Discreet announces 3ds max 7 launch

Discreet has announced 3ds max 7 - the newest version of its acclaimed 3D modelling, animation, and rendering software.
3ds max 7 will be shown publicly for the first time at the international Siggraph Exhibition in Los Angeles, running from August 10-12.
With over 280,000 registered users worldwide, and a 19% increase in sales revenues in the last year, 3ds max is the most popular professional 3D modelling and animation application available.
Responding to the ever-increasing industry need for powerful yet approachable non-linear animation tools, Discreet is integrating its award-winning advanced character motion toolset character studio into the core feature set of 3ds max 7.
With its unique constraint-based non-linear animation mixer, the highly scalable behavioural crowd simulation capabilities, and the extensive motion capture filtering and editing facilities, character studio is able to bring leading industry price and performance capabilities to the existing 3ds max character toolset.
The result of the integration of character studio and 3ds max is the democratisation of character animation functionality, which until now has been found in solutions costing two to three times more than 3ds max.
3ds max 7 also offers a wide range of newly developed core functionality including industry-first Normal Mapping, a workflow accelerator for gaming; and Edit Poly Modifier, which is designed to improve ease of use and speed of animation.
Groundbreaking features such as Normal Mapping continue Discreet’s legacy of cross-pollinating innovative technologies between market segments. For example, features originally designed for games can have a significant impact on other markets such as film or design visualisation.
"NVIDIA and Discreet have worked together for years to deliver the highest performance graphics creation solutions for professional 3D animation artists," said Jeff Brown, general manager of professional graphics at NVIDIA.
"With Discreet’s acute focus on high-end, real-time shading in 3ds max 7, it takes a powerful professional graphics solution with true 128-bit floating point frame buffers and Shader Model 3.0 support, like the NVIDIA Quadro FX workstation graphics solutions, to unleash its full potential. Together, Discreet and NVIDIA have ensured that the full power and feature sets of our respective products give 3D game developers and visual effects artists a sophisticated but approachable hardware and software duo that optimises productivity.”
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