Architecture

Interface

Modeling

Materials and Textures

Lighting

• Superscale Multi-Platform Core with
• Support for AltiVec and ISSE
• Based on MAXON's Exclusive
• COFFEE programming language (Exclusive Feature)
• Only 5% OS Dependent (Exclusive Feature)
• Seamlessly Cross-platform Support for 3rd Party Plugins (Exclusive Feature)
• Non-Linear Construction Hierarchy (Exclusive Feature)
• Parametric Objects
• Multi-threaded Background Rendering (Exclusive Feature)
• Near-Scale Multi-Processing (180% on a dual, 375% on a quad)

Interface 

• Completely Customizable (Exclusive Feature)
• Seamlessly Cross Platform (Exclusive Feature)
• Completely integrated working environment
• Seamless integration of plug-in technology
• All interface elements are written in and based on MAXON's exclusive COFFEE programming language (Exclusive Feature)
• Customize: Layouts, Keyboard Shortcuts, Menu Structures, Palettes, Windows, Dialogues (Exclusive Feature)
• Floating or tabbed windows (Exclusive Feature)
• Save an unlimited number of custom layouts, and use them on any platform. Call them up at any time while working (Exclusive Feature)
• Indexed and springing dialog windows
• New Command Manager for complete program overview and configuration
• New Dialogs: Selection Information, Structure Information, Active Tool
• Icons as picture, text or both
• Real-time textures in the editor window (Exclusive Feature)
• New Powerful Snapping System: Construction planes, Improved world grid, Dynamic grid for 2D, 2D, 2.5D, 3D

Snapping, Snap to Point, Edge, Polygon, Polygon Center, Grid Point, Grid Line, Midpoint, Object Axis, Spline, Tangent, Perpendicular, Spline Grid, and Major lines.
• New and Rewritten Multiple Selection Tools: Live selection, Freehand selection, Polygon selec-tion, Shrink and Grow selection, Point to poly/Poly to point, Only select visible elements, Select adjacent, Select connect, and Generate selection.
• New multiple independent view panels. As many views as you want. (Exclusive Feature)
• Title Safe and Action Safe
• Background image adjustable per view
• Full contextual menus throughout
• Selectable "level-of-Detail" to improve interaction

• Parametrics: More than 50 paramet -ric primitives and splines with con -venient control points for easy scal -ing and modification. Cone with fil -lets, Cube with fillets, Cylinder, with fillets, Disc, Plane, Spheres (multiple types), Torus, Capsule, Oil tank, Tube, Pyramid, Platonic, C60 Buckyball, Figure, Landscape (ridged, multi-fractal, spherical), Relief (spherical), Stage object, Setup functions, Target light, Target camera. 

• Freehand drawing of curves, Generation of linear/akima/bezier/ bspline curves, Hard and Soft inter -polation, Equal tangent length and direction, Join and Break segment, Reorder first point, Move up or down sequence, Chamfer (interac-tive), Create outline (interactive), Cross section (interactive), Line up, Round, Project. 

• Hyper NURBS: Subdivision surfaces.
• Instances with hierarchies and animation
• Metaballs / MetaSplines / MetaParticles 
• Symmetry.

• Bend, Bulge, Formula, Shear, Taper, Twist, Wrap and more — all interac-tive and animatable. 

• Array, Clone, Crumple, Disconnect, Explode segments, Matrix extrude, Quantize, Set value, Split, Weld, Make editable, Add points (interac-tive), Bevel (interactive), Bridge (interactive), Create polygon (inter-active), Extrude (interactive), Extrude inner (interactive), Knife (interactive), Normal move (interac-tive), Normal scale (interactive), Normal rotate (interactive), Magnet (interactive), Mirror (interactive), Smooth shift (interactive), Align nor-mals, Reverse normals, Optimize, Subdivide, Triangulate, Untriangulate.
• Non-linear Construction History

Materials and Textures
New Improved Material Manager 

• Non-modal material dialog
• 3 different preview sizes
• Quick selection of the most recent textures and built-in procedurals inside the material dialog 
• Color/Texture per channel mixing with mix modes (Normal, Add, Subtract, Multiply) 
• Vertex Map painting
• Restrict textures to polygon selections
• 13 material channels: Color, Diffusion, Lighting, Transparency with Fresnel, Reflection, Environment, Fog, Bump, Alpha,

Highlight and Highlight Color, Glow, Displacement. 
• MIP and SAT Mapping for best image quality
• Up to 256 stackable materials per object
• 8 texture mapping types (incl. UVW mapping) 

• Many Types: Omni, Area, Tube, Distant, Sun, Square and Round Spot, Square and Round Parallel. 
• Target-lights via expressions
• New Shadows: Hard, Soft and Area Shadows, Colored soft shadows, Custom shadow map size up to 10kx10k, Transparent shadows, Bias and Offset control, Soft shadow for parallel light, Shadow cone control. 
• Volumetric Noise: In Illumination, Visibility or Both, Turbulent Noise, Wavy Noise, Hard Turbulent Noise, Soft Turbulent Noise 
• Inverse Volumetrics
• Inner and outer angle control, inner and outer color control, inner and outer distance controls, inner and outer radius controls
• New Falloff types, Colored edge falloff
• Near and Far clipping for visibility and Illumination
• Ambient illumination
• Diffuse on and off per light, Specular on and off per light 
• Jittering for visible light
• All existing light and shadow types can be combined 
• More than 30 presets for lens effects (with full control over each parameter) 

• Timeline with fully integrated space and time curves (incl. formula input) 
• 8 colored layers (for visibility, orga -nization and protection)
• Unlimited markers (can also be imported from other programs) 
• Multiple selection of keys, sequences, tracks 
• 15 animation effects and universal track for all kinds of parameter ani-mation parametric primitives / splines, deformers, generators, lights, cameras, etc.) 
• Particle system with 8 modifiers
• Motion grouping and sequencing
• Live Expressions
• Sound display with markers
• Power slider
• Snapping
• Negative time range
• Free tangent control
• Action and Title safe areas

• True 2D/3D sound rendering includ-ing actual Doppler effects 
• Microphone Objects (mono, stereo, surround etc.) completely animat-able
• Loudspeaker Objects that are completely animatable

• Still the world's fastest raytracer
• Superscale 256-bit Motion Renderer (64-bits per channel)
• Up to 16,000 by 16,000 pixel image size 
• New compositing options
• Adaptive raytracer for maximum performance 
• New UVW coordinates: per point per polygon
• Different render modes (Mesh, Outline, 2D B/W or Colored,Raytracing)
• Materials per polygons
• Field rendering
• Post processing effects (Edge, Blur, etc.)
• Object and scene motion blur
• Depth and alpha maps (incl. straight alpha) 
• Support for QuickTime: import/ export of QuickTime stills 
• QuickTime VR can be automatically created
• Multiple render settings per document 
• Near-Scale Multi-Processing (180% on a dual, 375% on a quad)