Changes for v2.31 are:
- Support of references to lights
- Support of IESNA Photometric Type A and B
- Fixed problems with LIGHT LISTER
- Fixed network rendering problems for units differing from current one
- Fixed problem with rendering slowdown for scenes where smoothing groups are not defined
- Self-illumination color now is multiplied by (100 - opacity), so creation of transparent "skylight window" is possible

Integra is now available for Max 3 and 4, and costs $350. A demo version is available here.

This plugin allows Max to function as a DCOM server for Deep Exploration. The idea behind this plugin is to expose the core of Max so that Deep Exploration can invoke a local or remote Max instance to load .max files.

Deep Exploration is an easy-to-use viewer for Windows 98, NT and 2000 with a Windows Explorer-like interface and Open GL hardware accelerator support. It allows you to browse many popular 3D file formats: 3D Studio, LightWave, Caligari, Direct X, AutoCAD and many others as well as the common 2D file types.

The plugin works with Max 3 and 4, and costs $249. A demo version is available here.

Changes for v0.50.02022701 are:
- Timelock is extended to March 15th 2002
- Primary and secondary visibility now work (again)
- Glossiness of Phong and Blinn shaders in VRayMtl has been modified to change more uniformly

This plugin comes with the newly released version 3.1 of the Exluna renderer Entropy, and allows complete access to the renderer from inside Max.

Entropy v3.1 now incorporates depth of field and HDRI image-based lighting, adding to the rich feature set that includes global illumination, caustics, motion blur, and comprehensive geometry support. Performance enhancements for features such as motion blur, raytracing, and sub-pixel (true) displacement and better overall rendering speed represent some of the advances found in this latest version.

Entropy is available for Max 4 and pricing starts at $1750 for a license without support.

Changes for v0.50.02022601 are:
- Fixed loading of irradiance maps created with previous versions
- Fixed inherited visibility
- VRay will (probably) render Final Render volume lights
- Fixed VRay material and spot lights
- Several other small bug fixes

Changes for v0.50.02022501 are:
- The initial version of the VRay material is available
- Rendering of orthographic views and cameras is supported
- Standard Max raytrace shadows are no longer automatically disabled
- XRef'd objects with bitmaps render properly
- Irradiance maps produce much better results with small geometry details and bump maps
- Fixed a bug in VRayLight that caused ArchVision's RPC plugin to crash

Several years of research brings Facial Studio as a suite of plugins that gives you more than 500 controls over the head creation process. You can deform anything from the eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, chin, ears, cheeks, forehead, eyebrows to the overall head shape including teeth and tongue, as well as controlling shading, textures, wrinkle deformations and muscle animation.

Facial Studio does not use a simple linear morphing approach like some other head generation tools, in fact Facial Studio is not only a modeling tool, it's more a suite of tools that helps you in the holy grail quest of creating facial animation, in less time than ever before...from modeling to muscles-based deformations, including Texture Maps Libraries and a lot more...

Facial Studio also includes the first commercially available Sub-Surface Scattering Shader, to let you perfectly simulate skin, because it does not react like Phong or Blinn.

Facial Studio is available for Max 4 and is on introductory offer for $499 until March 25th 2002 (usually $699).

Chaos Group have announced that their VRay v1.0 renderer will be released March 11th. Version 1.1, a free update to the advanced package, is scheduled for release April 1st. It will include internal analytical displacement maps, global photon maps and more optimizations to make VRay even faster.

They are also now accepting pre-orders for the plugin, with huge discounts available. The Basic package pre-order price is $179 instead of $299, and the advanced package pre-order price is $479 instead of $799.

Full details are available here.

Changes for v1.00.008 are:
- Fixes a crash that happened under certain geometry configurations when exporting normals
- Fixes output for objects with mirror transforms

Changes for v2.0 are:
- Updated to work with the completely rewritten Granny v2.0
- Now accessible to MAXScript
- Max 4.x support added

More information is available here.

This plugin imports Lightwave LWO2 files, the new Lightwave file format introduced with Lightwave 6.

TurnTool ApS have added another scripting option to their TurnToolBox realtime 3D content creator. It is now possible to make impressive flyby animations of your products before letting the user interact with them.

