Sneak Peek at XBR Graphics in action
Posted by Shane Griffith, 18 February 2011 6:00 pm
Here's a quick look at some of the many things we've been working on behind scenes.
The top priority of the Excalibur (XBR) initiative is to re-architect the viewport system and provide dramatic improvements in performance and visual quality. Some of the possible capabilities include support for unlimited lights, soft shadows, screen-space ambient occlusion, tone-mapping, and higher-quality transparency. You also might notice the progressive refinement of image quality without blocking changes to the scene. To achieve this we've been researching advanced scene management techniques, together with multithreaded viewport scene traversal and material evaluation, the anticipated result is a smoother, more responsive workflow.
Enjoy!
San Francisco Scene File Stats
6.6m polys (15.1m faces)
4587 nodes
2 lights
The screen capture and compression causes the video to stutter a little, but actual interactivity was much smoother than this. An Nvidia FX3800 was used to generate this result (in case you were wondering). However, the viewport technology is not limited to spcific hardware manufacture or make. The main requirements are a DX 10 capable card with a min of 1GB texture memory.
Product Manager - 3ds Max & 3ds Max Design
Media and Entertainment Division
Autodesk, Inc
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58 Comments
Lee Johnson
Posted 18 February 2011 2:44 am
3DRealism.com
Posted 18 February 2011 3:33 am
sandykoufax
Posted 18 February 2011 3:44 am
Shane Bekker
Posted 18 February 2011 6:25 am
I could deffinatley use this in my local TV animated childrens series I am producing. Hope it does not take forever.
kanex
Posted 18 February 2011 6:36 am
mentalnils
Posted 18 February 2011 8:26 am
tadland
Posted 18 February 2011 8:40 am
nobodyspecial
Posted 18 February 2011 11:05 am
ficolo
Posted 18 February 2011 11:29 am
Onestly not is very interesting to see some CGshaders that i can see also my mobile phone software!
I hope to see fixed the 1000 bugs in CAT and Character Studio
Fix the 1000 bugs on pivot and reference systems
To see the graphite tool very fast and not to wait time for click on the buttons
Introducing new controllers like Dual Quaternions...and more and more....
Really is funny to read that for someone just like the colored icons!
I'm really disappointed for this SneekPeek!!!
tadland
Posted 18 February 2011 12:44 pm
(Serious, i like them
I always wonder how many of us use viewcube or the wheel-thing-stuff of the viewport.
I have never used them, and i guess that kind of stuff have spend (waste) a lot of time and money to be created.
Each of us have a opinion of the priority of development.
Carton, graphic, or cell render must have a certain interest, for somebody right up there...
From my "non-technical guy" point of view, a display below the "crysis" game display is a fail and i guess Max display should be far above.... but it's easy to tell from my desk....
The XBR project is the best thing they have done since Max V1.0, and all the "Iray kind of thing" give us a look of what the future will bring, and we'r so hurry to get it, so.... patience my friends.....
miquid
Posted 18 February 2011 1:55 pm
pivot, usable like in maya.
Tear off of viewport
all menu and option Floating without costraint the focus
eliminate the Modify side Bar: all menu like in maya, more liberty for work and pratice
MIDDLE mouse button like in maya, is the best solution for work and Snapping
Set Driven Key better
wire parameter Rewrite : is too much unstable, 50/100 times connection will lost and the files are deads
use Groups like in maya for make more animation pivot controls and hierarchy useful
all simulation in real time like in maya
caching all, geometry and more, for exporting animation and complete scene for render in other programs, like Renderman for maya
ficolo
Posted 18 February 2011 1:58 pm
miquid
Posted 18 February 2011 1:59 pm
Shane Griffith
Posted 18 February 2011 2:01 pm
Its not the only thing we use to guide investment decisions but does confirm we are aligned with what many of you see as most important.
Priority #1 for XBR Graphics is performance, the videos above were intended to show some of the other cool things you could do with the tech. I think some of you are assuming the artistic styles took man years to develop to this point, not true and rather were low hanging fruit based on the rest of the core tech. Besides performance videos are very subjective anyway, I'll leave that for when you can experience it yourself.
More sneak peeks coming soon.
freeflow
Posted 18 February 2011 2:07 pm
Shane Griffith
Posted 18 February 2011 2:11 pm
invisio
Posted 18 February 2011 2:31 pm
But what you don't say, is with what kind of card you reach this quality and smoothness in viewports.
