Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Sneak peek: 3ds Max’s new MediaSync workflow


Power Creative’s Chris Harkins demonstrates the work-in-progress MediaSync 3ds Max-to-After Effects link.

Autodesk has released another sneak peek of work-in-progress features in 3ds Max: in this case, its MediaSync technology for interoperability between Max and After Effects.

The work builds on the State Sets workflow introduced in last year’s 3ds Max 2012 Subscription Advantage Pack: something that many early users struggled with in production.

According to Ken Pimentel’s blog post: “We’ve greatly increased the stability of the workflow [and] we think we’ve addressed all the concerns.”

The workflow now tracks a much wider range of parameters, including iray render parameters; permits custom render element and file type pathing; and provides direct exposure via MaxScript.

V-Ray support has also been improved, although there are still issues, which you can read about on the blog.

Unlike the previous sneak peeks of the mCloth cloth system and Deformable Poly object type, this one comes with a full-length narrated video created by beta tester Chris Harkins of Power Creative. His second example, which starts at 04:40 in the video above, gives some idea of what the system could do in practice.

As ever with these things, the work is not guaranteed to make it into any specific release of 3ds Max, but the timing suggests 3ds Max 2013.

Read Ken Pimentel’s full blog post