3ds Max 7.5 Extension

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Extensions are downloadable, modular enhancements to 3ds Max® software that provide new functionality as it is developed.   The latest Max 7.5 extension provides a valuable upgrade to bring Max 7.0 up to the same core functionality as Autodesk® VIZ 2006.  The following is a listing of the new features provided in this extension:
 

 Hair and Fur

Hair and Fur Extension Known Issues -- Rendering Hair and Fur with animated cameras in Mental Ray 3.3 will result in an offset.  Updating to Mental Ray 3.4 will fix this offset. -- Using the Hair and Fur render effect can cause corruption in rendered images if there are no renderable Hairs in the scene. Be sure to delete the Hair and Fur render effect from the scene if there are no objects using the Hair and Fur (WSM) modifier.

3ds Max 7.5 for the first time builds "high-end" hair and fur capabilities right into the animator’s base application.  Based on Joe Alter’s highly regarded “Shave and a Haircut” solution, Hair and Fur offers numerous styling and dynamics tools for creating amazingly realistic hair and other strand-derivative effects.  These include:

• Styling tools — brush tool for combing hair and brushing along complicated contours with “re-comb,” as well as support for clumping and frizz for added realism.
• Hair dynamics tools— use the dynamics engine of Shave and the dynamic forces of 3ds Max to inherit inertia directly from the Skin or any other modifier’s surface movement.
• mental ray integration— fast, memory-efficient and direct rendering using the native mental ray hair primitive.
• Hair, plus— Instanced geometry can be used as individual hairs to easily create forests, fields of flowers, and other landscapes.

 mental ray® 3.4

With built-in access to the most current version of mental ray, design visualization and visual effects customers will be able to run medium-sized render farms right out of the box.  mental ray 3.4 delivers numerous optimizations, including faster final gathering performance, double precision computation for ray tracing and fast rasterization for first-generation rays.  mental ray 3.4 also adds Satellite Rendering,  to allow 3ds Max license owners to freely use up to eight slave CPUs  to render an image using distributed bucket rendering.

 Autodesk VIZ Functionality

3ds Max customers in design markets often require a broad cross-section of 3D and visualization tools.  With 3ds Max 7.5, product designers, architects, design visualization artists and others in this space will have the advanced modeling, lighting, rendering and animation tools that are exclusive to 3ds Max, combined with the unique design oriented functionality of Autodesk VIZ —all in a single package. Key VIZ functionality includes:

• Radiosity adaptive subdivision — Adds adaptive subdivision to the radiosity plug-in, enabling higher quality, more accurate, and more efficient radiosity processing.
• Batch render —  Gives users a way to quickly render a series of stills from different angles, with the option to change render settings and layers in between views.
• UVW mapping improvement — Place physically scaled materials onto objects in the scene more easily and accurately with support for real-world measurements.
• Sweep modifier— “Loft” a shape or profile along lines or polylines imported from AutoCAD^® or line work created in 3ds Max, even applying pre-set shapes to simple linework.
• Scene state — Capture object, layer, material, camera and light information as a "scene state” that can be saved and restored at will.
• Autodesk Revit^® 7 interoperability — Autodesk Revit users can now create high-quality images of their models with 3ds Max 7.5 by importing/linking a Revit model via the DWG format, and having the scene objects correspond directly to individual Revit objects.
• Autodesk Inventor^® interoperability — Access the Inventor file option directly within the import tool.
• DWF export— Convey ideas and share designs by exporting models from 3ds Max 7.5 for viewing with Autodesk DWF Viewer and Autodesk DWF Composer.

3ds Max 7.5 is immediately available for download for Subscription members only.   If you currently do not have a subscription contract, call us today to get on board.