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Using Anima and its plugins you can quickly and easily populate your 3D scenes using Library assets. Also, the plugin for 3ds Max optimizes memory usage, improves viewport performance, and adapts to the needs of the user by automatically generating native materials for the actors for all the supported render engines, including V-Ray,  Corona,  Octane, Redshift, Arnold, Fstorm, and more.

Also, thanks to the Anima plugin, 3dsMax gets full support for the amazing 4D Digital Human models, which use the most advanced State-Of-The-Art volumetric video technology.

There are 2 complementary workflows that can be used with Anima in 3ds Max:

• Import and synchronize your simulation from Anima into your 3dsMax scene using the Anima Alive Synchronization workflow.
• Drop models directly into the scene using Anima Drop.

You can learn more about both workflows in the links below:

• The Anima Alive Synchronization plugin
• Anima Drop

In this article, you will learn more details about all the features that both workflows enable in 3ds Max thanks to the Anima plugin.

Alternatively, you can use the Import anima project option from the AXYZ design Anima menu:

Displaying hundreds or thousands of animated characters can be taxing for your viewports. To make sure you never see a slow-down the Anima plugin allows you to display characters as arrows when their number exceeds a set threshold. To do use this feature:

1. Select an an Anima Scene object.
2. Open the Modify Panel.
3. Adjust the Display Value. This represents the number of characters to display in full mesh mode.

To control many aspects of the display and playback of the characters, select the scene controller and open the Modify panel to access the following settings:

Project – The Anima project associated with the scene controller. Click on the ellipsis (…) to change the project.

Reload – Reloads the Anima project and opens the Select Scene window. You can use this to either open a different scene, replacing the existing characters or update the scene after making changes to it in Anima standalone.

Rebuild Material – Opens the Material Adapter window allowing you to regenerate the materials. You can use this to rebuild the materials with appropriate shaders if you change to a different renderer, or if you’d like to swap the photoreal materials for one of the alternative options.

Browse Scenes – Allows you to select other scenes to merge them with the current scene in 3DSMax, but remember that the collisions won´t be recalculated.

Select Actors – Click to select all the characters associated with this scene.

Unlock Transform – Lets you translate, rotate and scale the whole Anima scene, (it doesn't work for individual actors).

Icon Size – Controls the size of the Anima icon in the viewport, measured in scene units.

Viewport Settings – Controls the number of characters that can be displayed in Full Mesh mode. If there are more characters in the scene than this value then the additional characters display as a simplified arrow. This is to keep viewport playback responsive but it doesn’t affect the render. You can also display or hide the textures in the viewports.

In scenes containing vehicles, you can set how they are interpreted in 3ds Max by the renderer of choice - as a mesh, or as a proxy. It is useful to specify this option when using V-Ray GPU or Redshift, as they don't interpret it automatically in render time.