3ds Max is one of the most widely-used off the shelf 3D animation programs by the general public. It has strong modeling capabilities, a flexible plugin architecture and a long heritage on the Microsoft Windows platform. It is mostly used by video game developers, TV commercial studios and architectural visualisation studios. It is also used for movie effects and movie previsualisation.

In addition to its modeling and animation tools, the latest version of 3ds Max also features advanced shaders (such as ambient occlusion and subsurface scattering), dynamic simulation, particle systems, radiosity, normal map creation and rendering, global illumination, an intuitive and fully-customizable user interface, its own scripting language and much more. There is also a plethora of specialized renderer plugins that can be bought separately, such as V-Ray, Brazil r/s and finalRender.

Earlier versions required a special copy prevention device (a dongle) to be plugged into the parallel port while the program was run, but later a software copy prevention method was implemented instead. Registration involving personal information such as name, address and e-mail address is now required.

Note: The downloadable trial version of 3ds Max 9 is not supported on Vista at this time.