Autodesk have released the second Hot Fix for the 2011 versions of 3ds Max Design and 3ds Max.

Links to each are below…….

Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 - Download HF2 here

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 - Download HF2 here

This Hot Fix covers many important areas including Viewports, Biped, CAT, and FBX from Revit issues, so make sure you keep up to date!

We held a few 3ds Max drop in sessions last year, these were an opportunity for an informal, 1-2-1 discussion with Autodesk’s guru Jamie Gwilliam. They went down very well with those lucky enough to secure a slot so we’ve decided to hold another on the 11th February at our Enfield office.

So, this is your chance to bag a slot before they all go – I say ‘all’, as they’re 1-2-1, there’s actually only five available, so be quick!

The idea is you can discuss any issues you have with regard to workflows, techniques and best practices. This applies whether you’re an existing user of 3ds Max or Max Design or just interested to see how Max can help your business. It would also be really helpful to bring along some examples of your latest projects on a USB drive.

So don’t be shy, this is a rare opportunity for a free of charge, 1-2-1 discussion, with one of Autodesk’s top 3D gurus! Either contact your Excitech Account Manager or you can register by clicking here!

Paul

The Boolean functionality in 3ds Max can be a little intermittent in some circumstances and can be slightly frustrating as I discovered recently.

Scenario:

I was building up a house from a 2d floor plan in Max and decided to build my rooms using the ‘wall’ tool which worked pretty well with a bit of playing around. But I ran into an issue when I tried to subtract box primitives as a method of creating the openings for my windows/doors/etc. The problem was that when I removed the primitives from the walls the wall would disappear as well as the box primitive I was subtracting away (below).

Proboolean is usually the most reliable and flexible of our two boolean options available in Max. However, in this case we can revert back to the tried and true, old but solid – Boolean tool.
One thing that we have to do when we are using the Boolean tool, as opposed to ‘Proboolean’, is perform each subtraction / union / intersection separately as new boolean objects (perform one boolean operation and then select the Boolean tool again and perform the next). In the Proboolean command we can subtract all 3 boxes within the same Proboolean object, however, the Boolean tool requires us to subtract them all separately or (as our max guru Paul Grimston suggests) we can union the boxes together and then remove them in one subtraction, doing it this way helps minimise the chance that Max will get confused with too many subtractions (two box primitives below were union’d and then subtracted from the walls).

As you can see I had a bit more luck with this than I was having with Proboolean and hopefully if you’re ever presented with a similar problem this will solve the issue.