This is part two of an ongoing series dedicated to my favorite tools/workflows. This time I cover Max2AE by Boomerlabs, an amazing plugin for 3DS Max that allows you to bring cameras, lights, planes, and even particles from Max to After Effects. It rules. Go here to get your copy of Max2AE.
This entry was written by , posted on October 26, 2009 at 3:40 pm, filed under review and tagged 3ds max, after effects, cgi, cgpov, max2ae. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
great lesson chad ,but since i’m a maya user ,do have any idea if thres any such plugin for maya .. i’v been looking all the month for that .. thanks alot
The best plug in ever for 3d max!, some times when i use copy paste for the camera, it misses some frames or does a jump in the movement. But if you export the whole proyect it works perfectly.
I didn`t know the part of exporting particles, nice tip.
bye
For Maya huh? I have no idea. That’s one of my beef’s with Maya users, they don’t like to share.
Actually, you can import your .ma (not .mb/binary) files directly into AE. It only brings in cameras and locators (they have to have some special naming convention too like null_#### I believe). Everything has to be baked out too from what I remember (typical maya)
Max2AE seems to fulfill dreams from Combustion early days. As far as the comments about Maya and plugins, you get what you pay for. Since Maya and Max are the same price, the issue is performance. Maya Composite comes with Maya and does quite a lot. Max2AE costs $250, but fits the AE pipeline.
My thoughts on some posts this fall:
Maya 2010 has less new features than Max partly because it does a lot already. New things such as OBJ import, which Maya has always had, are not new. Reminds me when “ghosting” came to Maya, which was already in Wavefront. But Max does seem to be favored. I’m curious as to Psoft over toon shader functions in Maya. As far as EXR, I’m using Nuke, which is great for large format work and handles EXR well. Nuke is node based and very flexible but I can’t recommend it for graphics work over AE. It’s a different tool like Maya used to be versus Max. Truth is Max and Maya just keep getting closer and yet get promotion over Softimage (they are “featured” but Softimage is not).
Finally, I’m glad you search for what is meaningfully cool rather than debate over which is the “winner” - which is decided by Autodesk anyway. Keep up the good work!
Chris, Good to hear from you!
I haven’t thought about Combustion in a long time. Maya Composite is really nothing more than Toxik and when it could not survive on it’s own, it was bundled as a “new-feature” in Maya. From what I’ve seen it has some decent features but I really don’t see it gaining much ground. AE is still the king. I’m not saying it’s perfect (far from it) but it is widely used. Historically, Autodesk has had a very hard time breaking into the desktop compositing market.
Psoft is very similar to Maya’s toon, albeit a much easier interface and WAY faster. It’s a favored tool in the Anime world in Japan and soon I’ll be using it on a project and will report back with a full review.
Glad to hear your using Nuke. I learned it myself over the summer and found that I actually prefer it over Fusion. You are correct that it is not a motion graphics tool. We use AE for those types of jobs, but for our more 3D or VFX heavy jobs, we do go the node route. On a recent job we finished for MGD we couldn’t have finished without Fusion’s projection tools.
We are big exr fans too. In the latest version of Max, it is very easy to embed your render elements into a multi-channel exr. The only issue we have is that After Effects really sucks at handling them. Very slow. So it’s a trade-off. I personally prefer them, they are space savers!
Ahhh Softimage. Not much being said about it’s development. Will it be around in 2011? Who knows. How can you have three products with competing features fighting for the same market share? Something has to give.
I think you’ll find that Max is getting a lot of great attention at Autodesk. Especially with Shane Griffith at the helm. I’ve seen pieces of it’s road-map, and I’m very excited.
Keep the comments coming! Thanks!
-chad