During the production of Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic disaster film 2012 Autodesk’s 3ds Max was used extensively to create very impressive visual effects. Here are some screenshots I grabbed from a “Making of” video, were you can see 3ds Max on the artists’ monitors.
3ds Max with a dark UI colour, showing the ruins of Las Vegas in wireframe.
3ds Max on the left monitor.
3ds Max on the left monitor, with some fluid simulation it looks like(?)
3ds Max on the left monitor with black viewport colours.
Check out the video and read the article here: Special Review: 2012 Film. The Making of. HD Video
The company behind the VFX is Uncharted Territory, LLC.
A new plug-in for 3ds Max called volumeBreaker was used to smash buildings and roads to pieces.
volumeBreaker is a volumetric geometry fracturing tool that will instantly create sub-geometry within any mesh - geometry that perfectly fits together and fills any given volume. With volumeBreaker Cebas brings a Hollywood quality destruction tool to 3ds MAX. volumeBreaker was developed in consultation with, and to meet the very exacting demands of, VFX artists working on multi-million dollar movies – because of this, volumeBreaker truly is a production proven tool.
The tool is being developed by cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc. and you can read more about it here: http://volumebreaker.com/index.php?pid=product&prd_id=77&feature=912
Now, ain’t that cool? 
Cheers mates!