To my mind, the first thing you should be working on is solving the performance bug in viewport when using high-end quadro card with xeon/sevent64bit/max2011 combo.
Actually, even with Hfix and SP1, 3dsmax 2011 is completely unusable for the users who ahave the "chance" to own those kind of computers.
I don't want to have new version every years, I want STABLE and EFFICIENT version every 2 or 3 years, thats enough.
And I want techs to fixs problems BEFORE working on new releases.
I paid subscription, so I can have new version every year.... And the last good and stable one was 3dsmax 2009.
So I paid for 2010 that was good but not better, and for V2011 that is totaly unusable.
I wonder if it's worth it to renew my subscription, I think not.
freeflow
Posted 18 February 2011 2:40 pm
Shane Griffith
Posted 18 February 2011 2:44 pm
http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/autodesk-3ds-max--3ds-max-design-2011/viewport-performance-is-a-joke/
ever since the 2009 release we have shifted the development cycle and no new feature work starts until we meet our legacy defect goals. What gets fixed is based on data from CER, subscription support, customer support, and beta.
http://www.autodesk.com/cer
http://www.autodesk.com/subscription
http://www.autodesk.com/3dsmax-DefectSubmission
http://beta.autodesk.com/
more info here:
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/ken/is_this_release_of_3ds_max_any_more_or_less_stable_than_prior_releases
mvshabeer
Posted 18 February 2011 3:25 pm
Argasio
Posted 18 February 2011 3:30 pm
Oh btw,just want to make clear that I find quicksilver totally useless.
Argasio
Posted 18 February 2011 3:30 pm
Oh btw,just want to make clear that I find quicksilver totally useless.
Nimadv
Posted 18 February 2011 3:58 pm
I don't see any reason to upgrade my subscription, if Priority #1 for XBR Graphics is performance, then I worried about other XBR features!
ToKo
Posted 18 February 2011 5:30 pm
Everything you show us are very little scenes with basic shading...we work with mio of polygons and hundreds of objects...(btw if you made a setup with so much elements you would notice that the layer manager isnt a very flexible part of max...)
check out these guys...they develop impressive tools for max....
griddeform: http://vimeo.com/groups/114/videos/2319449 from Iker j.
IK/FK Solver : http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolver.php From felix joleans
and finally for the big boys of sketch rendering:
Pencil+ : http://www.psoft.co.jp/en/product/pencil/index.html thats how it should work!
atti
Posted 18 February 2011 6:17 pm
Edit: looks like gr1f1th has pointed out almost the same thing while I was typing.
Shane Griffith
Posted 18 February 2011 8:38 pm
if you dig a bit deeper you'll find other sneak peeks that I've posted but haven't had time to blog about yet. plus there's more on the way. I'm not going to give it all away in one post
timd1971
Posted 18 February 2011 9:29 pm
Shane Griffith
Posted 18 February 2011 9:46 pm
The nitrous architecture is meant to scale on all types of hardware. Its a fundamental change in how the Max scene graph interfaces with the viewport so graphics card type doesn't necessarily play a role any more than it used to. the main thing you need is lots of graphics memory. 1GB is really the min I would recommend and this is what currently puts many into a quadro line card. but new cards with more and more memory are coming to market every month now so this barrier is likely to dissolve.
timd1971
Posted 18 February 2011 9:46 pm
really like the more colorful and dimensional icons like in the maya revamp. thanks Shane for all the previews!
mahi
Posted 18 February 2011 9:57 pm
I like that they are not grey for sure! But they are still ugly and the colors are like default paint colors. I'm not sure who is the designer over there but it is just not nice to look at. I do hope that it is just place holder for a more consistent color scheme that does not look like windows 98.
mortas may
Posted 18 February 2011 11:00 pm
patrick 85
Posted 19 February 2011 1:24 pm
gr1f1th
Posted 19 February 2011 6:21 pm
Pangloss
Posted 20 February 2011 10:02 am
You open curve editor and lose 30% of your framerate, turn on the framerate counter, lose another 30%, open material editor, another 30%. Have rig elements that are wireframe transparent, another 30%.
The guys _can not_ animate. They have to stop and make a preview every 5 seconds.
Think about how difficult it would be to change the primary DCC app of a studio with 650 heads who have been using it 10 years, and you will understand how bad the core problems are and why people seem annoyed that they are not being addressed.
ToKo
Posted 20 February 2011 1:28 pm
Why didnt you show us a scene with 2-3 CAD-cars or anything else with hardware shading on a 1000$ PC that would be research for one year...
