Discreet has launched 3ds max 4, and the Montreal-headquartered systems and software developer is calling this latest release of its 3D animation, modeling and rendering solution ‘the most significant’ ever.

Discreet was formerly known as Discreet Logic, dealing in high-end f/x products. Global design resource company Autodesk acquired dl in 1998 and merged it with another company it owned, Kinetix, which in turn owned the 3d Studio Max product. The software’s name was abbreviated, the new entity was called simply Discreet, and the target 3D market subsequently included everyone from home freelancers to gamers to post-production houses. Frank Delise, product manager of 3ds max 4, calls the software ‘the Swiss Army knife of 3D.’

‘We always had the goal of taking what’s in the high end and making it available to everybody,’ says Delise. ‘For almost 10 years our price has stayed in the $2,000 to $3,000 range, and for that reason all the other 3D packages came down from $30,000 to $20,000 and so on.’

According to Delise, the release of 3ds max 4 is significant because although max had previously excelled in parametric modeling, it offered little in the way of character animation. The company did have the Character Studio solution, a recent award-winner in the Computer Graphics World journal, but it was not built into the max package. To solve this shortcoming, Discreet hired away one of the chief designers of the inverse kinematics architecture of competitor Alias|Wavefront’s Maya system. (An ik structure refers to an animated character’s skeleton that provides the foundation of its movement.)

‘He came to Discreet and said ‘I want to make something easier and better to animate characters,’ and so we let him do that for a year-and-a-half, and he built an incredible animation system based on [ik],’ Delise recalls.

Delise notes another benefit of the update is greater integration between max and other Discreet products. For example, when in max, an artist can use Combustion to paint objects and create background elements.

Max runs on Windows 2000, and although there have been reports of numerous bugs in that system, Delise believes the new capabilities it offers make the platform a major step forward.

‘You can now use Microsoft Direct X8 drivers to do things people previously had to render for to see, such as realtime reflections and multiple textures, right in your interactive environment,’ he explains.

Putting max on the common Windows 2000 platform also makes it accessible on both high- and low-end machines. Delise cites a recent example of representatives from Industrial Light + Magic who purchased max and Combustion to perform f/x trials on a laptop on set during shooting.

According to Delise, the f/x market accounts for about 35% of Discreet’s business, whereas games make up 50% and the rest is divided among design and Internet uses. At SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans, the company trumpeted a free new consumer-level version of max, 3d studio gmax, aimed specifically at gamers.

The motivation behind gmax was a situation whereby game players, soon bored with new games, would use pirated versions of max and plug-ins from the game developers to edit and create new playing levels. In the instance of the motorcycle game Microsoft Madness, 3,000 new levels appeared one month after it shipped. As a result, Discreet is now furnishing the game companies with a version of max they can supply to their customers.

‘We made one version of max for the consumer to download and one for the developers to throw plug-ins to users,’ Delise explains. ‘id Software, who make the game Quake, would make their own level editor, which cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Instead, we’ll sell them one at a lesser price, one which we maintain and support and which has the best tools.’

Delise says Discreet has developed gmax not only to benefit the consumer, but also to help build a talent pool of max users beyond the 150,000 it says currently work with the professional version.

‘It’s going to help us make sure 3ds max is the easiest 3D program to use, because we will have so many consumers using it that we can learn from,’ he adds. ‘That’s a big beta program to find out what’s hard about 3D and allowing us to make it easier.’

Dramatic work

Despite the phenomenal rise of the game industry, motion picture and tv work remains a big part of Discreet’s focus. Delise cites several prestige projects that have used max, including X-Men, Mighty Joe Young, Armageddon and Titanic. Some of its high-profile customers include Blur Studios, an f/x, animation and design house out of Venice, ca, which contributes to the South Park tv show, and REZN8, the Hollywood f/x shop that contributed to the Cyberworld 3D imax film.

The latter two companies accomplished this work with the third version of 3d Studio Max, and, along with Sony Pictures Imageworks and Hollywood’s 525 Post Production, served as major beta sites for 3ds max 4. Discreet dissuades them from using the unreleased software on productions, since problems have arisen in the past, as on the feature Lost in Space, which Delise worked on with version two of Max in beta.

‘It’s hard, because during beta we’ll find the bug we have to fix, and the file you make could get corrupted,’ he says. ‘We have our own production testing in-house, because it’s dangerous. You can have a tight deadline, and then we have to say, ‘Sorry, we had to break the file format,’ which we don’t like to do.’

Delise admits, however, that productions are sometimes willing to take that chance, as in the case of the forthcoming Gaina, from France’s Chaman Productions. Said to be the first completely computer-generated film produced in Europe and Canada, the full-length 3D-animated Gaina has used the beta 3ds max 4, albeit in a limited capacity.

Delise says Discreet realizes animation/fx houses don’t necessarily want to commit to only one toolset brand, and so max has been designed with a plug-in architecture that makes it compatible with other companies’ rendering systems.

‘We made it so you can plug in mental ray [from Berlin’s mental images], RenderMan [from Pixar Animation Studios] and MaxMan [from Animal Logic],’ he says. ‘We can integrate with all the different rendering engines for people who don’t want to change their production pipelines. Every tool has its advantage, so the more open we are to working with everybody else, the better off our customer is.’

Animation and f/x shops see that the various software solutions each have their pros and cons, and they frequently use multiple systems for different effects on the same project. One example is Toronto’s Calibre Digital Pictures, which was called upon to create a ‘talking eight ball’ and smoke effects on the feature Interstate 60. The insides of the fantastical object were achieved with Max, and the smoke with a|w’s Maya.

‘A lot of people use Max for the patch-modeling techniques no one else has,’ Delise says. ‘They might use Max for different crazy effects because it has amazing parametric animation. Maya modeling techniques were never really good at polygons, but they were really good at nurbs [non-uniform rational b-splines, the curves and surfaces of which are parametric functions that can represent any type of curves or surfaces]. We were the opposite.’

Delise summarizes that success in the marketplace rides on providing a unique product.

‘We listen mainly to our customers, not to the marketing hype of the competition,’ he says. ‘We focus on those areas [the others] don’t have, because we expect people to use multiple tools. Our competition has things we don’t, and there are definitely things we have that they don’t.’ •

-www.discreet.com