What’s New in 3DS Max 2021
The new features in 3ds Max 2021 give it a next-gen flavor, where professionals are considering early adoption more seriously than they ever have before. Many known industry professionals already made the switch. I will list the reasons why.
Autodesk hit the trifecta with their viewport enhancements, the addition of PBR materials, and the HDRI material node. See Figure 1, for a live viewport (not rendered) where I applied PBR materials to a model in an environment lit with an HDRI.
Figure 1
AMBIENT OCCLUSION IN VIEWPORT
A vital component of the viewport enhancement is the ability to see, review, and tweak ambient occlusion in real-time. Ambient occlusion plays a significant part in the presentation of objects by simulating the effects of ambient light, most noticeably in peaks and valleys. The ability to see, control and modify this, is one of the most critical factors in quality production. See Figure 2, for an example of an object presented with, and without, ambient occlusion. Pay attention to the shadow in the mouth/cheek area in the image where the occlusion is on. Note this is also using 3ds Max’s viewport technology and is not a rendering.
Figure 2
PBR MATERIALS
PBR materials are excellent materials for production. The PBR Material (Metal/Rough) and PBR Material (Spec/Gloss) are simple to implement and provide quality results. See Figure 3, for example.
Figure 3
Figure 4 shows the settings for each of the materials applied to the teapots in Figure 3, demonstrating how simple they are to work with.
Figure 4
HDR IMAGES AND THE ENVIRONMENT
New shaders allow us to use the HDR images to work dynamically in our viewports with powerful features to manipulate them to make our presentations perfect.
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There are a dozen or more incredibly exciting enhancements with 2021. Some include shader improvements, like complex types of noise for Uber Noise such as Perlin, Fractal, Cell, fBm, and Worley, along with additions like color correction, float and color curves, and spherical projections. One more notably exciting feature, is the new modifier to improve vertex normal projections to produce cleaner results.
Brian Chapman is an Autodesk Authorized Developer, Digital Artist, and a CAD Applications Specialist for an engineering firm located in Las Vegas, Nevada. Brian shares tips and tricks at procad.blog with a portfolio of digital artwork and renderings at emptypawn.com. Brian’s email is procad-man@pro-cad.net
