8

What’s New in 3ds max 8 xv
•The bone twist controls (page 2–839) ,
previously limited to the biped’s forearm, have
been expanded to include all limbs and a twist
bias setting has b een added. These new settings
allow better mesh deformation on skinned
models (using Physique or Skin) when twisting
occurs on animated limbs.
•Withexpandedsupportformotion-capture
data on fingers, toes and neck, finer motion
detail can be captured for hands and feet,
allowing for more subtle animation in a
notoriously difficult area of animation,
including bendable toes.
•Supportfornewmotioncaptureformats
including HTR Import and Export, support
for 3ds Max bones, and TRC data import.
TRC data, an excellent format for capturing
subtledetailssuchasfacialanimation,canalso
be converted via a utility to CSM, the biped
motion format.
• The new Map Animation dialog for loading
XML animation data includes
retargeting (page
3–486)
functionality for assigning animation
between very different ty p es of characters.
• Thebiped’sFigureModepostureisnow
independent from the biped’s animation.
Figure Mode spine, tail, and ponytails postures
arenolongeraddedasoffsetstothebipedkeys.
General Animation
•Thenew Limit Cont roller (p age 2–319) lets you
layeralimitontopofamotioncurvewiththe
ability to ease and out of the limit.
• Numerous Track View improvements,
including
Track Sets (page 2–568) (like named
select ion sets), new
Auto Expand (page 2–502)
options, and new Hierarch y right-click menu
(page 2–495)
commands.
•The
Motion Mixer toolset (page 2–580) from
character studio has been fully integrated into
3ds Max, letting you create nonlinear animation
w ith al l objects.
• You can save and load XML-based animation
data for any number of object s sep arately
from the actual scene, w ith versatile mapping
options. See
Saving and Loading Animation
(page 3–477)
.
• Youcannowsetananimationtrackwitha
parametriccontroller,suchasNoise,to
apply
only to the current animation range (page
2–527)
or to ignore it (page 2–526) ,thus
repeating infinitely.
•Set
Default In/Out Tangents for new keys (page
3–764)
in the main program interface.
• Import and export motion-analysis files in
the HTR format and import TRC-format
motion-analysis files.
Mapping
• The Unwrap UVW modifier has been
substantia lly modified to provide new features
and enhanced workflow, including the
powerful new Pelt mapping feature. For a list of
significant changes, see
What’s New in Unwrap
UVW (page 1–868)
.
Rendering
•The Batch Render tool (page 3–200) provides
an efficient, visual approach to setting up t asks
when you want to render without having to be
in front of the computer.
•
mental ray 3.4 (page 3–77) delivers numerous
optimizations, including faster final gathering
performance, double precision computation
for ray tracing and fast rasterization for
first-generation rays. mental ray 3.4 also
adds Satellite Rendering, which lets you
deplo y up to eight slave CPU s to render an
image with distributed bucket rendering; see