Maxon

Maxon announced Maxon Digital Twin, an upcoming standalone application previewed at CES 2026 that converts CAD or 3D product models into photorealistic marketing assets and automatically matches lighting, perspective, and reflections to a user-chosen background. The application is currently in development with no release date announced.

Digital Twin takes a CAD or 3D product model as input and applies photorealistic materials, studio lighting, and rendering using Maxon's own 3D and rendering technology, producing a reusable 'digital prototype' of the product. When a background is provided — whether created by hand or generated using a third-party AI tool — the application's 'Match Background' function automatically aligns the product's perspective, lighting, and reflections. Maxon confirmed it is not developing its own AI agent for this product; AI-enabled background generation is an optional integration left to the user's choice of third-party tools. Maxon stated the application does not train on user or artist content.

Maxon's Redshift GPU renderer offers AI-based denoising options — including NVIDIA's OptiX and Intel's Open Image Denoise (OIDN) — that use deep learning to remove noise from 3D renders, allowing artists to use fewer render samples and get cleaner results faster. As of Redshift 2025.2 (December 2024), OIDN 2.3 became the default denoiser, with GPU-accelerated support across NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple Silicon hardware.

OptiX and OIDN are described in Maxon's official documentation as denoisers that 'use deep learning algorithms that have been trained with tens of thousands of images.' They analyze a partially rendered image and produce a cleaned version without requiring additional render passes. Redshift also supports a traditional non-AI denoiser (Altus). The AI denoisers are available to all Redshift users across supported host applications including Cinema 4D, Houdini, Maya, Blender, and 3ds Max. GPU-accelerated denoising across all major hardware platforms was standardized in Redshift 2025.2, released December 2024.

Maxon announced a partnership with Tencent Cloud to integrate Tencent's HY 3D AI engine into Cinema 4D, enabling artists to generate base 3D and UV models from text prompts or reference images. The integration, unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2026, is planned for late 2026 and will be optional for Cinema 4D users.

The HY 3D (Hunyuan 3D) engine is a generative AI model developed and operated by Tencent Cloud, not by Maxon. It takes text descriptions or reference images as input and produces base 3D mesh models with UV maps, which artists can then refine in Cinema 4D, sculpt further in ZBrush, and render in Redshift. Maxon confirmed it does not train proprietary generative AI models for this integration and does not use customer content to train AI systems. The feature will carry separate usage pricing tied to cloud computing costs, which Maxon stated will be announced at launch. The integration will debut first in the upcoming iPad edition of Cinema 4D.