Whether you’re an architect, designer, civil engineer, or visualization specialist, Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2012 software provides a powerful, integrated toolset that helps you to more rapidly iterate on design concepts and accurately analyze daylight effects. Create higher-impact visuals as you explore, validate, and communicate the story behind your design.

High Impact Visuals Made Easier
3ds Max Design 2012 continues to reach new milestones in the Rendering Revolution, helping you achieve the look you want more easily. Case in point: the newly integrated iray® rendering technology from mental images that enables you to get more predictable, photo-real results without worrying about rendering settings—similar to a ‘point-and-shoot’ camera. Meanwhile, new stylistic rendering capabilities enable you to create a variety of non-photorealistic (NPR) effects in a looser, more abstract style well suited to communicating core design intent while fine details are still undetermined. And, with a new library of 80 Substance procedural textures that feature dynamically editable and animatable parameters, a wide range of look variations is at your fingertips.

Iterate Faster, Work in Context
3ds Max 2012 forges ahead with the next steps in the Excalibur (XBR) initiative to revitalize the software at its core. Engineered to help provide dramatic

Image courtesy of Michael Roth Feuerroth.

Key New Features in Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2012 Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core
Experience dramatic improvements in performance and visual quality with the new Nitrous viewport system. Nitrous leverages accelerated GPUs and multi-core workstations to enable you to iterate faster and handle larger data sets. The render-quality display environment support lights, soft shadows, screen-space ambient occlusion, tone-mapping, and higher-quality transparency.

Autodesk Alias Design 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 2012 as Bodies objects, preserving object names, hierarchies, layers, and material names. You can now interactively adjust tessellation results inside 3ds Max Design and add sculpted details on top of Alias Design reference data using the intuitive Graphite polygon modeling toolset.

Substance Procedural Textures
Achieve a vast range of look variations with a new library of 80 Substance procedural textures. These dynamically editable and animatable resolutionindependent textures automatically generate bump maps and specular maps for impressive results, and can be quickly converted to bitmaps for rendering.

iray Renderer
Creating highly realistic images is easier with 3ds Max Design, using the newly integrated iray rendering technology from mental images. iray enables you to set up your scene using real-world materials and lighting, press ‘render’, and get more predictable, photo-real results without worrying about rendering settings; iray progressively refines the image until the desired level of detail is achieved.

Stylistic Rendering
Create a variety of non-photorealistic (NPR) effects 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 you more effectively communicate your core design intent while deemphasizing distracting or incomplete design details.

Autodesk Civil View
Automatically create highly realistic visualizations in 3ds Max Design using civil data from AutoCAD Civil 3D with the Civil View (formerly Dynamite VSP) feature set. 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.