The award-winning Autodesk® 3ds Max® software is the tool of choice for leaders in the game development, television, film, and digital publishing industries who want a comprehensive 3D modeling, animation, and rendering solution right out of the box.

Now, Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 builds on this success with powerful new toolsets to help you shape your worlds the way you want, manage complex scenes with ease, and take advantage of unprecedented support for software interoperability and pipeline integration.

Innovative Graphite Modeling Toolset
Create models quickly and efficiently with the new Graphite modeling toolset. Graphite takes 3ds Max polygon modeling to a new level by delivering over 100 tools for advanced polygonal modeling and freeform design. Because the Graphite tools are displayed in one central location, it‘s easy to find the tools you need for the job. With Graphite you can customize the tool display or hide the command panel and model in Expert Mode.

Material Explorer
Easily manage complex scenes using the new Material Explorer, a productivity-enhancing toolset that simplifies the way users interact with objects and materials. Use it to quickly browse and replace materials in your scene, and to view material properties and relationships.

Integrated mental mill Technology
Develop, test, and maintain powerful mental mill® shaders and shader graphsright inside 3ds Max. As the first 3D modeling and animation program to integrate mental mill technology, 3ds Max 2010 gives you real-time visual feedback, enabling even the novice user to create sophisticated, hardware-agnostic shaders.

PFlowAdvanced Particle Effects
Incorporate sophisticated particle effects into your 3ds Max scenes with PFlowAdvanced, a toolset of 12 new operators including precision painting, for manually specifying where particles will emit; and Shape Plus, an enhanced selection of 2D and 3D shapes. PFlowAdvanced also includes a range of utilities and grouping operators, and the PFlowElements library with over 100 element samples created by leaders in the 3D effects industry.

Containers
The new Containers toolset in 3ds Max facilitates collaboration and flexible workflows by enabling users to collect multiple objects of a complex scene into a single container. Place related objectssuch as sections of a cityin a container and treat them as a single element. To improve scene performance, temporarily unload containers from the viewport display while maintaining their relationships to the scene and reload later when neededsaving memory, increasing viewport performance, and decreasing load and save times. 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); and reference multiple containers created by others into a single scene so users can work together in context. Users can access and edit each other’s container, allowing flexible workflows while also imposing constraints on what can be edited.

Review 3
Take the guesswork out of your final renders with Review 3—a major advancement in viewport display. Review 3 now offers support for ambient occlusion, High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI)-based lighting, soft shadows, hardware anti-aliasing, interactive exposure control, and the revolutionary mental mill shader technology.

xView Mesh Analyzer
Reduce errors in your pipeline with the new xView mesh analyzer technology, a powerful tool with live in-viewport reporting that helps you quickly and efficiently resolve mesh errors, such as overlapping UVs, duplicate faces, and isolated vertices. The xView analyzer speeds the testing of models and maps, and lets you add your own specific tests and queries.

OBJ Import
Easily import and export 3D model data between 3ds Max and Autodesk® Mudbox™ softwareas well as other third-party 3D digital sculpting applicationswith improved OBJ plug-in performance and expanded file-format support. Enhanced features enable you to view OBJ files for texture coordinates and smoothing groups, and choose from options for importing normals, triangulating polygons on import, and saving normal and polygon import presets for future use.

ProOptimizer
Quickly and intelligently optimize your high-poly-count 3D models. ProOptimizer enables you to precisely control the number of faces or points in your scene or model by removing useful faces last to reduce a selection up to 75 percent without loss of detail. Scenes can be optimized in real time or batch optimized. ProOptimizer technology maintains all UV-texture-channel and vertex-color-channel information, respects the symmetry of models, preserves explicit normals, and gives you the option to protect or exclude object borders.

ProSound
Sync your audio playback with the viewport and render your track to match the playback speed with the new ProSound multitrack audio system. Add up to 100 audio tracks to your scene and animate the volume of each track; the technology also supports both PCM and compressed audio in AVI and WAV format with up to six output channels.

Global Quality Knobs: mental ray
Quickly dial up or down overall quality settings for shadows, glossy refractions or glossy reflections with global quality knobs along with image anti-aliasing and indirect illumination quality.

Performance Improvements
Work more efficiently with expanded multiprocessor support. Mesh-display processing algorithms and analytical calculations performed by the new xView mesh analyzer have been multithreaded for increased productivity. These improvements build on the many graphical processing unit (GPU) optimizations of earlier 3ds Max versions to give users a much more responsive viewport experience.

C# and .NET Support
Customize, extend, and integrate 3ds Max 2010 into your existing pipelines with improved support for C# and .NET; a new MAXScript debugger with line-number support helps identify problems in customized scripts.