Max's requirements are a 90MHz Pentium with 32MB of RAM that's running Windows NT 3.51 or higher, and Kinetix's new 3-D display engine, Heidi, can operate with any PCI or VLB graphics card capable of running at 800x600 or higher. We tested Max using a Diamond Stealth 64 card with 2MB of DRAM and found that it worked surprisingly well. While Heidi doesn't require hardware acceleration, it can take advantage of a large number of 3-D accelerators. Redraws and renders really flew by when we tested Max with an ELSA Gloria 8, a 3-D accelerator board that has an S3 Vision968 chip, a 3Dlabs Glint 300SX chip, and 8MB of VRAM.
In fact, Autodesk chose to go with Heidi rather than the OpenGL flow for Max. The benefit? Heidi is currently the only API that lets applications plug in at any level of the graphics pipeline. It can perform high-level functions, such as 2-D and 3-D transformations, lighting calculations, clipping, texture mapping, colour interpolation, or very low-level functions like fast rendering. Heidi uses graphics primitives to create its geometries, whereas OpenGL is vertex-based. Consequently, Heidi has less of the overhead associated with function calls and setting up complex geometries than does OpenGL, so it gives much faster redraws and renders.
Built for NT
Max can exploit NT's multitasking, multithreaded, and symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) capabilities, dividing one task among several processors or distributing tasks among processors. For serious production work, it can operate across a network and farm out rendering tasks to available processors. These slaves don't need to be running Max. Rather, Max starts a copy of SERVER.EXE on each remote machine and then sends it the scene and the necessary map files for rendering. While 3D Studio R4 for DOS has this capability, Max does the job using one-tenth of the bandwidth.
Summary
Max is intuitive and fun to learn and use. In no time, we were able to create simple scenes and animate them with some sophisticated effects. Truly mastering Max, however, will take time. Nonetheless, Max's all-in-one interface, unlimited undo/redo capabilities, and competent documentation makes it easier to learn than its DOS-based predecessor and its competition. You'll find similar features and performance in other NT-based 3-D animation packages such as Softimage's Softimage 3D and SGI-based programs; but you'll have to pay considerably more than Max's $5,500 price tag, and you may need a significantly higher investment in hardware.
3D Studio Max Requires: 90MHz Pentium-based PC; 32MB RAM; 100MB hard drive space; PCI- or VLB-based graphics card supporting 800x600x256 colors under Windows NT; Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 3.51 or higher.
