3ds Max 2024 is now Available
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We are excited to announce the release of 3ds Max 2024. This release includes a wide array of new features and enhancements that continue to push back limits on your creativity.
See What’s New in 2024 for more information and documentation.
Below are some key features.
Rendering
Color Management is a big one. We’ve added OCIO-based color management into 3ds Max as a tech preview. This new system is key to successful rendering in modern pipelines. While you can still utilize the classic gamma workflow, the new system is there to make sure your pipeline keeps colors consistent from beginning to end. This is available in the new Color Management tab of the Preferences. The features affect many areas of Max, including color pickers, material editor, viewport, frame buffer and more.
Compounds are a new node available in the Slate Material editor that allow you to wrap your complex shaders into single nodes. This is great for organization and packaging your shaders.
Another new goodie for Slate is the new Material Switcher. This material allows you to have multiple materials that might be relevant to your model, but gives you the ability to choose which of the sub-materials is being applied to the object. This allows you to create material variants.
Modeling
Model provided by: Fausto De Martini
Booleans have been a concept in Max for many years. But they’ve existed as compound objects that are often awkward to work with. We’ve now added a Boolean Modifier that makes using Booleans more natural in Max. Procedural modeling just got more fun with this modifier.
Improvements to the Array modifier keep pushing the capabilities of procedural modeling as well. New capabilities include a Pyhllotaxis mode that mimics several patterns in nature, progressive transforms that can transform elements incrementally more and more, and the ability to assign material IDs with your own rules.
USD for 3ds Max
Although you won’t see an entry for USD in the main What’s New section, the docs have an entire category for USD for 3ds Max. There you can find the release notes on USD for 3ds Max 0.4. USD (along with other Open-Source projects) is a major focus for us at Autodesk across our products. We’ve continued to enhance the USD SDK in Max to allow TDs and plugin developers to take control of our USD Exporter. With a USD Exporter that has improved constantly over the last couple of years, a highly performant USD Stage that previews right in the viewport, and growing support from 3rd Party developers, Max’s USD support is progressing at a rapid pace.
(Note that USD for 3ds Max is not packaged with the main Max installer. You can get it from your Autodesk account downloads where you get the installer for 3ds Max.)
More...
There are many more new features including new enhancements to animation workflows, more OSL maps, a modifier list search, improvements to various modifiers, performance enhancements and much more.
We hope you are as excited as we are!