If you look at Maya they could use HDR images in Viewport (vray domelight with HDR in Viewport....) btw. is the nitrous Viewport working with 3rd Party plugins like VRay or FinalRender to?
Recon442
Posted 20 February 2011 7:25 pm
And now, mainly, for the funny part you said. Performance in 3ds Max goes rapidly down with the amount of objects in the scene. If you got one mesh, that has 2 millions of polygons, your scene runs at hundreds of FPS. Tf you got thousand of objects 200 poly each, your performance drops to 1-5FPS.
This combined with GPU crippling system in 3ds max (read a thread "Viewport performance is a joke" - basically sometimes in 3ds max you accidentaly do something, that will make your scene perform 1000% better for a short while, showing you that hardware is capable of 10x better speed, but something in 3ds max is slowing it down) makes it really frustrating to work in 3ds max. No matter what GPU you have, 3ds Max always finds a way to cripple it. My new GTX460 performs same, or maybe even slightly worse than my 8800GTX... irony, isnt it?
3DRealism.com
Posted 20 February 2011 10:53 pm
Recon442
Posted 21 February 2011 10:08 am
Shane Griffith
Posted 21 February 2011 1:38 pm
Jonathan de Blok
Posted 21 February 2011 2:49 pm
The only thing that scares me is that 10 seconds/frame for z-depth is advertises as a good thing?
I hope QS can do the beauty pass, depth buffer and other render elements in one go to an EXR format aswell. That will fit better in modern pipelines.
Recon442
Posted 21 February 2011 3:52 pm
Shane Griffith
Posted 21 February 2011 4:03 pm
www.autodesk.com/3dsmax-defectsubmission
Send us hw config and repro steps.
Matic3d
Posted 21 February 2011 4:50 pm
Recon442
Posted 21 February 2011 5:04 pm
I am not talking about what a future release of 3ds max will be like. I just said that from experience of past releases, i am quite pessimistic about future ones.
And if you are really saying that you consider 2011 to be faster release than the previous ones, then you have no idea what you are talking about. I admit its more stable, but its probably the slowest and least responsive release in history of 3ds max.
Shane Griffith
Posted 21 February 2011 6:30 pm
Shane Griffith
Posted 21 February 2011 6:42 pm
Recon442
Posted 21 February 2011 7:08 pm
Anyways, i think that main viewport problem causing slowdown when scene contains a lot of objects is not specific for certain cards. That is issue almost everyone experiences. If you got a huge scene with hundreds of objects, and then you attach them all to a single mesh, performance shoots up sometimes even by thousands of percent. I have heard autodesk employees say it is hard to optimize viewport for such a wide range of GPUs or that its fault of people who make drivers. But how is it possible that for example viewport technology in softimage does not experience these problems ?
I know next release of max is all about viewport, and i am really happy about that. But after all those years of this kind of problems, my enthusiasm for new releases has gone cold.
Jonathan de Blok
Posted 22 February 2011 11:25 am
I assume 3dsmax doesn't talk to a GPU directly but uses the directX-api for viewport rendering.. so in theory if your card/drivers support the used directX functions you're good to go, if you have enough memory.
A gaming company doesn't require certain card models, they support a certain openGL or DirectX version, sometimes a minimum drivers version as well, and their 3d is way more advanced then what goes in a pre max2012 viewport.
So I wouldn't worry to much about the supported card list, in the last 10 years I have never had a supported card I think. sure sometimes it needed a little tweaking in the settings to get it to work properly but it always worked out.
raymarcher
Posted 22 February 2011 11:33 am
k4noe
Posted 23 February 2011 5:52 am
which windows version do you use
x64 or x32, windows XP or Vista, or se7en
timd1971
Posted 23 February 2011 6:18 am
http://www.raylightgames.com/xrayunwrap/videos.html
what i can't figure out, is why hasn't it been this easy and straightforward before?
Gryp Master
Posted 24 February 2011 4:57 am
k4noe
Posted 26 February 2011 5:08 pm
ficolo
Posted 2 March 2011 11:50 am
ficolo
Posted 2 March 2011 11:50 am
tadland
Posted 5 March 2011 9:17 am
so.. i guess we'll have to wait 2013 to have it on nitrous ?
Shane Griffith
Posted 3 October 2011 8:01 am
Kristoffer Helander
Posted 3 October 2011 8:35 am
By the way, Zap Andersson is an awesome tutor, you should have him make video tutorials for mental ray and iray, because it can be very tricky to get your head around those things!
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