Autodesk 3ds Max provides a comprehensive, integrated 3D modeling, animation, and rendering solution for game developers, visual effects artists, and graphic designers.
Powerful 3D modeling — With an extensive polygon modeling and texture mapping toolset, modelers and texture artists can work more quickly and effectively. Advanced character rigging and animation — The fully integrated Character Animation Toolkit (CAT) provides an out-of-the-box advanced rigging and animation system. Choice of integrated renderers — Artists can create highly near realistic or stylized looks using the tightly integrated 3ds Max scan line and mental ray® renderers, including mental ray network rendering to help finish rendering faster. Extensible pipeline support — Developers can customize, extend, and integrate 3ds Max into their existing pipelines with support for C ++ and .NET. FBX Import/Export for Unreal pipelines — Create and animate 3D models in Autodesk 3ds Max and export as Autodesk® FBX® asset exchange technology files, and then import into the Unreal® Editor content creation tool. What's New in 2012 VIDEO Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core A top priority of the Excalibur (XBR) initiative to restructure 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design was to introduce a new viewport system engineered to help provide dramatic improvements in performance and visual quality. The new Nitrous core leverages GPUs and multi-core workstations to enable you to iterate faster and handle larger data sets with more interactivity. Advanced scene management techniques, together with multithreaded viewport scene traversal and material evaluation, result in a smoother, more responsive workflow. Furthermore, Nitrous provides a render-quality display environment that supports unlimited lights, soft shadows, screen-space ambient occlusion, tone-mapping, and higher-quality transparency.
VIDEO Substance Procedural Textures Achieve a vast range of look variations with a new library of 80 Substance procedural textures. These dynamic, resolution-independent textures have a tiny disk space footprint, and can be exported to certain games engines via the Substance Air middleware offering (available separately from Allegorithmic SAS). Alternatively, textures can be quickly converted to bitmaps for rendering. Some examples of dynamically editable and animatable parameters are: brick distribution, surface aging, and mortar thickness in a brick wall; and the age, roughness, curb borders, and lane markings of a street texture.
mRigids Rigid-Body Dynamics 3ds Max 2012 and 3ds Max Design 2012 introduce the MassFX unified system of simulation solvers, and deliver the first module: mRigids rigid-body dynamics. With mRigids, you can leverage the multi-threaded NVIDIA® PhysX® engine to create compelling, dynamic rigid-body simulations directly in the 3ds Max viewport. mRigids supports static, dynamic, and kinematic rigid bodies (the latter for rag doll simulations), and a number of constraints: Rigid, Slide, Hinge, Twist, Universal, Ball & Socket, and Gear.
iray Renderer Creating realistic images has never been easier with 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design, using the newly incorporated iray® rendering technology from mental images. Get more predictable, photo-real results that more accurately portray the physical world without worrying about rendering settings™ similar to a 'point-and-shoot' camera. Focus on your creative vision and intuitively use real world materials, lighting, and settings to more accurately portray the physical world; iray progressively refines the image until the desired level of detail is achieved. iray works with standard multi-core CPUs, however, NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPU hardware will significantly accelerate the rendering process.
Single-Step Suites Interoperability Take advantage of the focused toolsets in the Autodesk® 3ds Max® Entertainment Creation Suites 2012, with new single-step interoperability between 3ds Max and Autodesk® Mudbox™ 2012 software, Autodesk® MotionBuilder® 2012 software, and Autodesk® Softimage® 2012 software. Export 3ds Max scenes to Mudbox to add sculpted and painted details, and then update the scene in 3ds Max in one simple step. Take a 3ds Max scene to MotionBuilder to access the animation toolset, without having to think about file format details. And tap into the power of the Softimage ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) particle system directly from your 3ds Max scene.
