Max 7 Sneak Preview

Our good buddy Sam is back with the second installment of his Max 7 preview series. Moving beyond the humble singing mushroom, Sam has turned his attention to mankind’s existential struggle in the post-feline digital age. My colleagues and I appreciate this struggle; it drives us to make life easier for the common Maxer (and Womaxer).

One of the ways we've been trying to make life easier has been to simplify the notoriously complex world of OpenGL. I've been working on developing a multi-pass rendering framework that allows you to drop in complex scene-processing effects, such as depth-of-field and SSAO* and start tweaking parameters with no knowledge of shaders or render targets.

Advanced users will still have access to all the gnarly lower level details, plus the ability to package and share their own custom effects. So yes, with the click of a toggle, we have shadows. I hope the ease of making shadows in Max 7 does not provoke an existential crisis for you as it seems to have done for Ms. Blancmange. Cat rave indeed.

* screen space ambient occlusion — this could also be a sound Maru makes