• 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.