3ds Max offers a rich and flexible toolset to create premium designs with full artistic control.
- Create massive worlds in games
- Visualize high-quality architectural renderings
- Model finely detailed interiors and objects
- Bring characters and features to life with animation and VFX
The built-in Arnold renderer provides a rich experience and can handle your more complex characters, scenes, and effects.
- Save time with centralized creative tools for interactive light mixing, color correction, and lens effects on the rendered image
- Work faster with an artist-friendly user experience and intuitive controls
- Iterate and produce high quality renders and variations faster
3ds Max lets you scale your workflow with automation, allowing you to spend more time on creativity.
- Use 3ds Max as a compute engine to scale content production
- Extend built-in workflows with accessible APIs
- Accelerate manual steps to boost productivity
Features include:
Modeling & Texturing
- Spline Workflows: Create and animate geometry in several intuitive ways with enhanced spline tools.
- Open Shading Language (OSL) Support: Create or use pre-existing procedural OSL maps with any supported renderer.
- Chamfer Modifier: Create best-in-class procedural edge modeling details with simple and precise tools.
- Automated Retopology and Mesh Repair: Automatically optimize the geometry of high-resolution models to create a clean, quad-based mesh geometry.
- Material, Texture & Color Editor: Apply material finishes, change textures, and use vibrant colors to make your designs photorealistic.
- Smart Extrude: Interactively extrude faces of 3D objects. Rebuild and stitch together adjacent faces automatically.
- Mesh & Surface Modeling: Create parametric and organic objects with polygon, subdivision surface, and spline-based modeling features.
- NEW! Baking to Texture: Streamlined, intuitive, and fully scriptable texture baking experience.
- NEW! Weighted Normals Modifier: Built-in weighted normal calculator that can be directly applied to 3D models allowing you to create precise designs.
Animation and Effects
- 3ds Max Fluids: Create realistic liquid behaviors such as water, oil, lava as well as replicate gravity and collision effects.
- Character Animation and Rigging Tools: Create procedural animation and character rigging with CAT, biped, and crowd animation tools.
- General Animation Tools: Use keyframe and procedural animation tools and also view and edit animation trajectories directly in the viewport.
- Motion Paths: Preview and adjust animation paths directly in the viewport.
- Particle Flow Effects: Create sophisticated particle effects such as water, fire, spray, and snow.
Rendering
- Brilliant Viewport: Reduce design interactions with render quality viewport previews, displaying PBR materials and camera effects directly.
- Arnold for 3ds Max: Use Arnold GPU Renderer to view scene changes in real time, including lighting, materials, and camera.
- Activeshade Viewport: An interactive rendering experience that allows you to see your scene in a near-final rendering quality as you’re working.
- Physical camera: Simulate real-life camera settings such as shutter speed, aperture, depth of field, exposure, and more.
- 3ds Max Batch: Leverage the power of 3ds Max for automation by using 3ds Max as a true command-line tool.
- Scene Converter: Seamlessly and consistently change materials, lights, cameras, renderers from one to another.
Workflow and Pipeline
- Improved Pipeline Tools Integration: Smooth, high-quality experience with added flexibility of tear-off viewports.
- Alembic Support: Alembic Version 1.7 now supports instances, allowing files to be drastically smaller while maintaining their original complexity.
- Modern UI and Workspaces
Create your own custom workspaces with a more modern, responsive, high-DPI-ready user interface. - CivilView Workflow: Automatically populate parametrically generated details such as animated vehicles to scale with your environment.
- Autodesk Viewer Workflow: Share models and review feedback online with the Autodesk Viewer directly from the 3ds Max interface.
- Software Security: Use Safe Scene Loading to protect your work from potentially malicious scripts that could be part of scene files.
Design Visualization
- Embellishments: Bring to life fine-tuned touches such as materials, lighting, and textures for photorealistic imagery.
- Import Capabilities: Import data from anywhere, using CAD and BIM data directly or to enhance the details of your 3D design.
- Physically Based Lighting: Simulate artificial lighting sources to accurately portray how light and shadows will interact with your designs.
- Interactive Rendering: See and make changes in your scene in near-final rendering quality in the render frame window while you work.
- High-Quality Imagery: Advanced tools give you the built-in rendering power to create the highest quality photo-real visualizations.
- Transform Technical to Visual: Rich and powerful toolsets allow you to model premium architectural designs with artistic control.
Games and Entertainment
- Powerful Scene Modeling: Easily model a place, person, or element with fast spline and poly modeling workflows.
- Stunning Characters: Create procedural animation and character rigging with CAT and biped tools.
- Physically Based Rendering: Quickly iterate and see near-final quality renders of your game assets right in the viewport.
- Dynamic Visual Content: Add shading and lighting to game assets with powerful texture baking tools.
- Customizable Pipeline Integration: Get tighter pipeline integration with support for Python 3.