Autodesk Brings Gaussian Splats Into 3ds Max and Live Arnold Rendering to Maya

Autodesk announced a set of updates to 3ds Max and Maya at SIGGRAPH 2026 on 22 July, and the headline change is that 3D Gaussian Splats are now a native part of the 3ds Max toolset rather than something artists have to import through a workaround.

3ds Max now treats a 3D Gaussian Splat, or 3DGS, as a proper point-object type. That means each splat carries position, orientation, scale, colour and custom attributes that artists can edit directly in the scene, rather than treating a splat capture as a fixed, unmodifiable blob of data. Autodesk has paired this with native 3DGS rendering support in Arnold, so a captured scene can go from raw splat data to a rendered frame without a separate conversion step.

Maya's update is aimed more at lighting and lookdev workflows. The viewport now supports interactive Arnold rendering, meaning lighting and material changes update live in the viewport instead of requiring a separate render to check the result. For anyone doing lookdev on a tight schedule, that is the kind of change that saves real hours rather than just looking good in a release note.

The third piece is a "Bring Your Own Data" feature in MotionMaker, Autodesk's generative motion tool, which lets studios train custom motion models on their own motion capture and keyframe libraries instead of relying only on Autodesk's stock data. That is significant for studios with a distinctive house style or a large existing animation library, since it means a generative tool can learn to move the way a studio already moves rather than defaulting to generic motion.

Together the three updates point at the same underlying shift: capture data, whether scanned or motion captured, is being treated as first class material inside the DCC rather than something bolted on afterwards.

For studios doing scan-based visualisation work, native Gaussian Splat editing in particular removes a step that used to mean bouncing a capture out to a separate tool before it was usable in a finished shot. Having it live inside 3ds Max from the start should make scan-to-render workflows noticeably faster.