Mad F/X ...

[Ross Macintosh]

I was wondering if anyone has tried out Mad F/X? If so please share your thoughts on it. I don't have a suitable graphics card -- but with the software's low price I might just be tempted to upgrade my card.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[Ross Macintosh]

I was wondering if anyone has tried out Mad F/X? If so please share your thoughts on it. I don't have a suitable graphics card -- but with the software's low price I might just be tempted to upgrade my card.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[jens g.r. benthien]

great link. Mad F/X sounds promising, but why do they require one of these weird graphic cards? I've downloaded one of the avi movies, but couldn't watch it because my MS MediaPlayer 6.4 doesn't have the required codec.

Now, if they exclude most of the users from viewing the clips, the app doesn't make any sense at all. I can run almost any avi on my w2k pro and linux systems, but I will never install the new MS spyware infested MediaPlayer 7.x and up.

Finally someone implements the display engine for gamers to render 3D scenes, but I don't like the limitation to MS related stuff and expensive graphic cards.

My nVidia graphic card with 64 MB RAM is 6 months 'old' and already 'too old'? Gimme a break, hey, I don't want to participate in the never ending rat race by upgrading my systems every month!

Last but not least: if the time to develop a new product takes weeks or even months, why should I complain about 2 hours rendering time? Compared to the whole development process it's only a marginal fraction of the time <sigh>.

Besides this - who will give me a guarantee that I don't have to upgrade my graphic card again with the next release of Mad F/X?

Conclusion: let the PC gamers use this weirdo. I'll still use my 6 year young Ashlar DrawingBoard, Rhino and Cinema 4D XL v7. No need for buggie upgrades here ;-}

F I E S T A ! ! !

jens g.r. benthien
designer
http://www.sacalobra.de

----------//--
If you don't know how to dream you'll never be a designer.
----------//--

[gidgit]

Hi Ross... geez, this looks pretty interesting as a FX and render solution... beyond that though, hmmm... no real modeling tools... says that v1.1 will include some basic modifiers but, that's it...

Perhaps in v2...? something to watch for...

Might be ok to use along with your Sketch Up app there Ross, for texturing and rendering, but then again, trueSpace 3 for the price of a magazine comes to mind here... decent modeling tools, 3D paint tools and a pretty decent render engine to boot... just a thought...

[dk_art]

"I've downloaded one of the avi movies, but couldn't watch it because my MS MediaPlayer 6.4 doesn't have the required codec."


They use the div x codec

http://www.divx.com/

David K ... www.dkingdesign.com

[Ross Macintosh]

providing high-quality real-time animation at a very low price point. To do so it uses the rendering capacity in the graphics card rather than in the software. I find that an interesting idea. Even with the cost of a new card the package costs less than many alternatives and provides much greater performance. (See the performance comparisons on the Mad F/X site).

It does force you to have a fairly high end gamer-oriented card to create with the program --- many people do have such cards (unfortunately I'm not one of them). It seems that they are working to make the program more compatible with more cards. The very highest end cards they mention aren't necessary - they just give you optimal performance. With a lesser but still compatible card the tradeoff seems to be a lower framerate in the realtime rendering. I suspect it is still faster than most alternatives. I suppose if you see no value in high-quality realtime visualization then this isn't the program for you.

At this point the emphasis of the program is on visualization rather than creation. If your modeling program can export as a .3ds you can open your textured model in Mad F/X and immediately experience the realtime rendering. That's got to add efficiency over doing a series of two-hour tweak render tweaks... It also allows you to present your work onscreen interactively in realtime instead of making time consuming movies as is common with other modeling programs.

With regards to the codec - they do have a link to obtain it on the site (a link to divx.com). Sixty million people have this codec. It is available as a free basic version, an ad-supported free pro version or a $30 USD non-spyware pro version. The codec is avail. for win, macs, and linux. My understanding, for windows, is that it doesn't require the newer versions of MS media player. It does require you have directX 7 or higher installed.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[gidgit]

hey, terrific explaination there Ross...thanx for this... real time eh? Hey hey, when I break down and buy a new rig I will have to take a closer look at this... thanx again

[Earl]

The DivX codec is great. And you're right Ross, it does not require the latest version of Media Player. It can be used with old MS Media Players, or you can use the free player that comes with the codec (no ads or nothing).

[Ross Macintosh]

In the SketchUp forum in which I participate the creator of Mad F/X just posted this info about his product:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> Hello,

I am Scott Bean, the creator of Mad F/X and president of Mad Software. Thank you for your interest in Mad F/X. Here are a few upcoming features.

