Autodesk 3ds Max is a staple application for producing award-winning games, film, video, web, multimedia and marketing communications content. It's also popular for communicating design concepts, by helping customers make decisions during design reviews and gain buy-in at every stage. Users can create emotionally engaging narratives to communicate information quickly, compellingly and persuasively.

New in the latest version is Slate, a node-based material editor that enables artists to more easily visualize and edit material component relationships; the Quicksilver hardware renderer, a multithreaded rendering engine that uses both the central processing unit (CPU) and the graphics processing unit (GPU) to achieve up to 10 times faster rendering than traditional techniques on common graphics cards; the ability to view many 3ds Max texture maps and materials in the viewport to help develop and refine scenes in a higher-fidelity interactive display environment; extended Graphite modeling and Viewport Canvas toolsets for 3D and 2D painting of textures directly in the viewport; the ability to non-destructively layer local edits on top of referenced content; and 3ds Max Composite, a full-featured, high dynamic range (HDR)–capable compositor, based on technology from Autodesk Toxik software.

3ds Max 2011 for Windows is expected to be available in April, 2010, with a suggested retail price of $3,495. More information is available on the Autodesk site. From March 11–13, 2010, the Virtual GDC event on the AREA site will provide 3ds Max 2011 product demonstrations and customer presentations live from the Autodesk Game Developers Conference booth. It's worth mentioning that free student versions of 3ds Max are available, as well as trial versions.