The Max Underground team would like to wish all our readers from around the world a Happy New Year!!! Here's to a great 2002!
Check out Google's 2001 top search terms to see what has "captivated the world over the past 12 months".

The trailer to the long-awaited French feature film Kaena (formerly known as Axis) is available for download. Kaena is being co-produced by Paris-based Chaman Productions, Studio Canal and TVA International. More than 70 CG artists have been using 3ds max (and various plugins) to create the all-CG film which is scheduled for release in mid-2002.

VFXPro has another very interesting article on the special FX created for The Fellowship of the Ring. (Login required.)

CGW.com has an article on Weta Digital's work for the first Lord of the Rings movie.

More great images (all by 3ds max users) have been added to Raph.com, including a couple of very nice 3D sculptures by Tobias Dahlén. Check 'em out!

Procedural Shaders
Vertex Painting a Drain Pipe (SimbiontMax tutorial)
How to do animated grass
HDRI & Luminance space

Two of the Blur Studios team talk about their work on Return to Castle Wolfenstein and upcoming projects, including a feature film, Mindbridge.

Michael Bailey has written a Cook-Torrance metal shader which gives users much more control over the appearance of a metal material. Unfortunately it's not compatible with the MAX Raytrace material yet but the author is working on a new version. R3 or R4 versions available.

Autodesk has released VIZ 4 with a new integrated version of Lightscape, among many other features. Check out Autodesk's site for details.

Digital Producer has a detailed five-page review of Vegas Video 3: "When you see your Mac friends getting all starry-eyed over the new Final Cut Pro 3, rest assured that the PC side has a software package that's every bit as good, and in some ways, better [...] I give it a ten out of ten".
Millimeter magazine has a great comparative review of four camera-tracking programs - MatchMover, Boujou, SynaMatch, and SceneGenie: "From a price performance point of view, [SceneGenie's] CameraGenie is the hands down winner in our four-product evaluation".

The Reyes family of plugins is finally available for Max 4. These include the well-known MetaReyes 5.0 (metamuscle modeling and animation), ClothReyes 3.11 (features tearable cloth and dynamic rigid bodies), CartoonReyes 2.0 (cartoon renderer), JetaReyes 1.4 (gesture synthesis system), SurfReyes 1.3 (subdivision surfaces modeling tool), DirtyReyes 1.6 (object weathering) and their new non-photorealistic renderer NPR1. Price for the whole package is $491 (plugins are also available separately).
Read on for more.   [ more... ]

Chaos Group have announced the pricing scheme and a scheduled release date of end of February for their VRay GI renderer. Prices for VRay are as follows:
- Free: $0 - Most advanced features will be disabled. Users will still be able to render properly and enjoy the fast raytracer.
- Basic: $299 - Most advanced features will be included. Distributed rendering and some features will be disabled.
- Advanced: $799 - All features will be available including distributed rendering.

New stereoscopic-enabling source code being researched at Intel allows computers to recognize depth and break out individual objects in 3D space. More information at Digit Magazine and Intel.com.

Gamasutra has three great articles that deal with character design and animation, including a guide to motion capture. (Registration required, but worth it.)

The Sound of Time is a new software that automatically synchronizes moving image with sound, creating a potentially infinite number of variations in motion, sound, and their nexus. This new system alters the concept of editing by automatically synchronizing unrelated audio and visual tracks.
Read the whole PR at Digitalproducer.com.

Brazil was used by Andrew Harron to create a test raytrace image that has over 100 million polygons in thousands of raytraced glasses. Read on for the Stats.   [ more... ]

Sitni Sati has published more information on its upcoming natural scenery plugin. DreamScape will include the ability to generate atmospheric effects (Daylight, Sky, Clouds, Rainbow), SubSurface atmospherics (realistic underwater scenery) and Sunlight (rayrace shadows, area shadows). A Terrain texture map is also provided that will let users apply different texmaps based on elevation and/or slope. Read on for more.   [ more... ]

New "The Clock" animation created with Max posted at Anibyte's website.

Check out this beautiful animation done by Rune Spaans for a TV commercial using Max (the last scene with the photorealistic bottle was rendered with Brazil). The final version of the animation consisted of 20 layers which were later composited in post.

Next finalRender update to feature enhanced rendering speed with cleaner results. Thomas Suurland has created an animation with a pre-release version of the update (which is due soon as a free release to owners of finalRender). Each frame of the animation was generated in 31 seconds.

