Kaldera (3DS Max Plugin)
Supports 3DS Max version 5.x through 2009

Kaldera is a powerful texturing plug-in that gives users the ability to render full scene information (lighting, opacity, texturing, displacement) into special texture maps based on your object's appearance and relationship to other objects or elements within your scene. These maps are then directly baked into your object and can be used to display your assets rapidly on Direct3D devices such as graphics display cards or game engines. As you can imagine, this makes Kaldera a huge timesaver for game content creators or any other artist looking to create complex models and sets. Architects and designers can also gain significant performance increases in their scenes since they can display all of the detail in their models without having the associated overhead.

High resolution geometry with complex mapping (including bumps, opacity and displacement) can also have its mapping rendered via Kaldera and projected onto lower resolution, game or production ready versions of the same asset, all while preserving the original's look and feel.

This is all achieved through the use of Kaldera's sophisticated processing engine that traverses an object's UVW coordinates like a scanline renderer. When it finds a 'hit', it captures that point on the surface and all attributes associated with that point (including normals direction and distance, color, opacity, etc.). Once it finishes scanning the object, it can build up to 10 different maps that can be applied to the object. Lighting, Alpha, Shadow, Atmospheric, Diffuse, Height and Custom maps can all be generated independently for your all of your assets. Just look at the features and controls Kaldera offers:

• The Source objects don't need to have any mapping channels applied
• You can have as many Source Objects as you want
• You have a big arsenal of tools to resolve hits between the Source and Target objects. This includes:
  • Use of two cage meshes to define the ray shooting start position and ray length
  • Use of different Material IDs or face selections to include and exclude faces from the Source object in the render
  • You can use 3ds Max standard modifiers like Select Mesh and Delete Mesh to temporarily delete unwanted faces before processing Kaldera mapping
  • You can mix different normals results using the alpha channel to blend the Normals Map without adding any extra geometry
  • A Normals Map is included with Kaldera to let you render and preview normals map results