I am pleased to announce the first Autodesk Labs project for 3ds Max, a technology preview enabling display and rendering of 3D laser scanning/LiDAR data sets with Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2010 & 2011 and Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010 & 2011. With the 3ds Max Point Cloud Tools you can import reference data that has been captured from various 3D scanning devices and use as a snapping reference for modeling workflows, or simply apply a material and render the point cloud using the mental ray renderer. We anticipate seeing a wide variety of use cases for this technology preview and have already seen users load up to 1 billion points within the viewport.

The Point Cloud Tools for 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design allows you to:

  1. Import .PTS format point cloud data into 3ds Max or 3ds Max Design scenes (release 2010 & 2011)
  2. Display the point cloud data in the 3ds Max viewport with a variety of rendering options and levels of detail
  3. Render point clouds using the mental ray rendering option
  4. Slice point clouds into pieces using geometric display volumes
  5. Export multiple clouds or parts of clouds to a new .PTS files
  6. Snap to specific points within the data
  7. Render with shadows for quick shadow studies
  8. Apply materials or projection map images onto the point cloud data
  9. Display captured per point color in viewport
  10. Independent LOD control for viewport and render settings

Working with 3D point cloud data is very memory intensive, we recommend at a minimum Win 7, 64bit, 8GB RAM, and a 64bit version of 3ds Max. Stability problems will increase on lower spec systems and the amount of data you can work with is dependent upon the amount of RAM in the system. Although there are a number of very functional features in the technology preview, it has not been widely tested on a range of hardware and configurations.