Here's the official word from Phil Miller, Vice President, Product Management Group at Discreet, about the recent restructuring happening at discreet.

Illusion, the realtime particle generator, has a new website.

Visit CGArchitect for a review of Viz 4.

Just a link.

Paulo de Andrade is writing a series of articles on Digital Filmmaking. The latest article concentrates on using color correction tools to emulate film balance on footage shot on video.

RE:Vision FX has released RE:Flex, a morphing and warping plugin set for After Effects 5.0. RE:Flex uses After Effects' own drawing and masking tools to direct the warping and morphing and allows for the animation of these geometric tools in order to achieve a non-constant speed of morphing. Introductory price is $395.00 (valid through January 1, 2001).

Read the whole PR.

Read the whole PR.

"When will people learn that without a viable storyline, the movie has a better chance of going down the road to nowhere..." Read the article at DigitalProducer.com.

3DStation reviews Reactor dynamics plugin (French).

Digimation is running a set of holiday specials for :
· Their own plugins at over $150 at a 30% discount through December 21st.
· finalRender for $550 ($145 or ~21% savings) through December 19th (limited supply)
· Life Forms Studio XT at $247 (50% savings) through December 31st
· Elsa Gloria DCC Power Bundle at $995 through January 31st 2002   [ more... ]

MindAvenue launches of AXELcore 1.5 and AXELedge 1.5, new versions of their complete authoring solution for high impact, programming-free, and interactive 3D Web content creation. New features include video texture support, new cartoon and wireframe rendering capabilities, and a streamlined user interface for enhanced workflow. Full press release.

Di-O-Matic just update its website with more infos, images and animations about the upcoming Facial Studio. Read the press release here.

Kaydara has released the latest version of its real-time 3D motion editing and character animation software.   [ more... ]

Adobe is licensing Sonic's DVD authoring technology as the foundation of a new Adobe-branded DVD authoring application. Read the whole PR.

Digit Magazine reviews Swift3D 2.0 vector 3D creation package for the Web.

SplutterFish will be demo'ing Brazil r/s at Motion Media's Open House on Wednedsay, Dec. 12. The Open House is from 2pm to 10pm at Motion Media (1874 Centinela Ave / Santa Monica, CA) - Parking in the area is a little hard to come by until after 5:30. Food, Prizes, etc. More info in this word doc. RSVP by sending and email to rsvp@motionmedia.com.

Dimension DESIGN Animation Group [chaoticdimension|ddag home] “formed a special division committed to game development for mobile devices. It's called Garga Games, both on PC and WAP devices. So far two WAP games and one game for CASIO PocketViewer are available. More games for different mobile platforms are coming soon.”

Ace's Hardware have a guide to 'budget' workstations online, including limited benchmarks under the popular 3D applications.

“Professional 3D Accelerators in 3D Studio MAX 3.1
Among 5 tested accelerators there are, in fact, only two - FireGL2 and GeForce3, which provide an appropriate performance for the 3D MAX. If the GeForce3 get its own API for the 3D MAX, it will be the fastest accelerator. The FireGL2 provides good quality and speed though there are some errors, but they are not fatal.”
  [ more... ]

Sitni Sati has posted more information and images on their upcoming DreamScape plugin for Max 4. The new plugin will enable users to create realistic landscapes, various atmospheric conditions, layered clouds and sea surfaces (the results produced by the algorithm resemble Arete's DNT-generated surfaces). According to Max3D, the plugin provides various paint tools for modifying the terrain and uses its own renderer to generate the images, which allows for the rendering of complex terrains with a fast performance and low memory requirements.

Kieron Helsdon has started a list of movies that have used 3ds max (& 3ds) over the years. If you have information to add to the list you can email him at kieron@groundzerofx.com.

Discreet is offering a series of free two-day intensive hands-on training sessions on Combustion 2, the latest version of its unified paint, animation and 3D compositing software, which is scheduled to ship at the end of this year. The sessions will take place at selected Discreet Training Centres across Europe, Middle East and Africa during December 2001 through January 2002 (the first one is in Bagnolet, France on Dec. 10).

Check out this amazing trailer by Tomek Baginski at Platige Image's website.

Discreet is offering promotional upgrade prices for Max 1.x and 2.x users who upgrade to release 4 before January 15, 2002 (there's also an extra promotion for those who upgrade before Dec. 31, 2001). There's no mention of what happens if users do not upgrade by that date.

