3ds max is the world's most widely used professional 3D modeling, animation and rendering solution, offering the ultimate in professional 3D tools required for creating eye-catching visual effects, cutting edge games, and distinct design visualizations.
With an extensive new feature set designed to increase performance and productivity, 3ds max 7 offers animators powerful new creative workflow tools, including the most comprehensive advanced character animation toolset currently available, acclaimed visual effects tools, and support for the next generation production environment.
Comprehensive modeling, animation and rendering tools
Includes reactor® 2 dynamics and integrated mental ray® rendering
Includes Character Studio 4
Easy to learn – fast - fits into any production pipeline
Supports the largest selection of rendering options including Brazil, VRay, Renderman, and PRMan
Over 400 sparks™ specialty plug-ins and Discreet Certified plug-ins .
3ds max 7 was engineered to accelerate both application and facility pipeline workflows, increasing studio productivity while providing intuitive artist-friendly tools to a user base of 280,000 customers. This release includes significant new features [PDF, 17 MB] that expand the toolset of 3ds max 6, offering animators one of the most complete and sophisticated 3D toolsets in the world. Feature highlights
Normal mapping: This revolutionary workflow developed for gaming adds extreme detail to low-polygon models with high-resolution maps. With complete rendering support this industry first allows normal mapping to bring great time-saving benefits to film production and cinematic visualizations.
Edit Poly: Significantly increases the rapidity and ease at which complex polygonal surfaces can be created, modified and then animated - improving the creative process.
character studio: Key to 3ds max 7 is the complete integration of character studio^® as a standard component. Previously offered only as a plug-in, this advanced character animation functionality now gives all animators the power and flexibility to rig and animate high-quality characters and create crowd simulations with the ease and efficiency customers have come to expect of Discreet solutions.
Academy Award-winning mental ray^® 3.3: The latest upgrade to this extremely popular high-quality rendering solution provides dramatic performance acceleration, advanced hardware-rendering options, and more flexible implementation capabilities through satellite licensing
Turbosmooth: A highly optimized smoothing algorithm for increased performance of high resolution models.
Skin wrap deformer: A powerful modeling and animation tool that allows artists to apply props and clothing to pre-skinned 3D models and create more sophisticated animations with greater ease.
Mobile game exporters: Native mobile 3D asset creation with new JSR 184 exporter.
More features: Download the 3ds max 7 New Features Guide [PDF, 17 MB].

hardware system requirements:
Intel® PIII or later Processor or AMD® running at 500Mhz minimum (Dual Intel® Xeon™ or dual AMD Athlon™ or Opteron™ (32 bit) system recommended)
512 MB RAM and 500 MB swap space minimum (1GB RAM and 2GB Swap Space Recommended)
Graphics card supporting 1024x768 16-bit color with 64MB RAM. (OpenGL and Direct3D hardware acceleration supported; 3D graphics accelerator 1280 x 1024 32-bit color with 256MB RAM preferred)
Windows-compliant pointing device (specific optimization for Microsoft Intellimouse™)
Wacom Intuos or similar pressure sensitive tablet recommended for vertex paint
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
software system requirements:
Primary Operating Systems: XP Professional (SP1), Windows 2000 (SP4), and XP Home (SP1)
Internet Explorer 6
DirectX 9.0c Required, OpenGL
Size: 85.1 MB
Download 3ds max 7