What's New?

Illustrate! 5.0 contains a huge number of new additions and improvements to help you quickly and easily create high-quality cel and artistic illustrations. Amongst the many new features...

Lines

• Variable-line weights are now possible using the new Paint On modifier.
• The anti-aliasing quality has been vastely improved. You can also set the quality level(None, Low, Medium, High, Extreme).
• Calculation of surface intersection lines is now 100% faster.
• To further speed up the calculation of surface intersection lines you can use the new Restrict SI (restrict surface intersections) modifier to specify which faces to include in the calculation.
• All hidden line calculations are faster.
• Line edges can now be automatically smoothed to create curved rather than straight lines.
• Lines in perspective or camera views will get thinner with distance(perspective foreshortening).

Cel Shader

• New custom Cel Shader built directly into the Standard 3DS MAX Material.
• Support for shadows, reflections, refractions, and all 3DS MAX renderer features.

Brushes

• Specify the brush size in any custom unit; pixels, inches, millimeters, centimeters, points, picas, and world units.
• If the output image size changes the brush size will now scale accordingly.

Strokes

• The linestyle can now be scaled so you can draw lines with longer or smaller linestyles.
• The type of line capping(butting or projecting) can now be specified.

Styles

• Specify the exact order in which lines will be classified including Silhouette, Surface Intersection etc.
• New Edge ID line type that allows you to specify an exact brush, paint, and stroke for individual edges.
• New Angle line type that draws a edge if the neighboring faces are within a range of angles.
• New Contours line type allows you to create cross-hatching, contour, etc patterns on an object's surface.

Managing Illustrate! Art Materials

• All the Art Materials can now be exported into a custom library file.
• Individual Art Materials can now be imported/merged into a scene.

Sub-object Materials

Through the use of custom text tags in the sub-material slot name you can specify the following features:

• The priority of a given material id. Material ids with a higher priority will have their edges drawn first.
• Exclude faces with specific materials ids from having their edges drawn.
• A custom paint color that will be used to drawn the edges of faces using the material id.

Renderer

• Render the object surfaces and object lines in separate passes.
• Direct the output of any of the passes to a custom bitmap file.
• Assign a custom renderer(Renderman, RayMan, Mental Ray, etc) to render the surfaces.

Interface

• Resize the Illustrate! window.
• Reduce the tree complexity by using different list filters (All, Styles Only, Style Names Only).
• Quick switching between window layouts for editing or assigning.
• Now includes a standard menu bar.

Miscellaneous

• Completely rewritten online help documentation with easier searching and more detailed tutorials.
• When an object is duplicated(Instance, Copy or Reference) its associated style is now copied.
• XRef Scenes and XRef Objects now work with scenes that already have an Illustrate! Art Material object.
• Most of the Illustrate! art materials can now be accessed and modified from MaxScript.

What is Illustrate!?

Illustrate! is a non-photorealistic renderer.

It allows you to render your 3D scene in a variety of artistic styles. The most common is the cel or toon style where the objects are rendered with a single or limited number of colors and the edges are drawn with a line. This version of Illustrate! is particularly adept at this style of rendering. It includes a lot of advanced features for creating film resolution cel renderings.

Illustrate! also renders illustrations. Most commonly these are technical illustrations with hidden-lines eliminated. Illustrate! supports a huge variety of line styles so you can create complex illustrations.

One amazing feature of Illustrate! is its ability to render these styles out to vector artwork. It currently supports Shockwave Flash, Adobe Illustrator, and Autocad DXF output. This allows you render your 3D scenes for displaying on the Internet or for inclusion with other vector graphics.

Below are some examples of the many rendering styles that Illustrate! supports...

To see more styles visit the Gallery.

History

Illustrate! was first released in 1994(3DS R3 for MS-DOS) and has provided the "best of class" technology ever since. Over the years many competing companies have since discontinued their renderers while Illustrate! has gone from strength to strength. Illustrate! is often the first to bring you the newest cutting-edge technologies. Amongst Illustrate!'s many "firsts":

• 1st cel and illustration renderer for 3DS DOS, 3DS MAX 1.x, 3DS MAX 3.x.
• 1st vector renderer for 3DS MAX, including the first Shockwave Flash and Adobe Illustrator output.
• 1st renderer to support reflections and refractions in toon shading.
• 1st renderer to support vector output of variable line weights.

Who uses Illustrate!?

Illustrate! is the market-leading non-photorealistic renderer for 3DS MAX. It was first released in 1994(3DS R3 for MS-DOS) and has provided the "best of class" technology ever since.

Companies

Illustrate! is used by some of the world's leading companies including Walt Disney Imagineering, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Aardman Animation Studios, IBM, Microsoft, NASA, MGM, Lockheed Martin, Westwood Studios, British Aerospace, Ex Machina, and many others.

Universities

Some of the leading universities and institutions are teaching Illustrate! including Sheridan Center for Animation and Emerging Technologies(Sheridan College), California State University, Pratt Institute(New York), University of Montana, Brown University and many others.

Features

Illustrate! has an extensive list of features. For a complete list of new features in Illustrate! 5.0 refer to What's New?

From its initial inception in 1994 the Illustrate! renderer has grown and advanced, continually bringing you the best cutting-edge non-photorealistic rendering technology. This latest version pushes that envelope far beyond anything available today. Illustrate! boasts a wide range of features that help animators and artists produce professional artwork with a minimum of time and effort.

Quick and Easy

Don't want to learn another plugin? Illustrate! includes the Rendering Wizard that sets up your output simply and easily. Just answer a series of questions, including output format, background color, and so on, and Illustrate! prepares the rendering for you. All that remains is for you to click on Render. If you do want to delve deeper into the enormous possiblities offered by Illustrate! the new advanced help system will provide you with all the information you need, including tutorials and examples