Scratching the Surface of 3ds Max 2011

The retail copies of 3ds Max and 3ds Max design are now shipping and already available for download for anyone on subscription. By the time you read this article it's likely that the boxed copies will be shipping as well.

There are several new features in 3ds Max 2011, including improvements to the viewport display and an entirely new node-based material editor. In addition, there are several enhancements to aid interoperability with other software. However, the feature we were most keen to test was the new hardware-based rendering engine, codenamed Quicksilver. This engine makes use of the GPU to vastly accelerate rendering, well that's the claim anyway. We wanted to see if this claim was true.

After downloading our software from Autodesk, we installed it on a BOXX workstation containing an NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 - this GPU has 4GB of RAM onboard and 240 CUDA Cores. To keep the test fair, we chose a machine with dual Intel CPUs, running at 2.66Ghz. This setup should provide plenty of power to both Mental Ray and Quicksilver. Quicksilver can render any Mental Ray materials and also includes advanced effects such as depth of field, ambient occlusion, soft shadows and indirect illumination, as well as the staple transparency and reflections.

We set up a fairly complicated test scene, consisting of around 5 million polygons and making use of Mental Ray proxies, opacity maps and glossy reflections to give the renderers a workout. The options within the Quicksilver are different from those within Mental Ray so we couldn't perform a direct comparison between Quicksilver and Mental Ray using the same settings. What we focused on instead was trying to identify the differences between each renderer so that we could compare the time taken to render each frame. You can see the output from the two renderers below:

Firstly, I should say that we had to turn off our Mental Ray proxies as they are not supported by Quicksilver; displacement is not supported either so we resorted to using bump maps instead. At first glance the two images look pretty similar, aside from slight differences in colour and exposure that we put down to differences in the way the two renders simulate light. On closer inspection, there seem to be a few issues with the opacity maps we used on our flowers, and the shadows produced by Quicksilver are not as soft even though we used the highest available sampling rate for soft shadows. The ground does not look as textured in the Quicksilver image either, although this may be down to the differences in colour and exposure.

This is a very early test but the results are looking promising. It is worth bearing in mind that this is the first release of Quicksilver and it isn't perfect but it is definitely the future of rendering. At present, Quicksilver can not match the quality of software renders such as Mental Ray. However, it can get around 80% of the way there in a fraction of the time and produces production quality images. For those who are not interested in ultimate quality or who need to quickly produce advanced effects such as depth of field or ambient occlusion, Quicksilver is a great choice and, along with GPU-accelerated rendering in general, is definitely something to watch in the future.

If you'd like to find out more about GPU rendering or about the new 3ds Max 2011 releases, give us a call on 03332 409 309 or email 3D@Jigsaw24.com.