APPENDIX B
Top Twenty 3D Vendors
TO DO GREAT 3D VISUALIZATIONS, you need great tools, and although 3ds Max is brimming with a fantastic collection of commands and features, it is not by any means a complete package for most of us in the industry. To provide a wide range of 3D services and produce your work efficiently, it is necessary to expand your 3D toolset beyond the limits and capabilities of 3ds Max. Some of the best features in 3ds Max actually started out as third-party plugins that Autodesk (or formerly Discreet) purchased for inclusion in the program, and while some of the tools highlighted here are likely to be incorporated in 3ds Max someday, for now they are only available through purchase.
This appendix contains a great list of tools that can expand the power and versatility of 3ds Max, as well as your entire workflow. Some of these links direct you to plugins that run inside 3ds Max and some to external programs that run outside of the program. Some direct you to great content-providers while others highlight some of the best equipment you could incorporate into your workflow. Each provides something unique to the industry and each improves either the quality or efficiency of our work. Additionally, some programs such as V-Ray, Photoshop, and a few others were considered unnecessary to mention in this list because of their already extreme popularity.
It should be mentioned that these are not advertisements. 3DATS has not benefited in any way from the companies mentioned in this list and only a couple of these companies know that they are being mentioned here. These vendors are listed only because we endorse their products and one or more of our members use them in production.
www.2d3.com – Here’s a place you can go to get an amazing program that let’s you integrate CG with real-life footage at the touch of a button. With their premier software package, Boujou, you can track even the most difficult of footage, and superimpose your 3D scene with almost no effort. Without such software, combining real video with CG is almost impossible. At last check, Boujou sold for $10,000 and is, therefore, not a viable option for many smaller companies or freelancers. However, a much more affordable option is Boujou Bullet, which at $2,500 provides most of the same features at a greatly reduced cost.
www.3dconnexion.com – As an outspoken advocate of fast and efficient work, I am listing 3D Connexion in this list because of how much their products have improved my speed and efficiency in all of my 3D projects. Every single command used in 3ds Max has to first go through an input device, and it only makes sense to use the best available equipment when it comes to something used as much as an input device. For me, the SpacePilot has made viewport navigation completely effortless has saved time on every project.
www.archvision.com – Archvision has long been recognized as an industry leader in providing, as their plug-in acronym ‘RPC’ implies, Rich-Photorealistic Content. Their content includes cars, vegetation, people, and much more. One of the things that most impresses my clients about the animations I create is how I integrate moving people in my scenes. With the RPC plug-in, doing so couldn’t be easier.
www.artbeats.com – Artbeats provides what I believe to be the finest collection of royalty-free stock video and imagery available on the market. They maintain a seemingly endless list of video and imagery and no matter what kind of subject matter you need for your visualizations, they are sure to have it. With the coming of high definition DVD players, their high definition collections provide a great solution for future projects.
www.axyz-design.com – Metropoly models can be viewed from any angle and break from the limitations of traditional characters. Designed for medium-viewing distances and perfect interaction with rendered images, each collection is optimized for perfect shadowing and little to no image retouching!
www.doschdesign.com – Dosch Design creates some of the finest 3D content, with a large collection of furniture, textures, 2D vegetation, people, HDRI maps, and my personal favorite, a wonderful collection of highly detailed 3D cars.
www.emagin.com – eMagin is a leader in OLED (organic light emitting diode) micro displays and virtual imaging technologies. They produce fantastic 3D visors that can be used in conjunction with Immersive Media’s software, to produce a complete 360 virtual-environment complete with stereovision and head-tracking. This technology is just in its infancy and already amazes clients.
www.evermotion.org – Evermotion provides some of the best 3D models available anywhere on the market and at very affordable prices. Their site contains dozens of collections, each containing an enormous variety of highly detailed models or materials.
