No matter what your E-commerce strategy, 3ds Max is the versatile tool to help you get the job done. It’s relied upon in multiple industries to produce professional-grade designs and assets, such as creating high-quality 3D renders for architecture projects to helping build complex and expansive worlds for video games. Anything you do involving photorealistic rendering can be done well with 3ds Max—and the 2023 edition can help you attack your project from just about every angle.
Whether you are an animation, lighting, or 3D modeling expert, you will find a wide range of uses for 3ds Max. But for online businesses, these features also make our software a powerful and creative tool for anyone working in the ever-converging realms of E-commerce and 3D technologies.
3ds Max can serve various purposes for those working in E-commerce, as you can easily create 3D assets for use in E-commerce applications. With 3ds Max, you can add greater detail, color, and texture and smooth out any blemishes to your product visualizations. With 3ds Max, you can create more refined 3D product models and use them to inform your prospective customers better and effectively advertise. Here’s why 3ds Max’s versatility and diverse range of capabilities make it the Swiss Army knife of E-commerce content creation.
Adding Texture and Detail to Your 3D Models Is Easier Than Ever
Your design software may need a facelift, and 3ds Max can provide you with precisely that. With enhanced Smart Extrude and Retopology tools, you can rebuild and simplify your mesh data, add shading and textures to your designs, easily bake your models to texture, and use overlapping and cut-through commands to streamline the extrusion of 3D faces on objects. Faces can easily be reconstructed, adjacent ones can be stitched together, and any asset you create for your business can be transmitted and published via 3ds Max by exporting it in the glTF format.
Using glTF on 3ds Max makes it easier for 360-degree product visualizations to be displayed on your business’ website. Complex sets of 3D data can easily become viewable on the site (especially if your products have multiple dimensions in their design) without taking up too much space on your hard drive. There’s also an integrated Arnold renderer, which can be accessed straight from the interface. Arnold can make your complex renders look better and more professional than ever, thanks to tools such as color correction, shading, denoising, and light mixing.
If you’re selling something like sneakers, 3D modeling and texturing can prove invaluable. Those sneakers could come in 10 different colorways, and 3ds Max allows you to swap in the necessary textures quickly and easily before putting them online, rather than making multiple models of the same shoe. 3ds Max also gives you the freedom to add more detail to your geometry using spline tools, use modifiers to quickly iterate your models and designs, and use surface modeling to convert your assets to a poly format to make them more easily editable and customizable.
How Retopology Can Elevate Your 3D E-commerce Assets
3ds Max’s Retopology tools also allow you to improve and rebuild your polygonal mesh data without having to do it manually. This can optimize the high-res models and designs you build within 3ds Max, turning your mesh data into a cleaner, more refined quad-based topology. Using automation here can take your model’s geometric makeup and add new textures to it while also rectifying any issues with the mesh or with its faces and vertices. For E-commerce specifically, retopologizing your meshes can make your product models look more smoothed out, detailed, and have a better-optimized shape. Your meshes will also look cleaner and won’t be as time- or memory-consuming to render, allowing you to quickly take your models from the concept stage to the marketplace.
Not only can this make your 3D models look sleeker and more smoothed out, but the rendering process won’t take up as much space on your hard drive. 3ds Max also gives you a variety of modifiers to choose from among its Retopology tools, such as symmetry, slice, smooth, relax, subdivide, mesh cleaner, and ProOptimize. In 3ds Max 2023, Retopology tools can also be used for mesh data propagation (e.g., Vertex color, Normals, Smoothing Groups) and pre-processing of that data (the ReForm retopology options now include a “pre-process” command, automatically creating a mesh based on your geometry).
Need Better Workflows and Content Creation Software? 3ds Max Can Do That, Too
3ds Max can go a long way in improving your pipeline. You can customize the application to suit the demands of your projects and pipeline and use Python 3 to streamline your pipeline integration. This allows you to jump from task to task on your production workflow easily, even if the studio you work for has customized specific settings such as plug-ins and user preferences differently. As a result, you can increase productivity on projects of all shapes and sizes while also working with unique software configurations for different phases of the process.
Regarding E-commerce workflows, 3ds Max can also help you design top-notch assets for your business. For example, you can use PBR textures within 3ds Max to create photorealistic images of products like purses/handbags, fabrics, sneakers, and other types of clothing. Material IDs can be made from a mesh so that your products’ 3D models can have high-quality materials assigned to them.
Using your material library, you can modify numerous components of your assets, such as color, shape, and texture. Various PBR (physically-based rendering) textures can also be accessed and utilized via the PBR importer. From here, you can fine-tune your models and create more eye-popping visuals, helping make your design concepts come to life. If you’re making models of your products using 3ds Max and need to create different resolutions of the same model, you can also apply details from the higher-res one and transfer them to the lower-res equivalent. You’ll have models ready to show customers interested in buying from your business, even if their resolution capabilities aren’t that high.
Viewports Let You Effortlessly Preview Your Assets
This is an especially great feature if you want to save as much time as possible and get a render-quality sneak peek so you don’t find yourself doing certain tasks repeatedly. Camera effects and PBR materials can be viewed this way, helping you see your renders before they go out into the world. Additionally, you can use the Per-Viewport Filter to take scene objects such as cameras and geometry and filter them to be either shown or obscured in your viewport, helping you focus specifically on certain aspects of your product model as you toggle them on and off.
The Per-Viewport Filter is yet another example of 3ds Max’s flexibility and versatility since you can copy and paste your filter settings and filter out objects that can be rendered from ones that aren’t. You can use this feature to filter which objects you need and temporarily hide whichever ones you don’t. Models for E-commerce purposes can be made through your viewport, as it allows you to more easily modify and smooth out your meshes, as well as seamlessly import PBR textures so your assets can look slicker and more visually appealing before selling them online.
So Why Is 3ds Max a Swiss Army Knife for E-commerce?
From product visualizations to your business’ website showing off your 3D data to the world, E-commerce workflows can be transformed with the help of 3ds Max. You could be creating meshes for just about any type of product—shoes, jackets, bags, chairs, you name it—through 3ds Max, and you’ll have a wide range of tools at your disposal to render your models easily and efficiently.
Using 3ds Max’s various modeling tools, you can add more texture, color, shading, detail, precision, and slickness to your designs—helping not only make your product designs and visualizations stand out from your competitors, but have consumers become more likely to make a purchase. Long story short, 3ds Max helps make the lives of those making designs for E-commerce easier.
