Geoff Alder
In this blog, I will be looking at what’s new in 3ds Max 2022 for the AEC. There were two primary features that caught my eye when looking at some of the new features, particularly for the workflow that visualisers have, starting with Revit models.
Most recently in my training courses with Revit to 3ds Max visualisation many people were asking about the workflow needed to get the Revit models suitable for presentation and display in VR and AR applications. There is a lot of talk expressing that clients want to display Revit models in real-time, and this may be through Game engine technology. Both Unity and Unreal Engine are very comprehensive applications in this area of real-time render. Another aspect is that the clients need capacity to show options and create a more interactive immersive experience and not just a 3d viewer.
In my new features review video I have looked at the features that are useful in this workflow. The first question I am asked when preparing Revit models for visualisation is the method and capacity to change the Revit materials to something more “realistic.” The question of texture tiling in the Revit render and the fact that surfaces that are meant to be quite bumpy are still flat and not very convincing.
In the image below we have a simple Revit scene with a stone wall with wall lamps shining down the wall. The Revit render setting is just the draft setting. Nothing is really added just the photometric light files are replaced with ies data that shows a defined illuminated shape on the wall.
This was a quick render to see how the lights reacted on the wall. Importing the model into 3ds max was the next step.
After importing the file into 3ds max I then used the scene converter from the render menu and converted the Revit material to Physical materials and the camera to a Physical camera. The Photometric lights will work in a 3ds max scene.
The new feature “Bake to Texture” in 3ds Max 2022 is a feature that came in a 2021 update which I believe it is quite stable now.
In this feature I created a “Normals” map to use as a bump to my stone wall.
The process was to create a high polygon version of the wall and project the normal tangents from the high poly version to the low poly version that will be used in the real-time render or even the production render.
This process was achieved using the new Bake to texture feature.
The Low polygon model has just six faces. The front, sides, top and bottom. The high polygon model has 66,000 polygons.
The texture created with the new bake to texture and the colour maps can be seen here:
The result gives a particularly good bump or relief effect on a very low polygon model.
I rendered the stone wall in 3ds Max with the included renderer Arnold.
In the review video I look at the realtime render effect of using the baked normal map in a physical material displayed in the 3ds max viewport with GPU viewport render active.
The other tool, I have been waiting quite a few years for is for the “Slice Modifier” feature to be working well.
We have had the simple slice tool for while, but now to include an internal cap option that allows to give the cap a texture and for me more importantly allow the slice to be animated.
In my example here I used the slice and animated the Revit wall growing out of the drawing sheet. It also has the hatch pattern of a cut wall on the capped surface. This was a texture that I was able to add to the capped surface.
The animated slice works very well in the animation as it does build the polygons of the surface cleanly, and I did not get animated flicker as the wall was appearing.
These are just two features that are available now in the 3ds Max 2022 release and they work well and fit into an AEC visualisation workflow.
I hope you found this article useful in looking at the new features and updates made to Autodesk's 3ds Max 2022 version release!
Watch our video below to see these new features in action:
To learn more about 3ds Max, please visit our product page or call us on 0345 370 1444 or email info@symetri.co.uk.