Check out this example, or download the sample file.

Changes for v1.1 are:
- Updated and optimized Area Light types
- Double precision anti-aliasing to fix scanliner issues
- Max. 2X speed improvement when building MSP acceleration
- Enhanced brute force GI importance sampling method
- NEW! Highly optimized, real Area Rectangular Light type
- 3 GI-engines; New: fRAnimation to render GI-animations
- Overall enhancements and improved accuracy of GI-renderings
- Streamlined Material Editor interface
- New Skylight feature for improved illumination handling
- True saturation GI-controls
- True GI-contrast controls with HDRI support
- Enhanced raytracer texture filtering
- Raytraced soft-shadow types: Disc, Rectangle, Sphere, Cylinder
- Enhanced color shadow map
- Additional Sub Surface Scattering features
- Workflow enhancements when Saving/Deleting/Reusing GI-solutions
- Better integration with Shag:Hair

Registered users can download the patch from Cebas family web page.

Total Textures v1 is a collection of bitmaps and procedural shaders for Max. There are over 280 Diffuse maps and Bump maps in 2 resolutions, as well as 36 royalty free photos (skies, backdrops etc.) and a selection of gobos and dirt maps. It also comes with a HTML interface for browsing and selecting maps.

Total Textures is available for Max 3 and 4, and costs £25.

Yulsoft Corporation, Inc are offering a free 3 day trial of their Fatlips 3D lip-sync plugin. Sample scenes and dialogue files are also available, just head over to their download page.

Digimation, Inc have posted demo versions of two of their new plugins. The demo of Darwin can be downloaded here, and the demo of Thunder can be downloaded here.

MooDee has made a trial version of his MDFilter v1.0 available for download. The trial is fully functional until April, and is the full version of MooDees MDFilterLite.

This render effect allows you to do colour correction and colour effects on your rendered images. It gives you full control over the individual RGB channels using bezier curves.

Changes for v1.31 are:
- This just fixes some licensing and installation bugs.

The full list of changes in this release is available here.

There are no changes to the plugin itself, but this version is for Max 4.2 only. The Max 4.0 version is still available.

Changes for v1.0.0.18 include:
There are no changes to the plugin itself, but this version is for Max 4.2 only. The Max 4.0 version is still available.

Changes for v0.10.02021801 are:
- Fixed a bug affecting precision in the standard camera sampler.

Changes for v0.10.02021701 are:
- A number of minor bug fixes.

Digimation, Inc are offering an upgrade for iMove Panoramic Media users to the Max 4 version of the plugin. The upgrade costs $99, and more information is available here.

Ghost 3D, LLC. have released a patch for users working with Max 4.26 (Intel Optimized version) that solves the problem of Scribe-iT v1.04 not being loaded. If you are a registered user, you can apply for the patch here.

Changes for v1.00.007 are:

New Features
- Scales to VRML units
- Improved NavInfo helper
- CreaseAngle support
- Context sensitive help for all Export Dialog controls

Bug Fixes
- Normals correctly generated
- TextureCoordinates DEFed and USEd greatly reducing output file size in most cases
- Output as quads, Ngons and visible edges now works correctly
- No more empty IndexedFaceSets
- No more duplicate DEF named IndexedFaceSets
- Material Editor's coordinates roll-up settings correctly output as TextureTransforms
- Hidden Bindable Nodes no longer exported

Changes for v0.10.02021401 are:
- Fixed a bug that caused some plugins (ArchVision's RPC plugin, for example) to not work properly
- Fixed a crash with the adaptive sampler when rendering is cancelled

The Chaotic Dimension server is down at the moment, so you can only get this build of the renderer from the Delphi forum.

REYES Infográfica have posted demo version of all of their plugins on their site. To get to the registration page for the demos, go here.

Changes for v1.2 are:
- The plugin for has been updated to work with the new version of VirtuaLight.
- There are also a load of bug-fixes and additions to the renderer.

You can get all of the information on the renderer here.

