Your scene, already rendered.

1. Install Vanguard Render

Overview

Vanguard Render is a 3ds Max renderer plugin for Windows 64-bit. It installs for Max 2024, 2025, 2026 and 2027 — whichever of them the installer finds on the machine — and needs an NVIDIA CUDA-capable GPU.

Steps

1. Close 3ds Max. A renderer cannot be replaced while Max holds it open, and an installer that appears to succeed against a running Max has changed nothing.
2. Run the installer you downloaded from this page.
3. Start Max, press F10 for Render Setup, and pick Vanguard Render in the renderer list.

If you already have VanguardCloud

You already have the renderer — it ships inside that installer too, as the same file in the same place. Installing both does not give you two copies, and removing one does not take it away from the other.

2. Activate your licence

The 7-day trial

Every install starts with a free 7-day trial. Nothing to enter and nothing to ask for: pick the renderer and press Render.

What the licence decides

The renderer is one plugin, and what it will draw depends on the licence you hold. A VanguardCloud licence renders clouds, sky and lightning. A Vanguard Render licence renders your objects, their materials and your lights as well.

Activating a purchased licence

1. Open Render Setup → the Vanguard Render rollout, and find the Licence page.
2. Copy the Hardware ID. It is read-only on purpose — it identifies this machine and a typed-over one will not match.
3. Sign in on this site, go to My Account, and paste the Hardware ID against your licence.
4. Press Download licence and load the file, or paste both of its lines into the key box.

Moving to another PC

A licence is bound to one machine’s Hardware ID. Ask for a transfer from My Account — it is a normal request, not a special case, and you do not lose the remaining days.

3. Your first render

Pick the renderer

F10 → Render Setup → the renderer dropdown at the top → Vanguard Render. Max keeps the choice with the scene, so a file you hand to somebody else opens on the same renderer.

Press Render

There is nothing to build and nothing to assign first. Whatever is in the scene — meshes, their materials, the lights — is what you get.

What it reads

Triangles with smoothing-group or Edit Normals normals, and UVs on map channel 1. Physical Material, Standard, VRayMtl, Corona and the light materials are read by parameter name, and a Multi/Sub-Object is followed through its material IDs. Texture maps are read as Bitmaps; a wrapper such as Color Correction is followed down to the Bitmap underneath it.

4. Lighting and the sky

Lights

Up to 32 Max lights per frame, with shadows. A scene with thousands of lamps should use emissive geometry for most of them rather than light objects — emissive surfaces cost almost nothing here and lights do not.

The sun

A light whose name or class says sun, direct or daylight is taken as the sun. If there is none, the sun direction in the renderer’s own settings is used, so a scene with no lights at all still renders lit rather than black.

Sky and clouds

If you hold a VanguardCloud licence, clouds in the scene march in the same frame as the geometry: the sky is behind your building and the cloud’s shadow is on the street in front of it, in one pass.

5. Quality and speed

Where the time goes

Three things dominate: how many triangles are in frame, how many lights cast shadows, and how much of the frame a volume covers. The BVH over your geometry is kept while the object’s validity interval holds, so a static set is built once and reused across the whole sequence.

Render elements

The usual passes are there, including Velocity, which is what motion blur is driven from.

Start coarse

Frame the shot at low settings — it comes back fast enough to keep working — and raise them once the camera is where you want it. That is the whole point of a renderer this quick: the expensive frame should be the last one, not every one.

6. Tips & fixes

Everything renders except my objects

You are on a VanguardCloud licence, which renders clouds and sky only. A Vanguard Render licence adds objects, materials and lights. This is the single most common surprise.

The frame is black

There is no light in the scene and no sun direction set, or the camera is inside a closed object. A correctly configured scene with nothing lighting it renders black, which looks exactly like a broken one.

A material renders as flat colour

Its texture is a procedural Texmap rather than a Bitmap. Bake it to an image and point the material at that.

It is slower than expected

Count the shadow-casting lights first. Thirty-two lights with shadows is thirty-two times the shadow work, and a city is usually better lit by emissive geometry than by light objects.