3D graphics package like MAX comes with a default renderer that is capable of slick, realistic output. However, sometimes a creation needs to have a fresh appearance, like the clearness of a cartoon or technical illustration. The shading has to be smooth and you might even want to include ink-like lines, to emphasize certain elements of your creation, like the contour. To achieve this look, Illustrate! is the plug-in to help you out.

The "Illustrate!" rendering plug-in was the first non-photorealistic renderer for MAX. Its history even goes back to the days of 3D Studio DOS R4 in 1994. Illustrate! provided the first 2D vector output possibilities for MAX, building a bridge to cross the gap between MAX and a non-bitmap oriented 2D program like Adobe Illustrator.

Years of ongoing development have resulted in the release of Illustrate! version 5. In the mean time the plug-in's features have of course been expanded to match today's demands. Let me grab my magnifying glass and have a close look at this alternative approach to 3D rendering.

After the installation, Illustrate! lodges itself between the main menus of the MAX interface, next to the Help menu. If you press the menu header, it turns out to behave as a button and summons the Illustrate! Rendering Wizard, that guides you through some basic Illustrate! settings. You can also simply press cancel to immediately access the main Illustrate! interface. Here you can adjust the various individual elements of an Illustrate! rendering result: Surfaces, Brushes, Paints, Strokes and Canvases. A Style covers all individual elements and settings and combines them into a distinct illustration style that can be assigned to desired objects in the scene and rendered with the Illustrate! renderer (or now with the MAX default scanline renderer itself as well, as you will read further on). Only the Canvas is a separate part of the rendering, establishing the background appearance of the rendering.

RENDERING WITH STYLE
An Illustrate! surface covers the main appearance of a rendered object. The Illustrate! shading technique is based on a distinguishable transition between an object's Shadow, Main and Highlight components. Each part can exist of a color, a gradient or a map. The transparency of each component and the transition softness between each component can be adjusted as well.

Brushes determine the shape (circular or square) and size of the ink line's virtual brush. New in version 5 is the great option to set the size to world units, making Illustrate! scale the line thickness according to the distance from the perspective or camera view. Maybe an idea for a future release of Illustrate! is to handle a user-defined (closed) MAX shape as a custom Illustrate! Brush.

In the Paints section of Illustrate! you can specify the color of your ink line. This can be a custom color or (a darkened or lightened variation of) one of the object's Material colors (Ambient, Diffuse or Specular). Maybe the implementation of a gradient and/or map option in a future Illustrate! update could enhance the ink line appearance in this section.

The Strokes part enables the user to define the continuity of an ink line in an effective and very simple to use visual editor. For instance, you can make a line dashed or dotted in stead of solid.

Within each individual Illustrate! Style you can specify which parts of the Style's objects are rendered and in what way. For instance, you can choose to render the silhouette of an object with a thick, continuous, black line and render the lines of the object's crease with a thinner, interrupted, red line. In version 5 of Illustrate! you're now in even more control of determining which lines of an object should be rendered in what way, as you can read further on in the part about the new Illustrate! Modifiers.

FLASH OUTPUT
When you're ready to render your Illustrate! masterpiece, you can choose between bitmap and vector output. Bitmap output covers all the bitmap formats that are supported in MAX. With vector output you can choose between Adobe Illustrator (AI), AutoCAD (DXF) and, last but not least: the popular Shockwave Flash format (SWF)! Yes, with Illustrate! you can directly export your MAX animations to a Flash file, ready to be integrated in your Web site or multimedia production! However, the Illustrate! Flash output does not support a distinction between the Shadow, Main and Highlight shades, neither does it include any color transition in the surface of an object. This results in a flat surface appearance when it comes to Flash output, so there is some room for improvement in that area. But the very presence of the Flash output feature is already enough to be happy.

MATERIAL CEL SHADER
One of the major enhancements of Illustrate! 5 is a very versatile alternative option for creating surfaces, by using the new Illustrate! Cel shader that can be chosen from the list of shaders in MAX 3's Standard Material. This enables the user to create a Material that behaves like an Illustrate! Surface, but with the addition of all possibilities of a Standard MAX Material, including dropshadows, reflections, refractions, bump mapping and much more! You can include the lines as well, if you want. There's only one drawback when using the Material Cel shader approach: if you choose this option, the rendering does have to be performed with the Default Scanline Renderer, constraining the Illustrate! output to bitmap formats only.

MODIFIERS
Another new feature of Illustrate! 5 is a set of three specific Modifiers that improve the management of line drawing on an object. The EdgeID Modifier can do for object edges what the MAX Material Modifier can do for object faces. After assigning one or more IDs to desired edges, you can specify them to be drawn in the Edge IDs section of a Style. With the RestrictSI Modifier you can reduce the amount of time-consuming surface intersection calculations by being able to specify only the necessary surface intersections. Last but not least, the Paint On Modifier enables you to paint variable line weights directly onto the vertices of an object, providing a very versatile way to determine the line thickness in various areas of your object.

CONCLUSION
Be sure to buy Illustrate! 5 if you want your MAX renderings to break out of the sometimes hackneyed photo-realism and to approximate that good old, unadulterated, spontaneous feeling of a 2D illustration/animation!

Metin Seven

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www.sevensheaven.nl
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