3ds Max Rendering
Initially, 3ds Max shipped with a built-in renderer called the Standard A-Buffer Scanline Renderer, currently known as the Default Scanline Renderer. In Release 1, the renderer was very similar to the scanline renderer in 3d Studio DOS except for the support of volumetric effects and unlimited material tree depths. It supported reflections and refractions only via maps and supported no raytracing until Release 2. Release 3 added better shading, supersampling and pluggable Anti-Aliasing filters. Release 4 added ActiveShade support for quick material testing and Tone Operators (Exposure Controls). Release 5 added support for advanced lighting plug-ins and included a brute-force global illumination module called Light Tracer (funny fact - during development it was called "GI Joe") and a Radiosity module based on further research by the Lightscape team.
Around 1998, rumors on the internet claimed that mental ray 2 is going to be available for 3ds Max soon. It sounded plausible since the NURBS meshing libraries in R2 were licensed from mental images. Around 1999 a bridge to the stand-alone mental ray renderer was demoed and it shipped as a add-on package in the summer of 2000. The first version of the bridge was not very usable and the cost for stand-alone licenses was too high for most users. Finally, 3dsmax 6 implemented mental ray support as a second built-in renderer using the free inline mental ray license which was added to Maya at about the same time. Since Release 6, mental ray is shipping as an integral part of 3ds Max. Initially, users were able to net-render to any number of licensed 3ds Max seats via Backburner or similar renderfarm management applications. Since 3ds Max 8, mental ray network rendering is free and can be used with any number of 3ds Max slaves without additional licenses.
(Trivia: Gary Yost, the mastermind behind 3d Studio and 3ds Max' development, moved on to become Executive VP of mental images for North America. Phillip Miller, former 3ds Max product manager and later Discreet's animation group manager, ended up as mental images' Executive Vice President of Business Development for North America. )
3ds Max was designed to support pluggable rendering engines from the ground up, so it was logical to see a large number of 3rd party renderers appear over its lifetime. In the first year of its existence, 3D Studio MAX R1 already had two additional raytracers - RayStudio and RayMax - available for purchase. In the following years, Right Hemisphere's RayGun, Animal Logic's MaxMan (a bridge to Renderman-compliant renderers), Splutterfish's Brazil r/s, Chaos Group's V-Ray and Cebas' finalRender pushed the bar higher and higher, with the last three currently dominating in the Max world together with the built-in Default Scanline and mental ray. A bridge to NVIDIA Gelato called Amaretto is also available from Frantic Films.
- This page was last modified 20:51, 12 April 2008.
- This page has been accessed 1,741 times.
- Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License.
- About CGWiki
- Disclaimers
|