Stuart Feldman, Product Manager for Autodesk VIZ and Lightscape has posted some information at the Lightscape webboard where he lets users know what's new in Autodesk VIZ 4. The posting mentions a new "pixel regathering" functionality that captures all the subtle shadows from indirect lighting (that cannot be captured in a radiosity mesh) and eliminates most of the artifacts that you can get with Lightscape - floating objects, light leaks and shadow leaks. Check out all the information at CGarchitect.com.

Eagle Research's WaveAnalyzer can control and synchronize a 3D graphics animation based on the frequencies of its sound track. Check out some sample animations at Eagle Research's website. Demo version available for download.

Chaotic Dimension has posted an update to their hair generation plugin. The update fixes several bugs and adds a new feature for helping in the creation of feathers. Release 3 and 4 builds available.

Snoswell Design's Absolute Character Tools muscle and skinning plugin is nearing its release date. More information on the plugin has been posted at ACT's website and new media can be found at ACT's gallery and Digimation's Beta site.

The new version of Final Cut Pro allows for real-time playback of transitions and effects (on a Mac G4 machine) without the need for extra PCI hardware. Read the details at Digit Magazine and Apple's website.

Architectural Record has a short article on the upcoming Autodesk Viz 4: "The big news in Viz 4 is its elegantly done (...) integrated global illumination rendering technology". Rumored release date is middle of December.
Computer Arts reviews After Effects 5.5.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back, but in 3d this time, check out the CG pilot here, created by Rainbow Studios.

Pepeland is updated with a new free IK model nammed "BOPED". BOPED is a IK skeleton (alpha version) for 3ds Max 4.2, with some very cool features. Check it out in www.pepeland.com

Illustrate! 5.2 and Morph-O-Matic 1.02 are now available in a special Bundle from Digimation, for $495 US (that’s $100 off the list if purchased separately).  This new combination of tools give artists the ability to create sophisticated morphing animation and render it out with a ‘toon’ look, and during the Digimation 9th Anniversary celebration, be sure to take advantage of even lower special pricing that lasts until December 21st.

Sonic Foundry has announced the release of its video and audio editing software. Improvements in version 3.0 include a new Sonic Foundry DV Codec, new MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 Encoder, more Video Effects and Generators, Video Batch Capture with Scene Detection and Print-To-Tape From Timeline capabilities.

Adobe will release version 5.5 of its compositing software in Q1, 2002. New features include an enhanced version of the 3D workspace introduced in 5.0, multiple-views, projection layers, coloured shadows and the ability to import 3D camera information from Max. Read the whole PR.

Phoenix-based Rainbow Studios recreated a newly-found species of dinosaurs in 3D and provided nearly 10 minutes of animation for the documentary titled The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt, by MPH Entertainment and Cosmos Studios (Cosmos Studios as in Carl Sagan's Cosmos - just follow the link :-). Read the article at CGW.com.

A projection-based technology gets more people into virtually enhanced worlds. Read the article at CGW.com.

SceneWeaver is designed to create photorealistic, interactive 3D Web environments that export to Macromedia Director. It helps users create 360-degree panoramic models by combining a series of overlapping still images. The end result can be viewed over the Web by ShockWave users.

CGW has an article on how animator Umesh Shukla used RE:Vision Effects Video Gogh and Side Effects' Houdini to create "Still I Rise", a short film with an impressionist painterly look.

The DivX Indie Film Licensing Program is a special program that allows independent filmmakers to license DivX video technology at no cost for certain types of limited commercial use. DivX compression technology enables full-screen near-DVD quality digital video at 7 to 10 times greater compression than MPEG-2 files.

VRay free public beta program has started today, Dec. 01, 2001. Everyone is invited to participate. VRay features include caustics, depth of field, different methods of illumination simulation, adaptive antialiasing, etc.

Chaotic Dimension have updated their website gallery with some images produced with their upcoming V-Ray renderer and some stills from the animation Blur Studio produced for this year's SIGGRAPH (with a 2001 theme).

A new animated series created entirely with 3ds max is coming to the ABC Family channel. Donner was conceived by Kevin Munroe, who also wrote the script, designed all the characters, backgrounds and props and produced the animation working with a team of ten animators from Rainbow Studios. The result is some "genuinely slapstick 2D-style animation inside the 3D realm". Read the article at Animation Magazine (which has some great pictures and drawings from the series) and don't forget to check out the schedules for the television show.

Borislav Petrov's Maxscripting resource is up again. The site is now being hosted by ScriptSpot, the new address is www.scriptspot.com/bobo.