Subscription customers get some treats this month! Hope you enjoy them. I've posted the features & benefits for 3ds Max 2011, but it is the same features for 3ds Max Design 2011. You'll get these by the end of September, I don't want to say more than that until the date is officially disclosed.

Subscription Advantage Pack for 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max Design 2011
 

Features and Benefits

Overview

The Autodesk® Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2011 software integrates state-of-the-art technology from renowned industry companies who are working with Autodesk to revolutionize rendering and simulation workflows. Featuring lightweight, resolution-independent procedural textures; GPU-accelerated rigid-body dynamics; and one of the world’s first physically accurate “point-and-shoot” renderers, the Advantage Pack for 3ds Max 2011 delivers cutting-edge tools that help leverage the latest hardware advances to help customers maintain their competitive advantage.

Top Features and Benefits

Substance Procedural Textures

Achieve a vast range of look variations with a new library of up to 75 Substance procedural textures. These dynamic, resolution-independent textures have a tiny memory and disk space footprint, making them very good for exporting to games engines via the Allegorithmic Substance Air middleware offering; integration is currently provided for Unreal® Engine 3 game engine, Emergent's Gamebryo game engine, and Unity. Alternatively, textures can be baked to bitmaps for use with certain renderers. Some examples of dynamically editable and animatable parameters are: brick distribution, surface aging, and mortar thickness in a brick wall; pupil size, eye color, and extent of veining in an eye texture; and the age, roughness, curb borders, and lane markings of a street texture.

PhysX Rigid-Body Dynamics

Create more compelling, dynamic rigid-body simulations directly in the 3ds Max viewport. The multi-threaded NVIDIA® PhysX® engine supports static, dynamic, and kinematic rigid bodies (the latter for rag doll simulations), and a number of constraints: Rigid, Slide, Hinge, Twist, Universal, Ball & Socket, and Gear. Animators can more quickly create a wider range of realistic dynamic simulations, and can also use the toolset for modeling: for example, creating a randomly placed landscape of rocks. Assigning physical properties – friction, density, and bounciness – is as simple as choosing from a set of initial preset real-world materials and tweaking parameters as required.

iray Photorealistic Renderer

Creating realistic images has never been easier with 3ds Max, using the newly integrated iray® rendering technology from mental images. Another major milestone in the Rendering Revolution, iray enables artists to set up their scene, press “render,” and get predictable, photo-real results without worrying about rendering settings­ just like a “point-and-shoot” camera. Artists can focus on their creative vision as they intuitively use real world materials, lighting, and settings to more accurately portray the physical world; iray progressively refines the image until the desired level of detail is achieved. iray works with standard multi-core CPUs. However, NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPU hardware will significantly accelerate the rendering process.

More information on Shane's blog on iray