Download: 3ds Max Design 2009 Overview

Autodesk 3ds Max Design

Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design software is a comprehensive
3D modeling, animation, and rendering solution designed to
support the way designers and visualization specialists work:
creatively, iteratively, and across multiple software applications.

Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design software enables architects, designers, and visualization specialists to fully explore, validate and communicate their creative ideas – from initial concept models to final, cinema-quality presentations. 3ds Max Design offers these professionals faster, more integrated workflows with AutoCAD®, Revit®, and Autodesk® Inventor™ software products.

3ds Max Design 2009

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009 software introduces powerful, new lighting simulation and analysis technology, advanced rendering capabilities, and integrated workflows with popular Autodesk products such as Revit, AutoCAD and Inventor. Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009 significantly enhances interoperability with Revit 2009 through the accurate import of lights, materials and cameras.

Key new technologies include new Exposure™ technology for simulating and analyzing sun, sky, and artificial lighting; Recognize™, scene loading technology that significantly improves inter-application workflow with Revit 2009; Reveal™, iterative rendering technology for dramatically faster, finished renderings, and ProMaterials™, a library of accurate manufacturer-specific materials.

New Feature Highlights

Exposure simulation technology – This key new technology, exclusive to 3ds Max Design 2009, is specifically designed to help simulate and analyze sun, sky, and artificial lighting, and is an ideal tool for sustainable-architecture projects.

Reveal rendering technology – The Reveal rendering system streamlines and accelerates iterative, creative workflows by providing precise control over what exactly is rendered in a given scene.

ProMaterials is an extensive, material library for mental ray® software, providing a fast and intuitive way to create accurate 3D materials for manufacturer-related building-materials including glass panes, hardwood floors, concrete, and different types of paint.

Recognize is a new Autodesk® FBX® software-based scene loading technology that enables 3ds Max Design users to quickly and accurately import geometry, lights, materials, and cameras from Revit 2009.

The ViewCube™ and SteeringWheels™ on-screen, interactive widgets give artists a fast and intuitive means of navigating 3D scenes. Both features are available in several Autodesk 3D products – providing users with a consistent navigation experience as they move between software packages.

New Mapping and Animation Workflow Toolsets – 3ds Max Design 2009 delivers new UV editing features including a UV spline mapping tool, and enhanced Pelt and Relax toolsets that streamline the UVW unwrap workflow.

Key New Features and Enhancements

	Reveal Workflow With 3ds Max Design 2009, Autodesk introduces Reveal rendering: a system that gives users very precise control over their renders, which in turn streamlines iterative workflows and enables designers to render final imagery faster. This key new feature gives the user the ability to visualize and manipulate a given region in both the Viewport and the Framebuffer. The rendered image Framebuffer now contains a simplified set of tools to quickly validate changes in a render, by optionally filtering out objects, regions and/or processes to temporarily balance quality vs. speed vs. completeness. For instance, render speed can be modulated by toggling geometry translation, lighting calculation and image-quality settings, based on what the user desires to update. Designers can now also auto-generate regions around selections and reuse temporary Final Gather maps at any time.
	Exposure Exposure technology is a key feature, exclusive to 3ds Max Design 2009, for simulating and analyzing sun, sky and artificial lighting in a 3D scene. Ideal for sustainable-architecture projects, this powerful feature set has been designed to assist architects in evaluating light intensity in their designs. This can help facilitate the evaluation of indoor environmental quality required, for example, for LEED 8.1 certification. In addition to light metering functionality with graphical output, Exposure also features the popular 3ds Max sun and sky models, a new quick-settings dashboard interface and an intelligent UI for accessing the various aspects of the software used in a light simulation such as render settings, light settings and material settings.
	Photometric Lighting Enhancements 3ds Max Design 2009 delivers a number of photometric lighting enhancements. The software now gives artists support for new types of area lights such as circular and cylindrical, photometric web previews in the Browse dialog and Light UI, as well as improved near-field photometry quality and spot distribution. Plus, distribution types can now support any emitting shape and artists can have their light shapes appear in their rendered image.
	New Color Correct Map The addition of a color correction map – separate from the composite map toolset – gives designers more options for independent color correction of texture maps.
	Review Enhancements Using Review, multiple maps can now be simultaneously displayed in the Viewport, for more accurate previewing. Review now has full photometric light support (including IES files) for instant feedback on how real luminaries will affect the environment. Finally, support has been added for realtime shadowing of objects that use Architectural and Design materials.
	ProMaterials A new library of easy-to-use, physically based materials for mental ray® software– based on manufacturing-supplied data and professional images – has been added to 3ds Max Design 2009. These give architects and designers fast access to such commonly used building and design materials as professional wall paint – with glossy or matte finishes – solid glass and concrete.
	Enhanced Per-object Render Settings The exposure of additional object-level settings for mental ray gives designers and visualization specialists the maximum level of control over their renders.
	Improved Render Final Gather and Global Illumination New render final gather only and render global illumination only settings enable designers to quickly cache these types of maps for improved animation rendering.
	New BSP2 Raytrace Acceleration The implementation of a new, faster BSP (binary space partitioning) acceleration in mental ray 3.6 improves large scene rendering performance and object instantiation. Unlike the traditional BSP acceleration, (which is still available), the new technique does not require manual tuning for BSP performance and memory consumption improvements.
	New mental ray Render Elements A first new mental ray-specific render element has been added to 3ds Max Design for extracting HDR data from Arch & Design materials. A second new element allows the users to define the type of data they would like extracted from the shader tree.
	UV Spline Mapping Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design software continue to lead the industry in intelligent, easy-to-use mapping tools. The new spline mapping feature can be used to map tubular and spline-like objects.
	Revit Interoperability The Autodesk ® FBX® software-based Recognize scene loading technology, new in 3ds Max Design 2009, gives architects, designers, and visualization professionals fast access to high-accuracy geometry, light, material, and camera data from their Revit 2009 scenes.
	Enhanced Scene Explorer With Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2009 software, Autodesk continues to expand the functionality of the Scene Explorer, originally released in 3ds Max 2008. New advanced filtering options allow architects, designers and visualization specialists to set and save more custom Scene Explorer object lists. Plus, there are now more options for how Groups are displayed.
	ViewCube Navigation With Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2009 software, Autodesk introduces the ViewCube™ navigation system – a UI toolset that common to several Autodesk 3D products. This on-screen, cube-shaped widget provides users feedback about their current viewing angle in relation to the model world. Users can also directly click on a face or rotate the ViewCube (with a click and drag motion) in order to change their view.
	SteeringWheels Navigation SteeringWheels™ Navigation is a simple-to-use camera interface common to several Autodesk 3D products. The SteeringWheels Navigation was designed to create a comfortable transition from the world of 2D to 3D specifically for design and architectural visualization professionals new to 3ds Max Design.
	Enhanced Windows Vista Support 3ds Max Design supports the Windows Vista® operating system Aero Interface.

