Why two? We've decided that the best way to focus on Entertainment and Design/Vis solutions is to customize the user experience accordingly. So, we now have two versions of your favorite product to choose from. At the same time, we are ending development on VIZ and encouraging customers to shift to 3ds Max Design. This is one of the reasons we created 3ds Max Design - to give VIZ users a clear path to 3ds Max and something they can fully leverage.

At this time, we are not releasing all the information about the two new flavors, but that will come as we officially launch the products later this quarter (March 25th). So, I don't actually want to duplicate all that information here, just deal with the major points:

1. 3ds Max Design 2009 includes 100% of the features in 3ds Max 2009 - except for the SDK
2. 3ds Max Design has the new Exposure lighting analysis feature, 3ds Max 2009 does not

Those are the critical differences you need to know about. We're also working on making each product a richer experience for the specific set of users, so you'll see evidence of this in tutorials, samples, application defaults, etc. They are 100% data compatible and they are actually the same binary. We think this should be the policy moving forwards as it means you'll always be able to mix/match these versions without fear of data loss.

The incredible success of 3ds Max in both Entertainment and Design/Vis gives us the ability to drive BOTH markets with increased resources. This is all tied up with the fact that we've also doubled our engineering resources.

Yes, we expect that you'll be a little confused by this news, but it will be clearer as time moves on. Subscription users will get BOTH installs, so they can play with either one and we'll have trial versions of both up on the web at ship date.

As to the future, I'm restricted to what I can say, but I think we've learned to be extremely careful with deciding that one feature is only useful by one market. If we are to create any further feature differentiation between the two, we'll do it very carefully and check with customers before doing it. Our policy is to ensure that you're never forced to need both to get the job done.

Here are some features (not all), since we are not launching the product today, just announcing it (this may appear to be a semantics issue, but Autodesk Marketing calls the shots on this) we are not giving you all the feature information like we normally do at announcement. Some of these headings may not make sense without the additional descriptions, but that is coming. I did leave in the descriptions on two of the bigger features that were part of the release effort.

Remember, this is an INCOMPLETE list, about 30% of the features are not listed here. Some important features will be revealed at launch.

Biped:
• Hands Like Feet Option
• Working Pivot Rotation
• Mirror Animation Options
• Triangle Neck

Modeling and Mapping
• UV Spline Mapping
• UVW Unwrap Improvements

Rendering
Reveal Workflow
• With 3ds Max 2009, Autodesk introduces Reveal rendering, a system that gives users very precise control over their renders, which in turn streamlines iterative workflows and enables artist to render final imagery faster. This key new feature gives artists the ability to visualize and manipulate a given region in both the Viewport and the Framebuffer. The rendered image Framebuffer now contains a simplified set of tools to quickly validate changes in a render, by optionally filtering out objects, regions and/or processes to temporarily balance quality vs. speed vs. completeness. For instance, render speed can be modulated by toggling geometry translation, lighting calculation and image-quality settings, based on what the artist desires to update. Using Reveal, artists can now also auto-generate regions around selections and reuse temporary Final Gather maps at any time.

Photometric Lighting Enhancements
• 3ds Max 2009 delivers a number of photometric lighting enhancements. The software now gives artists support for new types of area lights (circular, cylindrical), photometric web previews in the Browse dialog and Light UI, as well as improved near-field photometry quality and spot distribution. Plus, distribution types can now support any emitting shape and artists can have their light shapes appear in their rendered image.


mental ray
• ProMaterials
• New mental ray Proxy Objects
• Enhanced Accessibility of Production Shaders
• Enhanced Per-object Render Settings
• Improved Render Final Gather and Global Illumination
• New mental ray Render Elements

Note: We have now published the full feature list in the documents listed below along with a FAQ with possibly more answers to your many questions.