New Release Offers Innovative Creative Tools, Powerful Scene Management Capabilities and Enhanced Support for Interoperability and Pipeline Integration

SAN FRANCISCO, Game Developers Conference, March 24, 2009-Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) has introduced Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 software - the latest version of its 3D modeling, animation and rendering product - offering nearly 350 additional features. The 2010 release provides innovative creative tools: a render-quality viewport display and at least 100 new Graphite modeling tools. It also offers powerful new capabilities that help artists manage complex scenes with greater ease and an unprecedented level of support for software interoperability and pipeline integration.

Artists have used 3ds Max to create numerous award-winning entertainment projects, such as "Fallout 3," "Prince of Persia" and "Gears of War 2."

"3ds Max 2010 is a feature-packed release that has generated a lot of excitement in the 3D community," said Marc Petit, Autodesk senior vice president, Media & Entertainment. "This version will help artists work faster than ever before, so they can explore more ideas, push boundaries, and create stunning work in less time."

Jeff Hanna, senior technical artist at Volition, is a 3ds Max 2010 beta tester. His favorite new feature in the 2010 release is the xView mesh analyzer. "3ds Max 2010 software's powerful xView mesh analyzer will make it easier for us to ensure that every asset our artists create is correct and game ready," said Hanna. "The xView technology can quickly identify missing UVW coordinates, overlapping vertices, or open edges, among other things. With this tool, we won't have to worry about bad game data due to invalid geometry."

Global Quality Knobs: mental ray
Architects familiar with Revit will appreciate the addition of global quality knobs to the 3ds Max Design mental ray toolset. This new feature can be used to quickly dial up or down quality settings for shadows, glossy refractions and reflections along with image anti-aliasing and indirect illumination quality.

Interactive Lighting Analysis
A unique and new feature of 3ds Max Design 2010 lets you analytically explore direct lighting effects with interactive results right in the viewport using the new real-time pseudo-color exposure control. You can use the exposure control to establish color gradations for different light levels and then interactively adjust your lights until they give the necessary coverage. You can then use Exposure to validate the results and to factor in the impact of indirect lighting effects.

Linear Color Space Workflow
Gamma correction has been improved to correctly handle images and textures for a physicallyaccurate rendering workflow where color consistency is critical. Gamma settings now load correctly with files and propagate correctly on network rendering solutions.

Multi-Map Shader: mental ray
A new 3ds Max Design Multi-Map Shader for mental ray lets users purposely assign specific color variations to a set of objects that otherwise share the same material. It can also be used to quickly randomize or assign colors to multiple objects/maps based on object IDs or Material IDs. This new capability could be used to randomize the colors of trees, leaves, crowds, or anything repetitive that could benefit from a degree of color variation.

Review Enhancements
Representing a major leap forward in viewport display, Review 3 helps take the guesswork out of rendering. It offers support for ambient occlusion, HDRI-based lighting, soft shadows, hardware anti-aliasing, interactive exposure control, and the revolutionary mental mill™ shader technology from mental images. Combined with prior abilities for textures, bump maps and photometric area lights – viewports give you live feedback like never before. The Viewport menu system has also been re-designed to significantly improve the user experience. For example, you can now take advantage of the Layer Manager to control groups of lights (light banks) to quickly turn on and off lights in the viewport, similar to what you can do with the 3ds Max Design software renderer.

Key Highlights of Autodesk 3ds Max 2010

Innovative Creative Tools

• A new Graphite modeling and texturing system introduces at least 100 additional creative tools and helps artists explore and more rapidly iterate their ideas.
• The addition of render-like effects in the viewport display - such as soft shadowing, exposure control and ambient occlusion - offers near photo-real quality for faster decision making.

Powerful New Referencing and Scene Management Capabilities

• Artists can create robust referencing workflows to help organize complex scenes more easily by treating multiple objects and scenes as a single Container object.
• A new Material Explorer helps to simplify the way artists interact with objects and materials, making iterations much easier even in highly complex scenes.
• The new multithreaded xView mesh analyzer technology helps to significantly reduce errors by providing in-viewport reporting on several types of mesh.

Enhanced Software Interoperability and Pipeline Integration

• 3ds Max 2010 is the first animation package to integrate mental images' powerful mental mill technology. This allows users to develop, test and maintain hardware-agnostic shaders and complex shader graphs for hardware and software rendering with real-time visual feedback.
• Enhanced OBJ support and ProOptimizer technology provide improved interoperability with Autodesk Mudbox software.
• Additional support for C# and .NET gives developers the access they need to customize, extend and integrate 3ds Max into their existing pipelines.

3ds Max 2010 also includes all the features offered in the Creativity Extension for 3ds Max 2009, released in August 2008. A list of features in 3ds Max 2010 is available at http://www.autodesk.com/3dsmax.

Videos of the new features in 3ds Max 2010 are available on the Autodesk YouTube Channel. To learn more about the software, also visit Autodesk's 3ds Max blogs by Ken Pimentel, director of visual communications; Shane Griffith, 3ds Max product manager; and Louis Marcoux, 3ds Max application specialist.

Pricing and Availability

Autodesk anticipates that 3ds Max 2010 will be available in English during spring 2009. The Autodesk suggested retail price for Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 license is US$3,495*. The suggested retail price to upgrade from either 3ds Max 2009 or 3ds Max Design 2009 to 3ds Max 2010 is $895*. Autodesk Subscription is available for purchase simultaneously with the product or upgrade purchase. The Autodesk suggested retail price for Autodesk Subscription for 3ds Max 2010 is $495* per year.

*International pricing may vary.

About Autodesk

Autodesk, Inc., is a world leader in 2D and 3D design software for the manufacturing, building and construction, and media and entertainment markets. Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk has developed the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art Digital Prototyping solutions to help customers experience their ideas before they are real. Fortune 1000 companies rely on Autodesk for the tools to visualize, simulate and analyze real-world performance early in the design process to save time and money, enhance quality and foster innovation. For additional information about Autodesk, visit http://www.autodesk.com.

Autodesk, AutoCAD, Mudbox and 3ds Max are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. mental mill is a registered trademark of mental images GmbH licensed for use by Autodesk, Inc. All other brand names, product names or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product offerings and specifications at any time without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document.

© 2009 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.