by Dennis Collin
It is that time of year again when Autodesk release the latest versions of design software. 3ds Max has now been updated to the 2025 release and comes loaded with many new features, fixes and updates.
The first of these is a new default mode for colour management in new scenes.
OpenColorIO is an industry-standard, open-source colour-management solution that is integrated in many content creation, editing and finishing applications. OCIO uses configuration files to define the colour spaces used for input, rendering, display and output, as well as to automate the transformations between these spaces. You can use 3ds Max's default configuration or choose a custom config instead.
3ds Max's built-in configuration file is based on ACES, the Academy Colour Encoding System. It offers a choice of colour spaces and transforms that are suitable for a modern pipeline. Alternatively, you can use a custom config file such as one that has been especially developed for your project or studio.
In addition to the changes from previous versions, 3ds Max 2025 includes the following improvements:
- The VertexPaint tool is fully colour managed.
- The new Colour Space Conversion process operator can be applied to Data Channel modifiers to convert colour data (such as vertex colours) from one rendering space to another.
- The behaviour of the Automatic option in the Render Output File dialog and elsewhere now depends on the image file type. No conversion is applied for formats that are typically linear (such as EXR), while the output transforms that are specified in the Colour Management Settings are used for other formats.
- The Bake to Texture tool now lets you select the colour space for output files.
- The ColorSpaceNamePathSearch rule is available to match how image files were assigned to colour spaces in OCIO v1.
The version of OCIO has been updated to 2.3.2.
The global search has been updated to provide expanded functionality such as displaying the last 5 used items, extended results with toolclips, double clicking to execute commands and the ability to dock the search window if required.
Retopology Tools for 3ds Max have been improved and introduces preprocessing and OpenVDB remeshing as stand-alone processes along with improvements to the processing time when using Autodesk ReForm.
Max 2025 The new Menu Editor allows you to easily customise 3ds Max menus and quad menus. The editor lets you add, rename or remove menu and quad menu items, create new separators and sub-menus, as well as re-order menus.
Updated Universal Scene Description (USD) plug-in allows artists to import animations, including animated light and camera, as well as BlendShapes. There is also support for Multi-Sub Object Materials when exporting to USD.
3ds Max 2025 includes MAXtoA 5.7.0.0, and improvements include faster renders, improved shaders and lower memory usage.
For more information on Arnold for 3dsMax click here: