POWER SOLIDS
3.0
What Is Power Solids
for MAX/VIZ?
Power Solids and Power Translators
are the first products in product series of 3ds max plug-ins entitled the "Precision
Modeling Plug-ins". These first products will introduce support for a new type
of shape representation called a Boundary Representation (Brep). This is the
representation used in most modern day CAD systems. Robert McNeel's Rhino, Dassault's
Solid Works and Catia, PTC's Pro Engineer, EDS's Solid Edge, Bentley's Microstation,
Nemetschek's Vectorworks and Autodesk's Inventor are among the more popular
CAD systems that use Boundary Representations as their primary form of shape
representation.
Power Solids 3.0 is specifically
designed to be animation friendly. It includes high level solids modeling tools
that work on a solid primitive level. Power Solids contains all of the functionality
available in Power Translators plus the following:
- Booleans with optional
rounding
- Extrusion, Revolution,
Sweeping, Skinning Surfaces and Solid Primitives
- Rounding of selected
primitive features
- Offset/Inset of Shape
curves used in primitive creation
- Conversion of existing
MAX shapes and Editable Meshes into a Brep Object
- Conversion of Power Solids
Brep objects into Editable Polygon or Editable Mesh.
- Extraction of selected
faces into NURBS Surfaces or NURBS Curves.
- IMPORT, Adaptive Mesh,
Material Assignment, Filleting Selected Edges & Faces, Offset/Shelling (see
Power Translators Above). EXPORT using IGES, Rhino, STEP and SAT files.
Renderers
Power Solids/Translators
flexible tessellation enables users to automatically customize the rendering
meshes for a particular rendering engine. The Radiosity algorithms in MAX 5
and VIZ work best with smaller uniformly shaped triangles. In Power Solids you
can specify a maximum edge length in the rendering tessellation to prevent long
skinny triangles on large planar faces typically used used to model floors and
walls.
The ability to adjust the
chord height in view space enables the rendering engines to produce images of
amazing quality with exceptionally smooth looking surfaces. Most of the images
in the gallery were produced with a chord height of 1/2 pixel. This is very
important for animation where polygonal artifacts will become apparent when
objects move and when the camera zooms in for a close view. Having the appropriate
mesh density is also very important when doing ray tracing on reflective surfaces.
Power Solids produces exceptional
images in SplutterFish's Brazil Renderer and Cebas' Final Render.
Power Solids or Power
Translators?
Power Solids is a superset
of Power Translators. You get everything in Power Translators when you purchase
Power Solids. Power Solids also contains tools to do Boolean operations and
Intersect and Merge shapes together.
What is the Difference
Between Power Booleans and Power Solids?
The difference between Power
Booleans and Power Solids is like the difference between modeling with triangles
in meshes or modeling with patches. Power Solids works with curved geometry
much like Patches. The Power Solids BrepObjects can be tessellated at different
levels during render time. For example, you might specify a 1/2 pixel chord
height rendering tolerance to remove all polygonal artifacts and see very high
quality smooth results. The number of polygons would then vary depending upon
how close the object is in a given rendered view.
Power Solids is delivered electronically (no shipping costs), once your order
is processed.
Demo Movies
Creation
of Mouse
Editing
of Mouse
Power
of Revolution
