We're back to share with you another update to 3ds Max!



3ds Max 2020.3 is focused on providing you with more predictive tools that perform the way you expect. With 2020 through 2020.2, we brought you extensive updates to chamfer workflows. In 2020.3, we’re adding many of those improvements to EditablePoly objects. Our ATF (Autodesk Translation Framework) updates include Sketchup improvements so you can bring in content with even higher fidelity along with newer JT formats supported. You can now also view Arnold lights directly in the viewport.



Check the What’s New page to see what we’ve been up to since 3ds Max 2016! Release Notes for 3ds Max 2020.3







Beyond 2020.3 – 3ds Max Public Roadmap

The 3ds Max product team is excited to continue posting updates to our public roadmap. The goal is to further engage with the 3ds Max community and to share direction for the product. The team has been busy pushing as much value as possible to you and we want to provide some insights on what we are working on for the future as there is a lot that we believe you will also be excited to hear about.

Now, some ground rules before we go any further:

This roadmap may make statements regarding future events and development efforts for our products and services. These statements reflect our current expectations based on what we know today. Our plans are not intended to be a promise or guarantee of future delivery of products, services or features and purchasing decisions should not be made based upon these statements. We do not assume any responsibility to update this roadmap to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the publish date of this roadmap.

We believe that to continue to bring value to our users, we need to focus on making 3ds Max more reliable, procedural and scalable. Our roadmap is therefore structured into these three main themes, and this is what you will see in this document.

The list of capabilities presented below is certainly not exhaustive. We have released more than what is showed, and we are working on more than what you will see here. The intent is to give you a good sense of our areas of focus and direction. For a complete list of capabilities shipped in the past, please see the

what’s new section.





We are working hard so users get what they expect out of the 3ds Max releases: higher quality, more stability, better performance, but also enhancements to core authoring and modeling capabilities, a faster and better-looking viewport as well as improved rendering capabilities.





RELIABLE: Continuous delivery

Since we’ve adapted how we build and deliver 3ds Max to users, we have been able to deliver more value more frequently as well as been able to significantly increase the quality of the product. The following image shows some of the highlights of the latest releases. Note that the Ideas at the bottom of the image relate to our Autodesk® Ideas site





RELIABLE: Core 3D Authoring



Released



NEXT

UV Machine Learning: we are prototyping with machine learning to detect seams and automatically unwrap textures for layout. We hope to offer a fully automatic solution that produces UV mappings similar to those produced manually, or at least offer a good starting point to reach end results more rapidly. This would offer great time saving for artists who could rather spend time on creative tasks. Note that we are also considering improvements to the UV editor per se along the way.





RELIABLE: Viewport Improvements

Released

Detachable viewport *New in 2020.1

Playback performance

FPS, performance group, list controllers

Viewport performance



Viewport enhancements *New in 2020.2: support for roughness and faster progressive AO

NEXT

Simpler Viewport Settings: the 3ds Max® viewport is extremely capable but had a tendency over the years to become complicated to configure. The team is looking at making viewport quality configuration as simple as possible, especially when targeting industry standards such as PBR preview.





