Layers also work with the renderer, enabling the rendering of certain parts of a scene and not others. Users could separate a character's mesh from the skeleton to speed animation and rigging, for example.
With layers, it's possible to divide complex scenes into parts that can be hidden at the touch of a button. Layers are controlled through a floating toolbar. One completely new interface feature is the Layer Manager, which enables users to separate a scene into discrete layers for easy management. The schematic view reveals relationships between objects and offers the ability to edit constraints and links. With the new editor, users can view roughly any sort of relationship between objects, as well as an object's modifier stack and controllers. The schematic editor, having been totally rewritten, is much more robust. The render dialogs also have been revamped by adding a tabbed interface to help organize the wealth of new rendering options. Reactor, a nice physics and dynamics engine introduced last year, is now bundled with 3ds max.
The left side of the screen contains a new toolbar with Reactor-based tools. Installation is quite easy, and the interface has been reworked slightly. Unlike most 3D packages on the market, 3ds max runs only on Windows.
3ds max 6 software#
Version 6 of the software provides a number of excellent updates to existing features and adds some new features, such as a robust particle system and mental ray rendering. Over the years, it has found a solid home in the gaming community and become popular in film, broadcast, and visualization. Discreet's 3ds max is a very popular and robust 3D animation and rendering package.