GOAL
The application was first develop for the animation industry. Animation tools were evolving really fast and users could quickly conceive animation clip but they had to create music and sound effects with a diffrent set of application and know-how. We wanted to give the animators tools they know how to use so they can bring life and voices to their animations.

With the venue of surround THX and AC3 we thought of using SND for live action movies for foley artists to use but very few audio technician were 3d animators. The surround output was definetly a must and SND is ready for Dolby AC3 Integration. The license for AC3 encoding is a 400$ royalty for each copy so we planned to release a more expensive professional version in the following year of the first release.

OVERVIEW
SND is interfacing with 3D Studio MAX application it was last compiled for the version 2.5. It is a plugin that can be access in the Helper menu to create sound sources and receivers, in the Utilities menu you can access the Render Settings and the Collision Solver dialogs. Also in the Material Editor is a new material type called Sonic Material.

The program is written as a stand alone application composed with a 3D sound raytracer, a realtime preview engine, a collision detection engine. Programmed objects like the sound sources (point and conical), they can be animated in the 3d space and the wave file is start or end at a givin frame, loop or fade out. Sound sources have reach limits and def distances that you can set and animate. The sound receiver is a "3d head" that you can subdivided in microphones. It can also be considered has ears for the camera.

DEVELOPMENT
The development was scheduled for 4 months with two programers, a director and a designer. It was first release as beta version after 1 month, and made available to the beta program members. 125 days later version 1.0 was compiled, tested, packaged, licensed and launched. We fixed a few reported bugs and added the highly requested background sound feature and released 1.1 in early 1999. The code was then documented and the project was stopped.

FEATURES
- collision detection.
- background music.
- realtime preview using DirectSound (3DTM).
- support 3D sound with headphones,
       quadrophonic and surround configuration.
- manipulation similar to light and camera.
- material's frequential attenuation calculation.
- library of predefined "sonic materials".
- environmental reverberation.
- Doppler shif calculation.
- sound sources, sound receivers and sonic materials
       are fully animatable.
- supports up to 8 independant channels in a scene
       for any kind of commercial audio system.
- HRTF used for headphone sound rendering
      (Head-Related Transfer Function).

OPPORTUNITY
The possible applications you can use this code for are numerous. The simplest is the following : Just get the latest 3D Studio MAX SDK (Software Development Kit) from Autodesk/Discreet, recompile the source code and sell it has a plugin. You can also port it to the platform you prefer like Maya or you can package the realtime audio engine alone for game engine or patent it and keep it to yourself.