www.eyeonline.com – Fusion 5 is a full-featured, node-based compositing system with built-in backend tools via a powerful scripting engine with ODBC support. A perfect balance between a backroom-power-tool and a front-room-client station, Fusion 5 has it all. Not only does Fusion 5 have a real 3D environment with camera/lights support for leading 3D packages, it is also one of the most powerful and intuitive 3D particle systems on the market. With hardware-accelerated 3D capabilities, you can now migrate from pre-vis to finals within the same application. eyeon’s Fusion is a true synergy of 2D and 3D tools for ultimate compositing.
www.immersivemedia.com – Immersive Media Corp is an advanced digital-video-imaging company that will change your perspective. Using a 360-spherical camera, IMC’s proprietary software allows the view to play back videos while changing the view in real time. Combined with a head-mounted visor display from eMagin, the experience is one that will leave your clients in awe.
www.lbrush.com – A sophisticated poly modeling plugin that enables you to take the Edit Poly modifier tool to an entirely new level.
www.marlinstudios.com – Marlin Studios, of Arlington, Texas, is a graphics publisher and studio founded in 1993 by Company President Tom Marlin. The company takes pride in offering high-quality digital content for computer graphics artists at affordable prices, and views itself as a service company, with emphasis on one-on-one customer support.
www.nodejoe.com – NodeJoe is a schematic material editor plugin for 3ds Max that provides a quick, easy, and unique way of working with textures and materials. The plugin provides an intuitive and clearly arranged flow chart interface to create, analyze, and modify materials and textures within 3ds Max.
www.onyxtree.com – This site is home to what I believe to be the finest 3D procedural-modeling software for vegetation. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can create realistic, custom vegetation for export to 3ds Max. You can even animate your vegetation with wind.
www.polyboost.com – PolyBoost is an extensive set of easy-to-use but advanced tools for 3d artists working in 3ds Max. The focus of the PolyBoost tools is at speeding up and streamlining workflow for the artist. PolyBoost offers a wide range of tools for creating various types of subobject selections as well as a set of modeling tools that will make many tasks in everyday modeling much easier. Included is also a Viewport texture painting tool, UVW editing tools, and a set of useful transform tools. The tools have been developed with the end-user very much in mind to enable tools that are user-friendly, fast, stable, and above all useful. Autodesk 3ds Max contains an existing set of robust modeling tools. Combining these base tools with over 100 PolyBoost tools greatly enhances the users’ ability, giving them the most fully featured modeling package on the market with uses that stretch over all of the different areas of 3d.
www.quest3d.com – Quest3D is perhaps the best tool available for creating photorealistic, interactive, and real-time 3D visualizations at an affordable price. While not as advanced as the Crytek engine, Quest3D is inexpensive enough to be practical for very small firms.
www.respower.com – If you’re in the business of creating animations, you know how difficult it can be to produce them with a small number of computers from which to render. Render-farm services provide you an opportunity to send your complete 3ds Max scene to a third party, tap the resources of several hundred computers, and render your animations in no time at all. Although using a render service is not always the best option, being able to render long and complex animations when time is short can be invaluable. There are several companies that provide such as service, but ResPower has proven to me to be a reliable company that gives a great service at a great price. At the beginning of 2006, they began a new program called ‘Unlimited Rendering’, whereby users can pay a flat fee for unlimited rendering each month. For a smaller fee, you can use unlimited rendering during a four-day period each month.
www.shutterstock.com – Shutterstock is the largest subscription-based stock photo agency in the world. Their outstanding collection of premium, royalty-free images grows every day, with photographs, illustrations, and vectors you won’t find anywhere else.
www.sugar3d.com – Sugar3D cars each come with 3 polygon versions and represent the most realistic and easy to use image-based vehicles on the market.
www.zcorp.com – While attending SIGGRAPH a couple of years ago, I came across a booth by Z Corp. and was immediately fascinated by their amazing product line of 3D printers. Z Corp. makes the world’s fastest 3D printers and, at last glance, the only one that can produce models in multicolor. Although this is probably not a product for new 3D users, this is definitely a product that everyone should keep their eyes on. With every year that goes by, print quality and speed will improve to the point that it will become mainstream. I imagine it won’t be long before everyone has a 3D printer sitting on his or her desk as 2D printers are today.