Autodesk 3ds Max Design

Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2012 software delivers powerful new rendering toolsets, enhanced iterative workflows, and an accelerated graphics core that together help increase overall productivity. Featuring the physically accurate iray® renderer from mental images, versatile procedural textures, and stylized rendering capabilities, 3ds Max Design 2012 helps designers present their creative vision more effectively. Moreover, with the Nitrous render-quality accelerated viewports, designers can more rapidly iterate on their ideas to achieve more compelling end results. And, with new interoperability with Autodesk® Alias® industrial design applications and automated workflows with AutoCAD® Civil 3D® software, designers can more seamlessly aggregate their CAD data into powerful storytelling visualizations.

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Key new features

Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2012 software delivers powerful new rendering toolsets, enhanced iterative workflows, and an accelerated graphics core that together help increase overall
productivity. With this release, Autodesk helps designers to more effectively communicate design intent in order to influence key stakeholders and accelerate the path to new business.Featuring the physically accurate“point-and-shoot” iray® renderer from mental images, versatile,resolution-independent procedural textures, and new stylized rendering capabilities, 3ds Max Design2012 helps designers present their creative vision more effectively. Moreover, with the Nitrous render- quality accelerated viewports, designers can rapidly iterate on their ideas to achieve more compelling end results. Furthermore, with new interoperability with the Autodesk® Alias® industrial design software products and automated workflows with AutoCAD® Civil 3D® software, CAD data is more easily aggregated into powerful storytelling visualizations.

Top Benefits
Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core

A top priority of the Excalibur (XBR) initiative to revitalize 3ds Max Design is to introduce a new viewport system engineered to provide dramatic improvements in performance and visual quality.Nitrous leverages accelerated GPUs and multi-core workstations to enable designers to iterate faster and to handle larger data sets with limited impact on interactivity. Advanced scene management techniques, together with multithreaded viewport scene traversal and material evaluation, result in a smoother, more responsive workflow. Moreover, Nitrous provides a render-quality display environment supports unlimited lights, soft shadows, screen-space ambient occlusion, tone-mapping, and higher-quality transparency. It also enables progressive refinement of image quality without
blocking changes to the scene, helping designers make better creative and aesthetic decisions in the context of their final output.

Autodesk Alias Products Interoperability
Enjoy smoother interoperability with Autodesk® Alias® Design software for industrial design, with the new ability to import .WIRE files natively into 3ds Max Design as Bodies objects, preserving object names, hierarchies, layers, and material names. Designers can now interactively adjust tessellation results inside 3ds Max Design 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.

Graphite now features a new French curve-like ‘Constrain to Spline’ mode to help guide the brush as changes are made to the mesh. Edited meshes can be exported back to Alias Design as .OBJ files.

Substance Procedural Textures
Achieve a vast range of look variations with a new library of 80 Substance procedural textures.
These dynamic, resolution-independent textures automatically generate bump maps and specular maps for impressive results. Designers can quickly convert textures to bitmaps to work with a standard renderer using a GPU-accelerated baking process. Dynamically editable and animatable parameters are for example: brick distribution, surface aging, and mortar thickness in a brick wall and the age, roughness, curb borders, and lane markings of a street texture.

iray Renderer
Creating realistic images has never been easier with 3ds Max Design, using the newly integrated
iray® rendering technology from mental images. Another major milestone in the Rendering Revolution,
iray enables designers to set up their scene, press ‘render’, and get more predictable, photo-real
results without worrying about rendering settings— similar to a ‘point-and-shoot’ camera. Designers
can focus on their creative vision as they 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.

Stylistic Rendering
Create a variety of non-photorealistic (NPR) effects that help simulate artistic styles created by hand, 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.Civil View
Enjoy automated iterative workflows between AutoCAD Civil 3D and 3ds Max Design with the Civil View (formerly Dynamite VSP) feature set. With Civil View, designers can automatically create realistic visualizations in 3ds Max Design using civil data. They can create roads complete with road markings, circulation lanes, and chevrons; place trees at random or regular offsets along the side of a road or railway; or populate a highway with moving vehicles. With the repeatable, style-based process, styles are defined once, and then applied with minimal effort to multiple iterations or projects. Civil View now offers enhanced support for the new iray and Quicksilver rendering solutions.

Sculpting and Painting Enhancements
Designers can enjoy greater control over brushstrokes and their effects on geometry, thanks to new sculpting and painting workflows. New transform brushes enable modelers to slide vertices along target surfaces, while Paint Deform brushstrokes can be constrained to a spline. Moreover, designers can now save and load brush settings to quickly toggle between favorite presets, and choose a source for the Clone brush from anywhere on the screen when painting bitmaps in the Viewport Canvas.