Accelerate your work. Achieve superior results.

Bring 3D film effects to the big screen. Generate realistic characters in a top-selling game. Create rich and complex design visualization. Introduce a new dimension to your school curriculum.

Autodesk® 3ds Max® 8 software builds on our promise to deliver state-of-the-art tools for creative and media professionals. Developed as a total animation package with a deep, productive feature set designed to accelerate workflow, 3ds Max is the leader in 3D animation for game development, design visualization, visual effects, and education.

Key Features for Design Visualization Professionals;
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• Radiosity adaptive subdivision—Adds adaptive subdivision to the radiosity plug-in, enabling higher quality, more accurate, and more efficient radiosity processing.
• Batch render—Gives users a way to quickly render a series of stills from different angles, with the option to change render settings and layers in between views.
• UVW mapping improvement—Place physically scaled materials onto objects in the scene more easily and accurately with support for real-world measurements.
• Sweep modifier—“Loft” a shape or profile along lines or polylines imported from AutoCAD or line work created in 3ds Max, even applying pre-set shapes to simple line work.
• Scene state—Capture object, layer, material, camera, and light information as a "scene state” that can be saved and restored at will.
• Autodesk Revit 7 interoperability—Autodesk® Revit® users can now create high-quality images of their models with 3ds Max 7.5 by importing/linking a Revit model via the DWG format, and having the scene objects correspond directly to individual Revit objects.
• Autodesk Inventor interoperability—Access the Autodesk Inventor® file option directly within the import tool.
  DWF export—Convey ideas and share designs by exporting models from 3ds Max 8 for viewing with Autodesk® DWF™ Viewer and Autodesk® DWF™ Composer.
• mental ray 3.4—Run medium-sized render farms right out of the box. mental ray® 3.4 renderer delivers numerous optimizations, including faster final gathering performance, double precision computation for ray tracing and fast rasterization for first-generation rays. mental ray 3.4 also adds Satellite Rendering to allow 3d Max license owners to freely use up to eight slave CPUs to render an image using distributed bucket rendering.
• Asset Management—Share, control, and manage your work-in-progress assets using Asset Tracker, our new source control solution, tightly integrated with Autodesk® Vault and compatible with existing asset management solutions.
• Maxscript—Build Maxscripts faster with our Maxscript debugger. This debugger follows industry standards and allows you to break into your script’s code and isolate any issues in your scripts. Expression controllers now have full MXS support.
• New Edit Poly options—Build detail into geometry with Edit Poly Bridge. Have greater control of geometry with new Slide and Pinch option in Edit Poly Connect. Select edge geometry by growing and shrinking selections along Ring/Loops.

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Feature highlights

Normal mapping: This revolutionary workflow developed for gaming adds extreme detail to low-polygon models with high-resolution maps. With complete rendering support this industry first allows normal mapping to bring great time-saving benefits to film production and cinematic visualizations.

Edit Poly: Significantly increases the rapidity and ease at which complex polygonal surfaces can be created, modified and then animated - improving the creative process.

Autodesk® Character Studio® : Key to 3ds Max 7 is the complete integration of Character Studio as a standard component. Previously offered only as a plug-in, this advanced character animation functionality now gives all animators the power and flexibility to rig and animate high-quality characters and create crowd simulations with the ease and efficiency customers have come to expect of Autodesk Media and Entertainment solutions.

Academy Award-winning mental ray® 3.3: The latest upgrade to this extremely popular high-quality rendering solution provides dramatic performance acceleration, advanced hardware-rendering options, and more flexible implementation capabilities through satellite licensing

Turbosmooth: A highly optimized smoothing algorithm for increased performance of high resolution models.

Skin wrap deformer: A powerful modeling and animation tool that allows artists to apply props and clothing to pre-skinned 3D models and create more sophisticated animations with greater ease.

Mobile game exporters: Native mobile 3D asset creation with new JSR 184 exporter.