"3D Studio MAX R3 blows away the competition on price and power," said Matt Merkovich, senior digital artist at Los Angeles-based Digital Muse. Some of Merkovich's credits include 3D work on the motion pictures Spawn, Event Horizon, The Truman Show and Pleasantville, and the TV series Space: Above and Beyond, Star Trek Voyager and Deep Space 9. "3D Studio MAX R3's incredible modeler is much easier to use than others, and my tests show that the new renderer is much faster than the competitions. Discreet is keeping 3D Studio MAX several steps ahead of the rest."

The MAX Team rapidly built upon the solid 3D Studio MAX foundation, delivering a feature rich Release 2 just 18 months after MAX first shipped, and following that with an impressive Release 2.5 a mere 7 months later. While it may have appeared to some that 3DS MAX simply achieved feature parity with some older 3D systems, those using it realized those same abilities delivered substantially more power and possibility when integrated into MAX's unified, object-oriented NT environment. That fact was certainly not lost on many, as MAX has become the chosen tool for over 90,000 animators around the world.

Now, just 3 years after 3DS MAX was first available, and less then one year after R2.5, Kinetix is proud to announce 3D Studio MAX Release 3 – a very significant release that revolutionizes the workflow and productivity of animators and studios alike. While the 3D Studio MAX architecture has served well, the growing needs of animators and the competitive nature of their industry showed Kinetix that improvements to core areas were needed to ensure MAX artists would continue having what they required to stay in the lead for the years ahead in both efficiency and capabilities. MAX R3 does not shy away from large issues or answer problems with work-arounds – it delivers fundamental architectural innovations, and significant workflow improvements that take advantage of those innovations, to deliver an outstanding creative tool for 3D animation.

System requirements
Intel®-compatible processor at 200 MHz minimum (thoroughly multi-threaded to take full advantage of multiple processor systems; dual Pentium® II system recommended)
128 MB RAM minimum
250 MB HD Swap File (amount depends on scene complexity)
Graphics card supporting 1024x768x16-bit color.
(OpenGL and Direct3D hardware acceleration supported,
24-bit color, 3D graphics accelerator preferred)
Windows-compliant pointing device.
(specific optimization for Microsoft Intellimouse™)
CD-ROM drive
Optional: sound card and speakers, cabling for TCP/IP-compliant network, 3D hardware graphics acceleration, video input and output devices, joystick,  midi-instruments, 3-button mouse.