Rendering Your World

We take a look at one of the most common, and most powerful, 3D modeling tools on the market.

About a year ago, GamePro reported on the latest release (at the time) of Discreet's 3D rendering software, 3ds max, a program utilized in over 80 percent of the top rated games in the world. Well, Discreet has not been resting on its laurels over the past year, and now the latest installment of the award-winning 3D animation and rendering software smashes technological barriers to bring the most powerful and innovative technology (found most notably in Doom 3) to desktop PCs across the globe.

3ds max release 7 presents an absurd amount of functionality and new features that threaten to revolutionize the look of our favorite games and usher in a new generation of ultra-high resolution graphics.

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While numerous features have been added to the already incredibly comprehensive 3ds max, the buzz surrounding release 7 has mostly concerned two seemingly non-descript words that don't make a whole lot of sense to anyone not directly involved in CG production: normal mapping. Let's take a second to examine both what this technology is and how it's going to revolutionize the gaming industry (graphically at the very least).

As many of you already know, 3D rendered graphics are made up entirely of small triangles sometimes referred to as "faces"or "tris" and the magic of a really good rendering program lies within its ability to smooth or mask those triangles into solid-looking objects. Traditionally, the more triangles in your model, the more detailed it will look; however, the number of triangles that your average gaming rig can deal with depends heavily on the amount of power in its processor and so game developers have been limited in their ability to create truly realistic and highly detailed graphics in their games.

Those days are gone. Many of you have seen the amazing graphical feats in Doom 3, where extremely detailed characters move fluidly through pools of dynamic lighting (lighting that changes with time or position--for example: a bad fluorescent light swinging around casts shadows as it moves and blinks) casting and receiving shadows from their environment. What is responsible for those graphics is a new 3D rendering technique called normal mapping.

With normal mapping, a 3D modeler can make a highly detailed model using as many triangles as they'd like with no concern for the memory or processor power of the hardware they are designing for and then turn that model into a kind of skin which covers another model that uses far fewer triangles and, thusly, way less memory and processor power.

3ds max does this by looking at the high resolution model and recording every pixel's location in a special map referred to as a normal map, where RGB values (red, green, and blue - the three colors that are used to formulate all other colors in the visible light spectrum) are used to represent XYZ (the three axis that define a pixel's position in space).

In this way, a texture is created that contains all of the information of the high resolution model, but uses very little system resources. Consequently, while the models in Doom 3 look remarkably detailed, the actual underlying shapes that make them up are extremely simple and easy for most computers to deal with.

So, what does this mean for gaming? Well, for one thing, it means ridiculously better looking games.

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