Autodesk Alias Products Interoperability Enjoy smoother interoperability with Autodesk® Alias® Design software for industrial design, with the ability to import .WIRE files natively into 3ds Max Design and 3ds Max as Bodies objects, preserving object names, hierarchies, layers, and material names. Designers can now interactively adjust tessellation results inside 3ds Max Design and 3ds Max to help fine-tune their visualization, and add sculpted details on top of Alias Design reference data using the intuitive Graphite polygon modeling toolset in 3ds Max Design and 3ds Max.
Enhanced UVW Unwrapping Create better UVW maps in less time, with a new Least Squares Conformal Mapping (LSCM) method, enhancements to existing tools, and more streamlined workflows. The LSCM method preserves local angles of the mesh faces in order to help minimize texture distortion. Employed in a new 'Peel' tool, the new method produces unwrapped UVWs from cut seams with a single click.
Vector Displacement Map Support With new support for Vector Displacement Maps (VDMs) in 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design, you can use mental ray® renderer or iray to render complex high-resolution details created in Autodesk® Mudbox™ software or certain other packages on low-resolution geometry. VDMs can represent directional displacements that do not simply follow the normal: for example, forms with appendages, undercuts, folds, and bulges.
Sculpting and Painting Enhancements Enjoy greater control over brushstrokes and their effects on geometry, thanks to new sculpting and painting workflows. Useful in topology reduction workflows, the new Conform brush guides geometry towards another surface, with the degree of the conforming effect varying from softly approaching to shrink-wrapping. Modelers can slide vertices along target surfaces with the new transform brushes: Move, Rotate, Scale, and Relax. In addition, Paint Deform brushstrokes — for tools such as Push, Flatten, and Exaggerate — can be constrained to a spline, enabling it to be used as a guide or ruler, or to easily repeat freehand strokes.
Stylistic Rendering Create a variety of non-photorealistic (NPR) effects that help simulate artistic styles, with the new ability to render stylized images in the viewport and with the Quicksilver renderer. The looser, more abstract style of NPR imagery helps designers and architects more effectively communicate their core design intent while deemphasizing distracting or incomplete design details.
ProOptimizer Enhancements You can now optimize models faster, more efficiently, and with better results, using the enhanced ProOptimizer feature. ProOptimizer now offers normal and UV interpolation, together with the ability to keep high-resolution normals on the low-resolution result.
3ds Max SDK The Autodesk 3ds Max SDK (Software Developer Kit) can be used to help extend and implement virtually every aspect of the Autodesk 3ds Max application, including scene geometry, animation controllers, camera effects, and atmospherics. Create new scene components, control the behavior of existing components, and export the scene data to custom data formats. Developers can leverage a new managed .NET plug-in loader, making it easier to develop plug-ins in C# or other .NET languages. With more than 200 sample plug-in projects, 3ds Max's comprehensive SDK offers both deep and broad access to satisfy even the most demanding production scenarios.
