Max 2009 and 3ds Max Design 2009

Congratulations we have twins. This morning, Autodesk announces the birth of two versions 3ds Max 2009 and 3ds Max Design 2009 . These twin applications will share the same binary (DNA), either then small differences , they would be identical. The main defense would be differences into interface and precepts that will be geared towards the target industry (Design Visualizations will be the design version and Gaming and Media & Entertainment would be the regular Max). Except for a couple of tools, the tool sets are going to be identical. The big difference would be that Max 2009 would have the SDK included for users that need to write their own plug-ins, and Max Design will have a new Lighting analysis tool which will have values in the graphic representation (an answer to the many requests of some of our local users).
There are many new tools and improvements throughout the application from new lighting tools, exciting new material libraries and material tools animation and Biped tools ,many improvements to Mental Ray (including Proxy Object), a much tighter connection to Revit 2009, and many more (I will share them all with you as soon as it is legally possible).
These news will be accompanied with more news of improvements in other M&E applications especially for subscription users. All of which you can find here in the next few weeks, as they are released for publication

Exposing the Mental Ray Production Shaders in Max 2008

As promised, here is the way to expose the production shaders that exist in the max.mi.
CAUTION this is for you advanced users out there. Please save a copy of the max .mi before you change it scenes at the moment. There is no support for this part of Max

1. find the file called>> production_max.mi
2. open in notepad
3. do a search and replace
find "hidden" replace with # "hidden"
EXCEPT FOR THE FIRST ENTRY!!!!!!
The result is that the MI Production Shadersare exposed to Mental Ray.

These include:
mr Raytype Switcher
mr Raytype Switcher (advanced)
mr Raytype Switcher (environment)
mr Card Opacity
mr Motion Blur
mr Motion Vector Export
mr Matte/Shadow/Reflection (map)
mr Camera Map
mr Mirror Ball
mr Gray Ballmr Gamma & Gain
mr Matte/Shadow/Reflection (material)
mr Gamma
mr Gain

Combustion 2008

After a long anticipation we finally have a new version of Combustion to bring us into the age of HD. The new improvements in Combustion 2008 concentrate in two area's a new Color Wrap and improvements to the Schematics:

• Interactive adjustment of gamma, gain, offset, hue, saturation, and contrast
• Intuitive hue shift and tint color wheel for fast, accurate color balancing.
• Interactive Histogram and curves editing modes
• Independent controls for color correcting the image’s shadow, midtone, and highlight regions
• “Match” feature for fast scene-to-scene color correction
• “Selective” feature for sampling up to three color regions for isolated correction.
  
  These new improvements should make a more fluid workflow for SD and HD alike especially since now we can work in 8 , 10 , 16 , 32 and float bit depth