Behind-the-Scenes of Assembly Tool for 3ds Max

In case you missed it, a couple of days ago, Senior Art Manager at NVIDIA Andrew Averkin released Assembly Tool, a new plug-in for 3ds Max equipped with a set of useful scripts and tools designed to help you optimize, accelerate, and simplify your workflow.

Recently, following the release of the tool itself, the developer also prepared a short write-up that dives deeper into Assembly Tool, explains how it was created, what it is for, how it can be used for commercial and personal projects, and what features it has. What's more, Andrew also explained how the plug-in helped NVIDIA developers to optimize and speed up their workflows.

And here's the full breakdown:

Hello guys! My name is Andrew Averkin, I am a 3D Artist from Ukraine with more than 15 years of experience in the industry. I am specializing in the creation of 3D environments for films and game cinematics, as well as in the games development industry.

Currently, I work at NVIDIA as an Art Manager where I and a lot of great artists are taking part in many projects, including a variety of tech demos, game demos, remastering of famous game titles, as well in a big project here called Digital Twins. In parallel, I am helping to develop tools for Omniverse Create.

I want to bring to your attention the Assembly Tool for 3ds Max and tell you more about this tool, what it’s for, what features it has, how I use it for my personal and commercial projects to speed up my work, to make it more efficient, to optimize working processes and how we use it in our daily work here at NVIDIA.

A short story behind Assembly Tool development. Back in the day, I was mostly creating 3D environments for game cinematics. I remember quite often there were situations when during the creation of a particular project, certain challenging tasks emerged, and I had to search for tools that were either not available in 3ds Max, or their functionality was limited, or the tools did not quite fit the existing tasks. Also, there were often situations where I had to make the same steps over and over again, which usually were taking a lot of time.

That's how my friend Viacheslav Sutormin started helping me with the development of small scripts for 3ds Max that would help speed up my work as a whole, improve it and optimize it. So, I began to invent script ideas, their logic, and work, and Viacheslav implemented them and brought them to life. After some time, I took part in the development of some game projects, which also required the creation of specific scripts. By that time, I and Viacheslav work really well together, and we had gathered quite a large number of scripts. After that, we got a clear understanding that we need to combine all these scripts into one convenient and understandable tool. That's how Assembly Tool was born.

Assembly Tool was originally developed as a tool that could help 3D Environment Artists, but after a long and thorny path, many developments, changes, rethinking of toolkits and the logic of their work, as well as going through many commercial and non-commercial projects, Assembly Tool has grown and become a real friend and permanent assistant, that has in the arsenal a large set of indispensable tools that make the work of the artist not only easier but also faster, more efficient, and more fun. With each new project, the Assembly Tool expanded its capabilities, became more functional, and filled with new useful tools and options, which of course helped to solve work tasks much faster.

Assembly Tool has been used in various areas of 3D graphics: in game development, game cinematics, and advertising, and I can highlight a lot of 3D environment scenes where I used this tool: the Far Cry series, The Elder Scrolls Online, PUBG, Destiny, Halo, Love, Death & Robots by Netflix, Utopia Syndrome, as well as my personal projects.

Today, Assembly Tool has found a home at NVIDIA, where it is successfully used in many projects, including Digital Twins, a project in which we build 3D content for digital worlds with a highly accurate digital representation of physical objects and worlds that enable the next era of industrial virtualization and AI. My team uses Assembly Tool functionality to properly prepare 3d assets before they go to Omniverse Create and Digital Twins library, and I can say that the tool really helps to speed up our work, make it more efficient, and easier and it optimizes the entire QA process.

Assembly Tool contains a huge number of tools: smart transformation and manipulation of objects in a scene, tools that allow you to speed up the assembly of the scenes, tools for modeling and unwrapping, for work with textures and materials, objects and materials batch renaming, tools for work with layers, groups, pivot points, tools for scene management, painter, scatter, array, randomizer and physics tools, and this is only a small part of the Assembly Tool functionality. All of this allows for optimization of the workflow, which in turn significantly accelerated the performance of a variety of tasks and work in general.

Currently, here at Nvidia, we continue to develop Assembly Tool, to improve it, add new options and expand functionality. We use Assembly Tool as a prototype for upcoming new tools in Omniverse Create, which is an Omniverse app for world-building that allows users to assemble, light, simulate, and render large-scale scenes.

It is a completely free tool for 3ds Max and we really want to share it with everyone. We hope that the Assembly Tool will help you expand your working toolset as well, speed up work and make the life of a 3D Artist easier.

I would like to take this opportunity and thank Viacheslav Sutormin, who continues to help with the development of Assembly Tool, as well as my friend Gabriel Leone for his support and assistance. And of course, thanks to the NVIDIA family! Peace and goodness to everyone!

Learn more and download Assembly Tool for free by clicking this link. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.