We will have an import/export plugin SDK available for version 1.05 within the next week or two. We do have plans on making a SketchUp format importer for Mad F/X available shortly after.

Currently we support 3DStudio format, but are working on these formats and will be available as free upgrade. Any new formats developed after this release will be freely downloadable from our site.

Import

3D Studio ASCII (.ASC)
Cinema 4D (.C4D)
Caligari Objects (.COB)
Autocad DXF (.DXF & .DXB)
LightWave objects and LightWave layered objects (.LWO)
LightWave scene (.LWS)
Alias|Wavefront objects (.OBJ)
Caligari Scene (.SCN)
DirectX (.X)

Export

3D export formats supported (Available in version 1.1)
Viewpoint (.MTS or .MTX or .MTZ or .HTML)
Shockwave (.W3D)
WildTangent (.WASD)
VRML 2.0 (.WRL)
RenderMan (.RIB)

For version 2.0 of Mad F/X we are adding a top notch photo-realistic hybrid raytracer that supports, texture baking and global illumination. We plan on continuing to keep Mad F/X under $100 USD so that is is accessible to almost anyone.

Any questions, feel free to ask

Scott Bean scott@mad-fx.com
President / 3D Software Engineer
Mad Software, Inc.
www.Mad-FX.com <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[Ross Macintosh]

To Scott Bean and received an immediate reply. That's always nice to see from a software developer.

He commented back the following to my question regarding if super high-end cards were needed:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> The reason Mad F/X can handle enourmous models at amazing speeds and have cutting-edge shaders is because we are using Hardware Programmable Shaders which compute real-time transform and lighting (TnL), letting the GPU (graphics card) do all the work and takes the burden off the CPU. The nice thing is with a 150$ graphics card that supports shaders, you can get almost the same speed running Mad F/X on a Pentium 2 300MHZ compared to a pentium 4 1GHZ.. If you want to obtain the speeds these cards are capable of with software renderers, you’ll need a 20000$ graphics workhorse. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

And in the SketchUp forum Mr. Bean wrote this info about cards:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> I mean, GF3 are old enough and I'm sure they still have some AGP 2x cards available. The key is don't get an MX version, they are watered down and do not have a Shader engine. You'll see almost a 2x jump from a 2x AGP system to a 4x, just because the real bottleneck on those systems and even todays, is bandwidth, imagine sending a 200,000 polygone mesh 4MB, plus a highres skybox from 4-8MB depending (512x512 or 1024x1024) and then the textures in the scene... so you need to send that data each time it renders... Now, textures are stored in AGP memory and if a card has 64MB of memory, some is used for the frame buffer (viewport) and the rest is allocated to holding textures for reuse. But DX 8.1 does not cache vertices and indices per frame, so that must be send to the card each time. So that's where AGP comes into play, the faster the better. But even our Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB cards don't take advantage of 8x, they support it but no difference... so the 20MTri/sec we are getting will almost double on HUGE mesh benchmarks.

Now with that said, unless you have a super old computer running a Rage8 card or old matrox card you will be able to take advantage. Even PCI versions of the GF3 i'm sure are available...you'll have to look into that.. you don't really NEED agp, but it's the @!#$ and only getting faster.. most cards support 1x,2x and 4x all together.

Also, we ran some test on shitty systems running a nice card (2-300$) and the performace rocks.. this is where Mad F/X has the advantage of software renderers or non TnL engines... dont' need to upgrade your whole system, just your card, that is where the future is and what will be one of the most important components in your system, especially for graphics artists as the PC is embracing the world of 3D... upcoming Windows OSes will have their GDI changed to use DirectX for even 2D windowing and such, so what you see, you're whole desktop will be like viewing a 3D Tile based game... might have windows fly away into the distance of your desktop.. .. it's not that far away... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

And with regards to creating animation movies he wrote:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> As for creating animation and camera paths, it's very easy... manually, we have the same camera tools 3DStudio Max has and a bit more, they are very easy to use. you can create a camera, make that the current camera and selected object, move from one area to the next, a few feet ahead, rotate a bit, and create a position/rotation key, move the animation bar ahead 2 seconds, move the camera again and continue recording a some keyframes... Mad F/X will interpolate the rest.. you can change the tension of your path, and the curve type...open up a 3 viewport config, and run through your animation, move the keys around to speed up or slow down your animation.. very easy...

Or, if you ahve a SpacePuck, your in luck, you can just fly around at will, very cool, I LOVE using it... can navigate VERY easilly in each axis and auto-reacord, or record manually...
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I hope some find this info is useful.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>