FAQ

What is 3ds Max Design 2009?

3ds Max Design 2009 software is essentially a customized installation of Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2009 software, the result of which is an optimized user experience for architects, designers, engineers and visualization specialists.

3ds Max Design has the same functionality as 3ds Max, with the addition of the new Exposure™ lighting analysis technology. The Software Development Kit (SDK) is not provided. Other differences between the two products include user interface and application defaults, tutorials, sample files, and product websites.

Why is Autodesk creating two “flavors” or versions of 3ds Max?

In order to optimize the user experience for both entertainment and design visualization customers, it was necessary to create two flavors of 3ds Max.

Entertainment users commonly specialize in areas such as character rigging, lighting, texturing, and animation. For these customers, 3ds Max 2009 continues to build on its legacy as an industry-leading content creation tool in the games, film, television industries. 3ds Max Design is directed towards maximizing a high-quality “out of the box” design visualization experience for generalists in the architecture, civil engineering, industrial and manufacturing industries.

Each “flavor” of 3ds Max will be specifically tailored for its intended audience; from learning resources and sample files, to application defaults and even carefully selected features such as the Exposure lighting analysis technology for designers and visualization specialists.

Is 3ds Max or 3ds Max Design right for me?

If you work primarily in entertainment and require the SDK, choose 3ds Max 2009. 3ds Max has all the features of 3ds Max Design except for the new Exposure lighting analysis tool for assisting in LEED 8.1 certification.

If you work primarily in the architecture, civil engineering, or manufacturing sectors, and you do not need to create your own plug-ins using the SDK, choose 3ds Max Design. It has all the features of 3ds Max 2009 except for the SDK, and it includes the new Exposure lighting analysis tool for assisting in LEED 8.1 certification.

What features are the same between 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design?

With the exception of the SDK, 3ds Max Design has 100% of the features in 3ds Max. 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design share a single binary. This means that both applications will be able to simultaneously advance from a technological perspective. When 3ds Max is updated for the latest version of Microsoft® Windows® operating system (OS) or DirectX® application programming interface (API), 3ds Max Design is updated . A single binary also means that there is 100% file compatibility as well as plug-in compatibility between the applications.

How are 3ds Max 2009 and 3ds Max Design 2009 different from VIZ 2008?

VIZ 2008 was built on the 3ds Max 9 codebase. Since then, Autodesk has released 3ds Max 2008 and now intends to release 3ds Max 2009 and 3ds Max Design 2009. These products include major improvements in many important areas including:

Free, unlimited integrated mental ray® rendering software. VIZ 2008 requires a license per seat.
Up to 8 mental ray rendering satellites. VIZ 2008 is limited to 2 satellites.
Integrated mental ray rendering support for up to 512 cores. VIZ 2008 is limited to 4 cores.
Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. VIZ is limited to only a 32-bit version.
“Review” viewport improvements allow you to preview real-time shadows, photometric lights, Arch & Design materials and sun/sky system directly in the viewport. VIZ requires you to render to see these.
10 times the performance gains over VIZ for scenes composed of tens of thousands of objects.
“Reveal” iterative rendering optimizations for mental ray allow accelerated rendering of incremental changes or specific regions and objects
Enhanced DWG workflow with Select Similar, new memory management for handling large scenes, improved normal and material support from Revit DWG files, new material support for DWG Solid Objects and various other improvements.
“Recognize” scene loading technology for interoperability with Revit Architecture 2009; allowing cameras, geometries, materials and lights to be easily imported into 3ds Max with a high degree of fidelity.
“Exposure” lighting analysis technology for assisting in LEED 8.1 certification
ProBooleans (enhanced Boolean tools based on Npower Power Booleans)
Scene Explorer for managing scenes with thousands of objects and exposing Revit metadata for objects imported from Revit.
Fully-rigged character animation system and library of motions (Biped)
Particle system for realistic effects
Reactor real-time physics system
Cloth system for banners, curtains and clothes
Hair system for grass, fur, hair
Sub-object animation (deformable vertices)

Can I use both products in a production environment?

Yes. Since 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design are based on the same binary, data moves seamlessly between them and both can be used together in a Backburner rendering network.

When will 3ds Max Design 2009 be available?

3ds Max Design 2009 (English) is scheduled to ship at the end of March 2008.

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