3D Technologies and Solutions

This article describes some terms and solutions used in 3D visualization industry.

ART

Autodesk RayTracer, physically-based render engine for 3ds Max, AutoCAD, Revit, etc. Uses path tracing on CPUs for rendering.

ATF

Autodesk translation framework, framework for data exchange.

BRDF

Bidirectional reflectance distribution function.

BSDF

Bidirectional scattering distribution function. Used as generalization for reflectance and transmittance, e.g. BSDF = BRDF + BTDF.

BTDF

Bidirectional transmittance distribution function.

Hydra (HD)

Framework to transport live scene graph data to renderer (originally USD to OpenGL render engine). Open source, developed by Pixar.

Irradiance

Radiant flux received by a surface per unit area. The unit of irradiance is the watt per square metre (W⋅m⁻²).

LookdevKit

A plugin for Maya which provides some useful shader nodes: math, noise, mix, etc.

LookdevX

A node-based material editor for USD assets which comes with Maya.

Not to be confused with LookdevKit.

LTC

Linearly transformed cosines, a set of distributions to render area lights.

MaterialX

Standard for interoperable node-based materials. MaterialX graphs can be stored inside USD assets or as separate XML (.mtlx) files.

Mental Ray

Deprecated ray tracing renderer by NVIDIA. Was used in older versions of 3ds Max, Maya, Revit, Softimage, etc. Replaced by Arnold.

MetaSL

Outdated shading language which was used in 3ds Max (before 2016) and Mental Mill software.

Nitrous

3ds Max viewport system.

OGS

Open graphics system, viewport renderer used in Autodesk software (3ds Max, Maya, AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, Fusion, Infraworks, Navisworks, Recap, etc).

Not to be confused with OpenSceneGraph (OSG).

OpenPBR Surface

Name of standard shader node used for physically based rendering (PBR). Supported starting from 3ds Max 2025.3 and Maya 2025.3.

PMREM

Stands for prefiltered mipmapped radiance environment map. A special map which is used to calculate image-based lighting for PBR-based materials.

Radiance

Radiant flux emitted, reflected, transmitted, or received by a given surface, per unit solid angle per unit projected area. The unit of radiance is watt per steradian per square metre (W·sr⁻¹·m⁻²).

RapidRT

Another name for Autodesk RayTracer renderer (ART).

Stingray

A discontinued 3D game engine. Also known as 3ds Max Interactive. The shader node system based on Stingray PBS is still supported in 3ds Max, Maya (created via ShaderFX editor).