Unwrap changes are updated immediately while you remain in Peel Mode. You can also add new seams on the fly with Edit Seams. Even better in vertex mode the new Pin tools lock selected UVs so that you can easily reshape UV clusters in a relax-type workflow. Once seams are selected the Peel Mode command instantly unfolds the selection. Point-to Point Seams is the best of the bunch. The Peel rollout in the command panel features new seam creation tools. The Unwrap UVW modifier also has replaced the old Pelt mapping workflow with a newer one called Peel. Also you can find new tools for packing, scaling and aligning UV clusters in the new rollout Arrange Elements. For example, existing commands that were part of the menu bar, like Relax, have been grouped with new relax-related tools and are now available in the UI. 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 (seen in photo at top). My question remains: Does the new UI and new tools really make UV mapping less mind numbing? 3ds Max 2012 features a revamped Unwrap UVW modifier. UV mapping is a tedious and thankless job and previous versions of 3ds Max didn't offer up much to make things easier. 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. Nitrous' stylized effects, seemingly an afterthought, are intended for non-photorealistic effects. However, unlike Viewport 2.0, Nitrous does not support effects like depth of field and motion blur maybe it will 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 difference between 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max 2012 is like night and day. In contrast, 3ds Max 2012 loaded the model 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 cache the model. After several trials a definite pattern emerged. I used a mid-level Quad-core Dell workstation with an nVidia Quadro FX 4600 graphics card for testing. To put Nitrous through its paces, I loaded a heavy model composed of hundreds of parts and about two million polygons 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.Įasily the best new feature in 3ds Max 2012, the Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core delivers blazing fast performance with massive datasets, real-time rendering effects in the viewports and non-photorealistic options. Nitrous harnesses the computing power of multiple core workstations and high-end GPUs to manage and display massive datasets in the viewports faster.
#3ds max 2011 cost update
As part of the XBR push to streamline and update 3ds Max 2012, it is a complete re-engineering. Nitrous is not simply tweaks to a bloated viewport system. 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.