32-Bit 3ds Max 2012 or 3ds Max Design 2012 for Windows Operating system : Microsoft® Windows® 7 Professional operating system, Microsoft® Windows Vista® Business operating system (SP2 or higher), or Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional operating system (SP3 or higher)
For general animation and rendering (typically fewer than 1,000 objects or 100,000 polygons):
Intel® Pentium® 4 1.4 GHz or equivalent AMD® processor with SSE2 technology* 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended) 2 GB swap space (4 GB recommended)** 3 GB free hard drive space Direct3D® 10 technology, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL-capable graphics card† (256 MB or higher video card memory, 1 GB or higher recommended) Three-button mouse with mouse driver software DVD-ROM drive†† Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 8.0 internet browser or higher or Mozilla® Firefox® 3.0 internet browser or higher Internet connection for web downloads and Autodesk® Subscription-aware access 64-Bit 3ds Max 2012 or 3ds Max Design 2012 for Windows Operating system : Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64, Microsoft Windows Vista Business x64 (SP2 or higher), or Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 (SP3 or higher)
For general animation and rendering (typically fewer than 1,000 objects or 100,000 polygons):
Intel® 64 or AMD64 processor with SSE2 technology* 4 GB RAM (8 GB recommended) 4 GB swap space (8 GB recommended)** 3 GB free hard drive space Direct3D 10, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL-capable graphics card† (256 MB or higher video card memory, 1 GB recommended) Three-button mouse with mouse driver software DVD-ROM drive†† Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 or higher or Mozilla Firefox 3.0 or higher browser Internet connection for web downloads and Autodesk Subscription-aware access For large scenes and complex data sets (typically more than 1,000 objects or 100,000 polygons):
Intel® 64 or AMD64 processor with SSE2 technology* 8 GB RAM 8 GB swap space** 3 GB free hard drive space Direct3D 10, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL-capable graphics card† (1 GB or higher video card memory) Three-button mouse with mouse driver software DVD-ROM drive†† Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 or higher or Mozilla Firefox 3.0 or higher browser Internet connection for web downloads and Autodesk Subscription-aware access 3ds Max 2012 or 3ds Max Design 2012 for Macintosh Boot Camp You can install Autodesk 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2012 software on a Mac® computer on a Windows® partition. The system must use Boot Camp® application program to help manage a dual OS configuration and meet the minimum system requirements.
Intel®-based Mac Pro or MacBook® Pro computer1 Mac® OS X 10.5.x or higher operating system Boot Camp V 2.0 or higher Minimum 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended for 32-bit Windows, 8 GB or more for 64-bit Windows) Minimum 20 GB disk space for Apple OS partition, minimum 20 GB for Windows OS partition Mac Virtualization on Parallels Desktop Autodesk 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2012 can be used on the Mac via Parallels Desktop® for Mac software without having to boot directly into the Windows OS so it is easy to switch between platforms. The system must meet the following requirements:
Intel-based Mac Pro or MacBook Pro1 Mac OS X 10.5.x or higher Parallels Desktop 4.0 (4.0.3844 or higher)2 Minimum 4 GB RAM (6 GB system memory for 32-bit Windows, 8 GB or more for 64-bit Windows recommended) Minimum 40 GB available disk space (100 GB recommended) For more details, read the 3ds Max for Mac FAQ .
1 64-bit Windows Vista requires an Intel Core® 2 Duo or Intel® Xeon® processor.2 Parallels Desktop is the only supported virtual machine software at this time.
* Autodesk 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2012 have been optimized to take advantage of the SSE2 extended instruction sets supported on Intel® Pentium® 4 or higher, AMD Athlon™ 64, AMD Opteron™, and AMD Phenom™ processors. Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 will not operate on computers that do not support SSE2. Several utilities are available on the Internet that report CPUID, including supported instructions sets.
** Autodesk recommends settings that allow Microsoft Windows to manage virtual memory, as needed. There should always be at least twice as much free hard disk space as system memory (RAM).
† Some features of 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2012 are enabled only when used with graphics hardware that supports Shader Model 3.0 (Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 3.0). In addition, Quicksilver hardware rendering requires additional GPU resources to work effectively. A minimum of 512 MB of graphics memory should be used. A minimum of 1 GB is recommended for the most complex scenes, shaders, and lighting modes.
The integrated iray® rendering technology from mental images runs well on CPU processing alone but can be accelerated by NVIDIA GPU CUDA technology.
†† Autodesk 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2012 are available only on dual-layer DVD media (or electronic download where available). CD media is no longer available. DVD-ROM drive is not required if installing using electronic download. However, to accommodate the installation files, you will need 9 GB of hard disk space and an additional 16 GB of space for temporary files created during the installation.
Autodesk reserves the right to alter product offerings and specifications at any time without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear on this page.
Autodesk is not responsible for errors or failures of Autodesk software arising from the installation of updates, extensions or new releases issued by third party hardware or software vendors for the qualified software or hardware identified in this document (or for any other third party software or hardware that you may use in connection with Autodesk products).
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