Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2012 3D animation software delivers inspiring new creative toolsets, enhanced iterative workflows, and an accelerated graphics core that together help significantly increase overall productivity.

Download Top Reasons to buy 3ds Max 2012 (.pdf 586KB)
Download What's New in 3ds Max 2012 (.pdf 1.1MB)

New features in 3ds Max 2012 include:

Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core: Enjoy dramatic improvements in performance and visual quality in the viewport.

Substance Procedural Textures: Achieve a vast range of look variations with 80 new Substance procedural textures.

mRigids Rigid-Body Dynamics: Leverage the NVIDIA® PhysX® engine to create dynamic rigid-body simulations directly in the viewport.

iray Renderer: Get more predictable, photo-realistic results without worrying about rendering settings.

Single-Step Suites Interoperability: Take advantage of the focused toolsets in the Autodesk® 3ds Max® Entertainment Creation Suites 2012, with new single-step interoperability between the products found in the suites.

Enhanced UVW Unwrapping: Create better UVW maps in less time, with a new mapping method.

Sculpting and Painting Enhancements: Enjoy greater control over brushstrokes and their effects, with new Conform, Transform, and Constrain-to-Spline brushes.

Vector Displacement Map Support: Use mental ray® or iray® to render complex high-resolution details created in Autodesk® Mudbox® software or certain other packages on low-resolution geometry.

Enhanced, More Consistent F-Curve Editor: Enjoy some of the best features from the f-curve editors within each of the products in the Autodesk® 3ds Max® Entertainment Creation Suites 2012, combined into a toolset that offers more consistent functionality and terminology.

Stylistic Rendering: Create a variety of non-photorealistic (NPR) effects that simulate artistic styles created by hand, with the new ability to render stylized images in the viewport and with the Quicksilver renderer.

ProOptimizer Enhancements: You can now optimize models faster, more efficiently, and with better results.

Improved Start-Up Time and Memory Footprint: Targeted performance improvements developed as part of the XBR initiative enable tools to be more intelligently loaded as required.

UI Enhancements: An enhanced user interface (UI) adjusts to dark UI color schemes, performs faster, and offers a more consistent contextual UI location and access to help.

Caddy Improvements: The Caddy in-canvas UI offers better usability, with a more predictable contextual UI location, quicker interaction, and default behavior which does not occlude the artist’s selection.