Text tool
Add data-driven information to your scenes. Choose the level of control you need for your work: edit entire paragraphs and words, or individual letters. 3ds Max also retains information such as font theme, font style, and glyphs when you copy text from Microsoft Word documents, simplifying your 2D-to-3D workflow.
Geodesic Voxel and Heatmap skinning
Generate better skin weighting at a fraction of the time. Run Geodesic Voxel and Heatmap skinning outside of the bind pose, and even on selected areas, to refine your weighting in particular spots more easily. Geodesic Voxel Skinning can handle complex geometry that’s not watertight and can contain non-manifold or overlapping components—as is frequently the case with real-world production meshes.
Max Creation Graph animation controllers
Author animation controllers in MCG, using a new generation of animation tools that you can create and modify, package and share. Extension 1 includes 3 new MCG-based controllers: LookAt Constraint, Ray to Surface Transform Constraint, and Rotation Spring Controller. Create physically based simulation controllers with MCG and the Bullet Physics engine sample integration.
Camera Sequencer
Tell great stories by creating high-quality animated visualizations, animatics, and cinematics more easily and with more camera control. Cut between multiple cameras, trim, and reorder animated clips nondestructively—leaving the original data unchanged.
Dual Quaternion skinning
Create better skinned characters with more realistic deformations. Avoid “bow-tie” or “candy-wrapper” effects, in which the mesh loses volume as deformers are twisted or pivoted, which can commonly occur in characters’ shoulders or wrists. This new option in the Skin modifier enables you to paint the amount of influence skinning has on a surface; use it where you need it, and taper off to linear skinning where you don’t.
Populate crowd animation
Generate believable moving or idle crowds with a high level of control to enrich architectural presentations, or to previsualize a film or video scene. A set of animated characters can appear in common public settings, such as sidewalks, hallways, lobbies, and plazas. Connect walkways into patterns of pedestrian flow with crowd composition tools.
Populate enhancements
The enhanced Populate crowd animation feature offers increased artistic control, better realism, and improved usability. Give characters more convincing walking, jogging, passing, turning, and seated behaviors. Control more aspects of character generation to influence their outcome. Save textures for reuse, customization, and network sharing and rendering. Customize Populate through an SDK (software development kit).
Character animation and rigging tools
Perform procedural animation and character rigging with CAT, biped, and crowd animation tools. Use the Skin modifier and CAT Muscle for smoother, more precise control of skeletal deformation. Rig complex mechanical assemblies and characters with custom skeletons using 3ds Max bones, inverse kinematics (IK) solvers, and customizable rigging tools. Wire 1-way and 2-way relationships between controllers to help create simplified 3D animation interfaces.
General animation tools
Use keyframe and procedural animation tools for almost any parameter in your scene. View and edit animation trajectories directly in the viewport. Implement custom animation controls by wiring UI elements, such as sliders and spinners, to an object's animatable tracks, and control multiple attributes with a single slider. Use the Dopesheet to edit slide, move, and scale keys or sets of keys in both time and value.
Animated deformers
Add life to creatures and simulate fluidic effects with Freeform, Affect Region, Bend, Displace, Lattice, Mirror, Noise, Physique, Push, Preserve, Relax, Ripple, Shell, Slice, Skew, Stretch, Spherify, Squeeze, Twist, Taper, Substitute, XForm, and Wave modifiers. World Space modifiers operate atop the modifier stack and bind objects to animated world conditions, such as surfaces, forces, fields, and deflections. Use animated deformers on particles and other geometry types.
