VIZ 2005

Ted Boardman tedb@tbmax.com         http://www.tbmax.com


Finally, in the middle of April the cold rainy weather broke long enough for me to sit on the porch in relative comfort one afternoon. Not that I haven’t seen some nice weather, it’s just that it hasn’t been while I’m home. This spring has been a busy travel time for me and I’ve seen 102 degree F temperatures in Palm Springs, CA, low 70’s in San Francisco, mid 80’s in Atlanta and Alabama and, this week, the high 90’s in the Temecula Valley of southern California.

I really like the “newness” of spring. In New Hampshire the first red, green, and yellow buds are showing on the trees giving the woods the slightest tinge of color in varying shades and the grasses are beginning to green in the damp areas to give some visual depth to the last gray-brown landscape of late winter.

In May I traveled to Amsterdam for a few days and had a chance to meet with Marc Heesterbeek, Fermi Bertran, Gonçarlo Próspero, and their wives. The weather there was close to perfect, especially for sitting out in the many outdoor cafés for a freshly tapped Grolsch or Heiniken.

In all my travels, along with Jeff Mottle’s travels to Copenhagen in May, last month’s column fell by the wayside but I should be back on schedule for the rest of the summer.

The program is now very similar to Discreet 3ds max 6; minus sub-object animation, particle systems, reactor dynamics, and a few other features that rely on these major areas to function properly. The Interface is almost exactly the same and the files generated are compatible. This is fantastic news for the end user as it makes integration with max much easier for those offices that use both programs in production.

Having a common interface and file compatibility also opens the door for many more useful tutorials that previously were just too difficult to adapt for one program or the other. You will benefit from sharing workflow methods used in other disciplines from computer games to film and video techniques. This is especially important to me personally because it means that my 3ds max 5 Fundamentals and 3ds max 6 Fundamentals books by New Riders Publishing, which have many exercises based on architectural examples, are now much more relevant for VIZ 2005 users.

Animation

New animation features like SetKey mode and AutoTangent velocity control make it much easier to create initial animation keys without excess anticipation and follow-through secondary motion that made animation in Autodesk VIZ 4 so frustrating at times. More new animation controllers and constraints, including a reworked Look-At constraint make it easier to set up complex animations like industrial or mechanical systems. The Track view has been separated into two new dialogs; a Curve Editor for manipulating animation function curves, and a Dope Sheet for editing keys and range bars for animations. With more VIZ users becoming interested in animations these new features should help reduce the learning curve significantly.

Materials

Material enhancements include a new Architectural material type that is sort of a “paint-by-the-numbers” approach that allows new users to quickly create reasonably good scene materials with preset parameters without learning anything about materials. That makes a great marketing tool for the VIZ dealers and gives new users some instant gratification. However, start learning to use the Material Editor as quickly as possible to create your own materials that will differentiate you from your competition. One small thing worth mentioning in the Material Editor is that the Bricks procedural map has been renamed Tiles and the default settings have been changed. It is the same map, however, and the name change was implemented to break new users from thinking the map was only for creating bricks. It can be used for any tiled pattern so the new name is more appropriate.

Modeling

A great new modifier called the Shell modifier is included in VIZ 2005. It allows you to take objects with no “thickness”, i.e. objects made of one layer of faces, and offset a new surface to the inside or the outside of the original mesh. There is also an option to define new edges of the surface with a spline. Figure 1 shows a simple vase made with a spline and the Lathe modifier. As you can see in the Perspective viewport, the object has no thickness and the face normals cause the inside surface to be invisible. In the Front viewport you can also see a S-shaped curve that will be used with the Shell modifier.

Figure 1: Spline with Lathe modifier. Object has no thickness.

Figure 2: Shell modifier with Bevel Edges and Straighten Corners options enabled.

Do not use the Shell modifier frivolously though as it can easily double or triple the face count of objects, something that architects especially don’t need. However, remember that when using Radiosity and Photometric lights, “open” objects with no thickness are not correctly processed. To clarify, a primitive sphere is a “closed” object and doesn’t need thickness to be processed correctly.

Object creation and editing methods know as box or polygon modeling are greatly improved in both functionality and workflow and will allow you to create models ranging from generic buildings to soft furniture quickly and, most importantly, with a very controlled polygon count for efficient rendering.

Polygon modeling was designed as a tool for computer game creators primarily and the objects are created by manipulating quad polygons rather than the triangular faces we are familiar with. The polygon modeling workflow has great potential for architectural and engineering work though. I have quickly created objects like the buildings shown in Figure 3, coffered ceilings and other honeycomb structures.

Figure 3: Buildings with multi-paned windows created quickly from boxes using VIZ2005 Polygon modeling techniques.

Scene Management

For those of you who use the Linking to Autocad or ADT files, the Link Manager has been improved from what I’ve heard, but I don’t have any direct experience with it. I’m still of the belief that it is initially more productive to take the time to learn modeling in VIZ for more control over the density of your meshes and greater flexibility in editing and to use linking for those projects or parts of projects where it really makes sense…but that’s a topic for another day!
Layer management has been greatly improved in VIZ 2005 making it easier to create new layers containing all currently selected objects and to move objects from one later to another. I find it particularly helpful to manage the meshing of objects in Radiosity solutions by layer.

Rendering

The Mental Ray global illumination renderer is built into VIZ 2005 and will allow some very interesting rendering and lighting techniques to be used. Approach the use of Mental Ray slowly to learn its myriad of controls and adjustments on simple scenes and work your way up to more complex scenes and materials and lighting. See Figure 4 for an example of Mental Ray rendering.

Figure 4: Mental Ray image with more convincing shadows and reflections at a cost of much longer render times than the same scene with the Radiosity renderer.

One of the Mental Ray shaders that might be cost effectively implemented in the architectural and mechanical disciplines is the Contour shader that allows you to render a “hidden line” type image. See Figure 5.

Figure 5: Same scene rendered using Mental Ray Simple Contour shader for a shaded “hidden line” look.

Render to Texture is another process included with VIZ 2005. This allows you to “bake” the materials and lighting, including shadows, into the vertices of a mesh object. Once the information has be baked in you can then remove all the lights and render the scene again much more quickly because all the lighting and shadows do not have to be recalculated. This could significantly speed the processing of animated scenes and allow scenes to be exported to real-time viewers.

Summary

That’s a look at a few of the features of Autodesk VIZ 2005. In some of the upcoming columns I’ll introduce a few tutorials and techniques that will help make use of these new features in a cost effective manner. New features of any software are only useful if they make you more money, right?

In the mean time, good luck and have fun.

Ted

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