3ds Max 2019.2 Update

Fluids update 

It’s been a year since Fluids wre introduced into 3ds Max. Over the course of the past year, Autodesk updated this built-in solution with more features.

• The new Fluid Loader is an object that makes it easy to load and manipulate fluid simulation data. With the Fluids Loader, you can load cached fluid simulations, adjust the transform of the sim, offset the playback, assign materials and render the sim.
• Added support for rendering fluids data channels such as Vorticity, Density, Age, etc. with Arnold
• You can adjust the meshing parameters for liquid and foam of a loader and the render settings such as data channels mentioned above. Even reuse simulations and control each playback independently.
• When working with complex simulations, you may have many emitters, colliders, and motion fields. This can make iterating on fluid simulations cumbersome, so we have added the ability to disable and enable emitters, colliders, motion fields, etc. for faster, more finely controlled sims.

Open standards Alembic & OSL Improvements. Alembic support has been updated to version 1.7.5, with this comes with improvements to export and speed.

• Alembic UV export is now compatible with Maya by default
• Support for instances allows files to be much smaller while maintaining complexity and can dramatically improve export speed
• A better tree-view arrangement and searching in the Alembic Inspector Window
• The OSL editor now displays line numbers
• In the OSL editor, the “Compile” shortcut is changed from Ctrl+S to F7, and Ctrl+S is now the much more sensible “Save”
• The OSL editor now highlights matching brackets, e.g. if the cursor is on a left parenthesis, the matching right parenthesis is highlighted.

Arnold 5.2 Update. Arnold 5.2 delivers several usability and performance enhancements, plus significant new features to improve workflows. 

• Texture Baking is now supported with the render-to-texture workflow
• Shade enhancements include a new Cell Noise shader and new Sheen function in the Standard Surface shader to render cloth-like microfiber materials or the peach fuzz
• RGB clamping in clamp shader can now be configured to either a scalar or color mode
• Edge detection can be controlled in Toon Shader using the STRING type user data, toon_id
• The stability and usability of the high-quality Noice denoiser has been improved
• GPU memory consumption of the fast NVIDIA OptiX denoiser has been greatly reduced