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.

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.

3ds Max 2012 and 3ds Max Design 2012 introduces 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.

* The mRigids rigid body simulation component of the MassFX simulation framework replaces Havok™ Reactor which was available in prior versions of 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design.

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.

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.

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.

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