X-DoF is a sophisticated plugin for generating Depth of Field (DoF) in your rendered images. The feature list consists of:
- Smooth, Fast and Accurate Depth-Of-Field effect
- Custom Lens Diaphragms
- Custom Intensity Features
- Advanced Motion Blur

X-DoF is implemented with 4 different classes:
- Render Effect (applies the effect)
- Specular Shader (controls pixel intensity based on specular shading)
- Luminosity Shader (controls pixel intesity on custom basis)
- Multipass (provides camera sampling for Depth-of-Field and Motion Blur effects)

There is an impressive gallery with samples of what the plugin can do here.

X-DoF is available for Max 4, and although no pricing has been announced yet, the Lightwave version retails for $199, so I presume the Max version will have a similar price.

BGT BioGraphic Technologies, Inc. are looking for beta testers for their upcoming plugin AI.implant 1. AI.implant is a crowd control system, planned for release in May 2002. If you are interested in taking part in the beta test, just go here and fill out the form.

Changes for v0.10.02021302 are:
- Fixes broken GI multipliers
- Irradiance map didn't work with DOF - Fixed

The Chaotic Dimension server is down at the moment, so you can only get this build of the renderer from the Delphi forum.

Changes for v1.30 are:
- Max 3.1 added to supported platforms
- VR4MAX now supports Lightscape from Autodesk
- Added a "link ambient to diffuse" switch to the Mesh Options dialog
- The Mesh Options dialog now contains a button opening the Lightscape Options dialog
- The Runtime Options dialog now allows you to specify the name of the root object
- Fixed a number of bugs
- And more...

The full list of changes in this release is available here.

This is an import plugin for Photoshop 6 that can open Max RLA files with the Z-Channel being read in as a second alpha channel. At the moment it is not possible to save RLA files with this plugin, and it doesn't work with 16Bit images.

Changes for v0.10.02021201 are:
- Fixes slowdown when there are very large and very small objects together in the scene
- Fixes area light sampling
- Max displacement mapping now works
- Matte/shadow material works a little better
- Other small bugfixes

The Chaotic Dimension server is down at the moment, so you can only get this build of the renderer from the Delphi forum.

Discreet have released a number of updates for Character Studio. CS v3.31 is for Max 4 versions using the FlexLM License system, CS v3.21 is for Max 4 versions using C-Dilla, CS v3.05 is for Max 3.1, and there is also an unsupported update for CS 2 users working with Max 4.

More information about the different upgrades can be found here.

Changes for v3.21 / v3.31 are:
- Fixed Biped problems with Windows 2000 memory and GDI objects
- Moving and setting keys no longer causes user interface freezing in Win2K with SP2 or higher
- Sliding touchdown and lift-off keys, in Track View or track bar, now updates the footstep pattern correctly
- Color-coding of leg keys has been restored
- Toe bones now update correctly in Animate mode
- and loads more...

For the full list of changes go here for v3.21, here for v3.31, here for v3.05, and here for v2.41

The TurnTool Exporter allows Max to export files in the TurnTool *.TNT file format. Modelling a 3D scene for realtime display with TurnTool is quite similar to using other tools for realtime 3D. Follow a few rules of thumb and you are ready to create fantastic realtime TurnTool content of your 3D artistry.

Content created with this plugin and the demo version of TurnTool has a logo printed across it, the registered version of TurnTool removes this.

Changes for v3.1.8 are:
- Corrected an issue affecting the installation of the plugin in VIZ 3
- No changes to the plugin itself other than the version number, version date and copyright notices

Changes for v0.10.02021001 are:
- Fixes bad antialiasing of bright colors
- Fixes environment maps not working a second time with irradiance maps

The Chaotic Dimension server is down at the moment, so you can only get this build of the renderer from the Delphi forum.

This filter plugin turns your rendered images into Non-Photorealistic images with brush touch image files.

Changes for v1.4 are:

New Features
- Toolbars can be placed through toolbar tab in properties popup
- Option to highlight entire line if an object is selected
- Show/hide filtered parents
- Filter filtered parents collapses the hierarchy and shows unfiltered nodes
-Checkbox in general tab to select if floating explorers are automatically opened on startup

Changed Functionality
- Alpha filtering is done per keystroke
- Click on a selected node will deselect all other nodes
- CTRL-click on a selected node will deselect only that node

New Look
- Remove hierarchy lines in flat layout
- Use dotted lines for hierarchy and fix them to be like in trackview
- Tightening of spaces between lines
- Viewport does not jump back to the top of the list on resize
- Added 2 icons to control whether the hidden and/or frozen state icons are visible
- Larger icons (20 pixels)

Bugs Fixed
- Fixed the hierarchy line for target nodes

Changes for v0.10.02020701 are:
- Fixes a number of bugs introduced in the last two builds (glossy reflection sampling, motion blur etc)

The Chaotic Dimension server is down at the moment, so you can only get this build of the renderer from the Delphi forum.

