Adobe's annual MAX conference kicked off in San Diego today, with the company showcasing new apps, new features for old apps, and more powerful cloud services.

Project Felix is a new kind of graphical design application designed for creating things like composited product shots that are built from a mix of 3D assets, such as models of a new product, and 2D assets, such as backgrounds and scenery. It produces photorealistic renders combining these various elements using the V-Ray engine. Felix will figure out where the horizon and surfaces are in a 2D background image, ensuring that the 3D objects are placed properly in the scene. It will also identify lighting within the background so that illumination of the rendered parts is consistent with the 2D parts.

Felix is designed to be approachable even by non-3D artists, with a range of models, lights, and materials available from Adobe Stock, Adobe's cloud marketplace for graphical assets. A beta will be released later this year for Creative Cloud subscribers.

Another new app, Experience Design (XD) is currently out in beta. XD is for designing, prototyping, and sharing mobile and Web app user experiences. A new beta is out today, with support for defining layers and symbols that are shared across multiple screens. Adobe says that it is prioritizing mobile and collaborative development, and both of these are apparent in XD. In today's update, shared prototypes can be commented on, and the mobile apps for iOS and Android enable quick and easy previewing of design concepts. Later in the year, a UWP version of the app will be released for Windows 10, and in the first half of next year, Adobe is adding collaborative co-editing capabilities, so that teams can work together on designs and see changes made in real-time.

Adobe's cloud features continue to grow, and the company is promoting a new intelligent services/machine learning framework, called Sensei, that it's using to power various features. Chief among these is a visual search capability for Stock. At its most basic, this will let you search for images that are similar to one you already have, but the system also allows refining searches using text. For example, if you've got a photo of a cup of coffee, and want to find something similar but tea instead, you can use the coffee picture and the keyword tea to tell Stock to find what you want.

That searching is ever more important, as Stock is growing larger. Adobe and Reuters have announced a partnership to license Reuters' extensive collection of a million video clips and 12 million photographs through the Stock service. There are new font-licensing options, too; joining Typekit subscriptions is a new Typekit marketplace, allowing individual fonts to be licensed.

The other Adobe apps are also receiving a range of updates. Probably the biggest update is coming to Dreamweaver, with a clean new user interface, a brand new code editor, a really neat inline CSS editor, built-in support for CSS preprocessors, and the ability to drive Safari, Firefox, and Chrome to offer a live in-browser preview of the page being edited. Dreamweaver still has an integrated WYSIWYG view, but Adobe is trying to make it a much stronger code/developer-oriented tool, with Muse offering a more design-oriented WYSIWYG editing experience.

Other apps are getting their own smaller updates: After Effects can render up to 20 times faster, Premiere Pro detects VR content and alters its settings appropriately, and a new feature called Team Projects will enable co-editing of video files in Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Prelude. Both Photoshop and Illustrator will be able to fetch templates from Stock, and Photoshop will also integrate Stock's visual search capabilities. The mobile apps are getting some updates too; for example, Photoshop brushes can now be used in Sketch, and both Sketch and Draw will support layer blend modes. Photoshop Sketch, Comp, and Photoshop Fix are also now available on Android.