Gregory Taylor

I think we all tend to focus on novelty - 

 was new once, and that novelty has as much to do with the perceiver as it does with the presence of things in the world (did you already know that 

oxygen isotopes caught in zircon crystals

 -- tell us that there was liquid water on the earth 4.4 billion years ago?).

I love novelty as much as the next person, but you might be surprised to discover that one of the places I routinely send friends, new students, and workshop attendees is a video about new features of Max 6.

Max 6 Sneak Peek: Jitter OpenGL

It was made back in November of 2011 by my colleague Rob Ramirez (To paraphrase 

a really famous old television commercial

 listen), and takes about 10 minutes to run down some Max 6 OpenGL improvements, once after the other: 

, implicit rendering contexts, and a few other cool and then-brand-spanking-new tricks.

You may already know all this, of course. You may even know about the Max 7 improvements to some of the tricks shown here. (Support for shadows comes to mind.) I love this video precisely because I cannot think of a single better example of a Cycling '74 video that that's as likely to quickly show you features of things you think you know about already that you'd forgotten about, demonstrate a feature you may never have known about at all, and leave you with an urge to fiddle around.

So have a look. I think it'll be 10 minutes well spent, and remember - if you didn't know it, 

I think we all tend to focus on novelty - it attracts the eye and diverts the mind. What is often less clear is that everything was new once, and that novelty has as much to do with the perceiver as it does with the presence of things in the world (did you already know that oxygen isotopes caught in zircon crystals -- yes, those zircon crystals -- tell us that there was liquid water on the earth 4.4 billion years ago?).

It was made back in November of 2011 by my colleague Rob Ramirez (To paraphrase a really famous old television commercial, when Rob Ramirez talks, I listen), and takes about 10 minutes to run down some Max 6 OpenGL improvements, once after the other: viewports and multiple cameras, moving lights, the materials browser, object groupings and transformations, implicit rendering contexts, and a few other cool and then-brand-spanking-new tricks.

So have a look. I think it'll be 10 minutes well spent, and remember - if you didn't know it, it's new to you.


How Does That Work Again? (Jitter OpenGL)