Changes for v1.2 are:
- Option to export relative paths for texture filenames
- Fixed animation length bug when exporting animation to XSI Actions

More information and source-code is available here.

Ghost 3D, LLC. have announced 2 new product bundles. The Power Modeler Pack 1 costs $299.95, and consists of Surf-iT and ResErect, a saving of $49. The Power Digitizer Pack 1 costs $695, and consists of Scribe-iT (Scribe-iT has Surf-iT built in) and ResErect, also saving $49. The bundles are available directly from the Ghost 3D e-Store.

This little extension will expose the two functions 'GetXRefFileName index' and 'SetXRefFileName index name'. The bug which this allows us to overcome is as follows...

When you load two XRefScenes which are the same file, the command 'XRefs.GetXRefFile i' will only ever return the first one. This is because the names are somehow used as an ID.

The workaround allows us to rename the XRefScenes so the 'XRefs.GetXRefFile i' will now return the correct reference. It is necessary to rename the XRefScene back to it's original name before saving otherwise it will try to load a different or non-existing .max file as the XRefScene.

Changes for v0.10.02020401 are:
- Fixed a bug in the QMC sampler that caused increased noise
- Node visibility and primary/secondary visibility now work
- Animated textures now work in Max 4 (really)
- Crash on render abort (hopefully) fixed

Tree C Technology B.V. have announced the upcoming release of VR4MAX v1.3. They expect the update to be available for download from their web site on February 11th. This new release will include support for Max 3.1. As a functional addition VR4MAX will include Lightscape support.

Implementation of new Drag and Drop features for Max R4.x. Included are DropClipFormat and handlers for both the command panel and viewports.

Written by Michaelson Britt. Compiled for Max 4.x by Conny Klasson exclusively for Scripts@tdp.nu.

Source code (C++) is available here.

SuperUtility implements Function Publishing to provide access to MAXscript. It also has a TrackViewNode that will load/save the paramblock the utility uses which is viewable in the trackview.

Turned into a sample by Neil Hazzard, based on test code by Michaelson Britt. Compiled to plugin by Conny Klasson exclusively for Scripts@tdp.nu.

Source code (C++) is available here.

Changes for v0.10.02020201 are:
- Fixed a memory leak when using DOF
- Fixed the alpha channel when using DOF
- Fixed the inverted alpha in the previous build
- Fixed increased noise when using secondary GI bounces
- Animated textures now work

Snoswell Design, developer of Absolute Character Tools, have released information on an upcoming plugin known as Spine System. The Spine System is the first of a set of new character animation tools that they are considering developing commercially. These would be sophisticated System Plugins with 3D Manipulator interfaces and provide modular and anatomically accurate character animation rigs.

Changes for v2.3 beta 12 include:
- Updated to work with Metasequoia v2.3
- now able to import mapping types other than UV

Thanks to Mark Aldred for the translation.

Changes for v2.3 beta 12 include:
- Updated to work with Metasequoia v2.3
- now able to import mapping types other than UV

Thanks to Mark Aldred for the translation.

Changes for v0.10.02020101 are:
- Timelock is extended to the end of February 2002
- VRay now uses quasi-Monte Carlo sampling for fuzzy effects
- Some improvements in the motion blur algorithms
- Progress of irradiance map computation displayed in the virtual frame buffer
- Added some information about the irradiance map
- Added parameters to VRayMap, VRayShadow and VRayLight to control the ray depth at which the map/shadow/light swtiches to low sampling rate
- Added a parameter in the System roll-up to control the locking of VRay's random generator to pixel coordinates
- Diffuse illumination from VRayLights can be stored in the irradiance map for fast soft shadows