3D Modeling
Efficiently create parametric and organic objects with polygon, spline, and NURBS-based modeling features.
Liberate your creativity with more than 100 advanced polygonal modeling and freeform 3D design tools in the Graphite modeling toolset.
Precisely control the number of faces or points in your object with ProOptimizer technology and reduce a selection’s complexity by up to 75 percent without loss of detail.
Articulate minute details and optimize meshes for both interactive manipulation and rendering using subdivision surfaces and polygon smoothing.
Shading & Texturing
Perform creative texture mapping operations, including tiling, mirroring, decal placement, blurring, spline mapping, UV stretching, relaxation, Remove Distortion, Preserve UV, and UV template image export.
Design and edit simple to complex shading hierarchies with the Slate material editor, taking advantage of extensive libraries of textures, images, image swatches, and procedural maps.
Bake each object’s material and lighting into new texture maps with the Render to Texture functionality.
Animation
Leverage procedural animation and rigging with CAT (Character Animation Toolkit), biped, and crowd-animation functionality.
Use the Skin modifier and CAT Muscle to help achieve more precise, smoother control of skeletal deformation as bones move.
Rig complex mechanical assemblies and characters with custom skeletons using 3ds Max bones, inverse kinematics (IK) solvers, and customizable rigging tools.
Wire one- and two-way relationships between controllers to create simplified animation interfaces.
Animate CAT, biped, and 3ds Max objects in layers to tweak dense motion capture data without compromising underlying keyframes.
Dynamics & Effects
Use the built-in cloth-simulation engine to turn almost any 3D object into clothing, or build garments from scratch—and then make adjustments to and animate these cloth objects.
Create hair, fur, and other strand-derived effects such as grass, and precisely control their styling and animation.
Design sophisticated event-driven particle effects such as water, fire, spray, and snow, and control them with expressions, scripts, or direct manipulators.
3D Rendering
Create high-fidelity pre-visualizations, animatics, and marketing materials with the innovative, new Quicksilver high-performance renderer.
Quickly set up advanced photorealistic lighting and custom shaders with the mental ray® rendering engine.
Take advantage of idle processors to finish rendering faster with unlimited batch rendering in mental ray.
Visualize and manipulate a given region in both the viewport and Framebuffer with Reveal™ functionality.
Output multiple passes simultaneously from supported rendering software, including high dynamic range (HDR) data from architecture and design materials, for reassembly in 3ds Max® Composite.
Pipeline Integration
Use Autodesk® FBX® technology to exchange data with certain other leading 3D applications, including Autodesk® Maya® 3D animation, modeling, visual effects, rendering, and compositing software; Autodesk® Mudbox™ 3D digital sculpting and texture painting software; and Autodesk® Revit® Architecture building design software.
Make the most of nondestructive file-link workflows to deal with upstream changes when working with Autodesk software that exports FBX file formats.
Import solids data directly into Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk 3ds Max Design from Autodesk® Inventor® 3D CAD software.
Aggregate data with support for more than 30 2D and 3D data formats, including 3ds, AI, DEM, XML, DDF, DWG, DXF, FBX, DAE, IGES, IPT, IAM, OBJ, STL, VRML, FLT, SAT, and SKP.
Collaboration
Improve scene performance and reduce memory consumption by temporarily unloading Containers from the viewport display while maintaining their relationships to the scene and reloading them when required.
Translate, delete, copy, or save container nodes.
Use containers to override object properties for scene organization without affecting layer organization (similar to a nested layer workflow).
Reference containers created by others into a single scene and access and edit colleagues’ containers, enabling more flexible, collaborative workflows while protecting against unwanted edits.
