Bake3D is a small utility designed for baking 3D texture maps into 2D bitmaps. The original idea was to use it to generate displacement maps for VRay, but it's quite useful on its own too (note: for best results with Bake3D and VRay displacement, you will need VRay 1.08.04k or later)

Bake3D consists of two parts: a UV-coordinates generator, which takes a mesh and generates UV coordinates for it, and a texmap renderer which samples the 3D texture and converts it to a bitmap to use with the generated UV-coordinates. The two parts of Bake3D are not connected and can be used independently

Changes for v1.08.04k are:
- Some compatibility issues with SimbiontMAX 2 were solved
- Light include/exclude with groups of objects now works
- Using irradiance maps with reflective and refractive materials caused blotches in the rendering - Fixed
- Some multi-threading problems which could cause VRay to hang are hopefully resolved
- Motion blur on objects that change topology now renders with the motion blur resulting from matrix animation
- VRay area shadows and lights did not filter opacity maps properly - Fixed
- Displacement mapping is enhanced with some new parameters
- Displacement mapping has changed slightly to ensure better compatibility with Bake3D

SplutterFish have escaped from the Delphi forums and set up their own support forum for Brazil and other SplutterFish projects. Anyone can register and join. You can find it here.

Chaos Group have set up their own free support forum for VRay. It is intended to give all users support on Chaos Group products. Anyone can register and join. You can find it here.

Changes for v1.037 are:
- TurnTool Viewer now smaller than ever at a mere 124K initial download
- 7% faster rendering speed. Further optimizations have made TurnTool even faster
- Support for map channel selected
- Vertex colors can be used for precalculated lighting in unlit scenes
- Restraining of the camera controller to a specified angle interval
- LookAtV object property. Modifies the LookAt flag to only work in one direction

Changes for v1.08.04g are:
- Fixes some numerical problems that could cause dropped faces during rendering

Changes for v5.0 are:
- Optimization lets you keep object symmetry
- Advanced parameters that offer control on face compactness and normals inversion
- Improvements in the order faces are optimized
- New viewer interface
- New commands access menus
- New commands shortcuts
- Fit on screen command
- Save as... features
- New texture file formats support
- New setup software
- Help improvement, due to the addition of a lot of concrete examples.

Polygon Cruncher is available for Max 3 and 4, and costs $99. A demo version is available here.

Oops, I seem to have missed this one...

Enables Max to export models for Carmageddon TDR2000. This plugin is part of the TDR2000 SDK.

Pandora takes the power of the basic Max particle systems and adds in several new and unique abilities to expand your creative possibilities. Pandora is actually a total of seven plugins. This includes the Pandora Particle System, Pandora Material, and five new Space Warps.

The form on the Digimation download page doesn't mention the Max 4 version yet, but it does exist.

The XFrog Plugin is a combination of procedural object and importer plugin which enables Max to import XFrog *.XFR files. After import the model should show up in your viewports fully textured. The importer inserts a procedural object which reads the data from the file you indicated and creates the geometry inside Max. It also creates a multi-sub material containing the original surfacing information from the XFrog file. The material can be freely edited once it has been created.

Xfrog is a popular solution for modeling trees, plants, and many other organic forms. For more information on XFrog, go here.

Morph Toolkit is a series of very handy tools that are designed to help you while creating morph targets and morph animation. The tools inside of Morph ToolKit do not rely on any morphing systems, so you can use them with the built-in Morpher, Morph-O-Matic or any other morphing systems.

The plugins included in Morph ToolKit are:
- Attach-O-Matic, a new compound object type, lets you attach objects together but still gives access to the modifier stack of each attached object. This way you can always access all your parameters.
- Copy-O-Matic, a powerful tool which lets you copy vertex selections and positions from one object to other objects, and also lets you mirror copy them, which is very handy while doing morph targets. Now you can simply morph on only one half of your models, and Copy-O-Matic will do the rest.
- Link-O-Matic, a new type of constraint, lets you link objects to vertices of others objects. You can for example use Link-O-Matic to link teeth to the chin. This way there is no need to include teeth in your morphs, and when the jaw opens, the teeth will automatically follow.

The Morph ToolKit is available for Max 4 and costs $199. There isn't a demo version yet, but Di-O-Matic have posted some videos demonstrating the different plugins.

This is an import plugin which allows PDB-Molecule (Protein Data Base) files to be imported into MAX. The ATOM, HETATM, and CONECT records are supported; all other types of records are ignored. For very large molecules, only the first 300 atoms are shown. If an atom has alternate locations, all locations are shown.

Changes for v1.08.04f are:
- Objects with visibility set to 0 in frame 0 did not render at all - Fixed.
- Total internal reflections were ignored when glossy refraction was used - Fixed.
- Setting Refraction glossiness to 1.0 makes Translucency almost twice as fast.
- Additional fog parameter 'Affect shadows' added to the VRay material.
- Additional parameter 'MAX-compatible shade context' added to the System roll-up.
- VRay is compiled with Visual C++ 6.0 SP5 which gives a few percent speed-up.

