, unlike Viewport 2.0, Nitrous does not support effects like depth of field and motion blur – maybe in the next release. Maya 2012 features a similar viewport system dubbed Viewport 2.0. Nitrous provides artists with the ability to focus on the composition of a scene in real-time via immediate previews, instead of having to wait for time consuming renders. Nitrous supports effects such as ambient occlusion, high quality shadows, better transparency, and tone mapping. With Nitrous, effects that could only be seen after rendering can now be previewed right in the viewports. The viewport performance differences between 3ds Max 2012 and 3ds Max 2011 is like night and day. In contrast, 3ds Max 2012 the model loaded almost instantly and scene changes or mesh edits (in Realistic mode with soft shadows and ambient occlusion) were smooth and in real time. Once the model was displayed the worst part was that camera rotations or mesh edits caused painfully slow redraws. In 3ds Max 2011 it took at least three minutes to cached the model. After several trials a definite pattern emerged. A mid-level Quad-core Dell workstation with an nVidia Quadro FX 4600 graphics card was used for testing. To put Nitrous through its paces a heavy model composed of hundreds of parts and about two million polygons was loaded into 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max 2012. With Nitrous, the data in each viewport is crunched separately from all other computing processes, thus providing users with fast working environment.
Nitrous harnesses the computing power of multiple core workstations and high-end GPUs to manage and display massive datasets in the viewports faster.
Autodesk 3ds max 2011 review update#
As part of the XBR push to streamline and update 3ds Max 2012 Nitrous is not simply tweaks to a bloated viewport system but a complete re-engineering. The most important update in 3ds Max 2012 is the new Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core – a new viewport system that improves performance and display quality. The best new feature in 3ds Max 2012 is the Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core which delivers blazing fast performance with massive datasets, real-time rendering effects in the viewports, and Non-photorealistic options.