Hardware Shading simply allows the user to see advances lighting in the viewport including hard or soft shadows, ambient occlusion and exposure control.

There are also some admittedly less "sexy" features in the new version of 3ds Max, but are certainly noteworthy.

Containers
The new Container system seems like it may be the answer all of my peers have been looking for by way of an alternative to Xrefs. For years my team has been trying to work Xrefs into our pipeline but they have never worked out do to bugginess or just lack of usefulness. However, the new Container system seems to be trying to attack this issue from a different direction. Containers allow multiple objects to be "contained" in one group, but maybe more importantly, the Containers can then be saved off, shared and even locked. This means that a prop modeler can be working on a pile of wrecked cars, save it as a Container but "close" it as uneditable. A level modeler can then import that Container into their level and place that pile of cars in the scene. If the original author revises it, changes will be brought into the level file. The original modeler can also "open" the container, allowing other users to make changes to the base file. Pretty interesting. Let's hope it is solid and free of bugs.

Changing hierarchy, moving materials, renaming and assigning are all available inside these explorers. 

Explorers
The Scene explorer has been improved and there is a new Material Explorer. Using these two in conjunction with each other will let users who are more list-oriented really navigate their scene. These explorers are embeddable (see image) and can handle on the fly adjustments all within the lists. Changing hierarchy, moving materials, renaming and assigning are all available inside these explorers.

As usual with new tools, there are always things that leave you wanting. For example, there seems to be no undo for many of the Graphite tools. There are also multiple options that I wish were available in the Material Explorer, now that there is a Material Explorer. However, on the whole there is a ton to see in this new version. If you are a new user looking to get into 3ds Max, the 2010 release is really solid and one of the best modelers and all around packages out there. However, if you are a current owner of 3ds Max 2009 and also own PolyBoost and other debugging scripts...then this upgrade may not be worth the $895. A free 30-day trial is available at http://usa.autodesk.com so users can see for themselves. Enjoy!

Ryan Lesser has served as art director at Harmonix since 1999. Here he has helped produce award-winning games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Frequency and Amplitude. Lesser also teaches animation at his alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). His animation company (Mammoth Studios) worked on projects for Phish, Sony, MTV, De La Soul, Madison Square Garden and others. Lesser also maintains a Providence, Rhode Island-only underground music site.