Paralelo Computação have updated all of their Fly3D import and export plugins to work with the Release Candidate 2c of their Fly3D game engine.

Snoswell Design are offering a preorder special on Absolute Character Tools v1.5. By ordering now, you pay only $890 instead of the full price of $995.

Changes for v1.7.5 are:
- The 'ambient only' attribute of lights is now supported
- Sometimes max produces trim curves that are partially reversed and this causes the maxman render to not show the trim. Fixed.

Changes for v1.7.5 are:
- The 'ambient only' attribute of lights is now supported
- Sometimes max produces trim curves that are partially reversed and this causes the maxman render to not show the trim. Fixed.

In case any of you are having problems loading these pages at the moment, here's the reason: my hoster can't seem to get mySQL working properly...They are supposedly installing newer faster SQL servers that will bring everything back to normal, so hopefully the site will soon be fast again :o)
Dave

nPower Software have released some information about their upcoming Power Solids plugin. They will also be giving demos at the Digimation booth and the IntegrityWare booth at Siggraph 2002.

Changes for v1.01 are:
- Now supports Alpha in DDS images.
- Recompiled for Max 4.2 (thanks to Todd Kuehnl from High Voltage Software)

The source code for the plugin is also available at the nVidia Developer site.

Paralelo Computação have updated all of their Fly3D import and export plugins to work with the Release Candidate 2b of their Fly3D game engine.

This release fixes the following problems:
- Fixed a bug that was flipping texture coordinates in the 'v' direction on the max import/export plugins and prevented the correct use of texture clamp and stretch/rotate shader parameters.

EON Raptor Web Studio (Raptor) is a plugin that enables you to display and interact Max content in real-time with intuitive controls. Simple interactive behaviors can easily be authored without opening additional programs outside Max.

EON Raptor is seamlessly integrated within Max and translates with a simple push of a button geometry, textures, lights and key-frames. Once animations have been created in Max, interactivity can easily be created inside Max and published FREE to the Internet using Raptor's wizard driven webpublisher.

Keyfeatures:
- Fully integrated real-time viewing within Max 4 (no expensive hardware required)
- Create interactive key-frame animations (objects and/or camera)
- Simple wizard driven web publishing
- FREE Web and CD-ROM publishing

Raptor is available for Max 4 and costs $499. EON have posted a version which can be tested for FREE until the 15th of June. You can download it here.

Changes for v1.08.04 are:
- Improved motion blur
- Improved irradiance maps
- Increased compatibility with XDof
- Several bugfixes

Changes for v0.4.5a are:
- Time Bomb extended to 30 June 2002
- Corrected a minor bug

Changes for v1.01.15 are:
- New option Translucency in the Hair Shader
- Behavior for non-hair objects improved
- New plugin object called WaveWind. This is the standard Wind warp, with the additional option to control strength with a 3D texture map
- Separate Quality spinner in the Hair Shadows
- Option in Hair Shadows to do faster filtering, at the cost of a little lower quality
- Rendering speed optimization
- Fixes a strange crash bug when rendering on dual-CPU machines
- Fixed Combustion crash caused by Shag G-Buffer output
- The modeling cutters did not work when Fix Shape was enabled - Fixed
- Fixed unneeded hair geometry generation when saving Max scenes or opening the object properties dialog
- The 'Copy from internal render buffers' option in the Shag G-buffer render effect can now output the Velocity channel
- Restricting cutters are faster in the viewports
- Fixed missing ShagView's in light include/exclude lists
- Added an error message when memory allocation fails during render

You can get the patches here (R4.x) and here (R3.x).

Paralelo Computação have updated all of their Fly3D import and export plugins to work with the Release Candidate 2a of their Fly3D game engine.

This fixes the following problems:
- Max export FMP plugin would crash if none of the scene objects included a material (object material set to NULL)
- Fixed the bug where the import and export FMP plugins were not loading on Max startup.

Changes for v5.0 are:
- Adds 2 new functions, GetRegistrySetting and SetRegistrySetting. These obviously Get/Set a value to the Windows registry. Yes, beware...

Di-O-Matic, Inc. has released information on the upcoming plugin Morph ToolKit.

Morph ToolKit is series of very handy tools that are designed to help you while creating morph targets and morph animation. The tools inside of Morph ToolKit does not rely on any morphing systems, so you can use them with the build-in Morpher, Morph-O-Matic or any other morphing systems.

The plugins include in Morph ToolKit are:
Attach-O-Matic, a new compound object type, let you attach objects together but it still gives you access to the modifier stack of each attached objects, this way you can always access all your parameters.

Copy-O-Matic, a powerful tool, let you copy vertex selections and positions, from object to other objects, and let you also do a mirror copy of them, which is very handy while doing morph targets, so you can simply now do morph on only one half of your models, and Copy-O-Matic will do the rest.

Link-O-Matic, a new type of constraints, let you link object to vertices of others objects. You can for example use Link-O-Matic to link teeth to the chin, this way you won't have to include teeth in your morphs, and when the jaw will open, the teeth will automatically follow.

Suggested retail price is $199, and the plugin will be available soon. It is well worth taking a look at the demo videos.