3DS Max 2018.2 released with new spline tools

Hey Animatect

While I understand what you say, those things you named are not showstoppers, being a person that have worked and tested max for more than 11 years I´m very well aware about all that, but when I asked Xerges about that, was not to criticize but to understand what was the things that he was missing, because while I understand that in max there are several good things, I also think that none of those things are so capital that could force a person to stay with max, if that were not the case Maya would not be so widely used.
So in general the main thing an artist lacks when goes out of it´s main package is willing to investigate and understand the new package, everything you said is true, but it has different workflows in different packages, from C4D to Maya and Blender, all can be done in any of them,ç.
Of course there may be tools that you miss, in our case we were missing a tool as simple as “Modify Pivot Only”, and in less than a few days, because I have not dedicated more than one hour per day or so, without having touched Python in my life, we already have that tool inside Blender.
While I agree with you in the proceduralism weak point, I disagree in the “Edit poly” advantages, because “Edit Poly” is just a modifier that creates a full copy of your mesh in memory, but I could agree in the advantages of Poly Select for example, but then again both things can be done in Blender (or Maya BTW), there is an addon (free) for Blender that gives you something similar to Edit Poly, and you have vértices selection sets, wich I found far more useful than Poly select and far more flexible and stable, but that is only my opinion.

The thing here is that there used to be “showstoppers”, real ones, that differentiate max from other packages, now they are not, you can do whatever you want practically with any package, and as of today people are happy because they get a bunch of spline tools that are available in other packages since ages, please guys, this is another purchased plugin, yes, it´s been improved because Autodesk paid their developers, but for how much time? Do you remember CAT? It was going to be the future of animation in max, they paid it´s developers and even hired one of them inside the Max team… how much has it evolved? Where are those devs today?

Now…. Eloí… or you understand the anger of the people wrong, or you distort the reality so it benefits your way of thought, sorry for being so hars but all that you said is a half-true:

Arnold: the problem was not Arnold being integrated, the problem is that with max you acquired unlimited network licenses of it´s streamlined render engine, mental Ray in that case, and now all of a sudden you have no render licenses at all and you have to pay for them… there were entire renderfarms built up against that benefit of max, max was chosen by many companies mainly because that ”feature” in several occasions, and mental was the selected render engine because of that leverage, the problem is not the change to Arnold, that could have been a pretty good change, is that they are removing something they advertised and something for what we paid and that we acquired with max, unlimited network rendering, and they did not even tried to soften the hit including 5 or 10 network render licensee, instead they included 0… so the problem is not Arnold, you may want to see it or not, but the anger is not because Arnold.

Game Engine: A game engine that no one was using, tied to a rental licensing scheme? Yes… then you need a new build supporting the new iOS release ( wich breaks iOS compilation in Unity and Unreal almost in any update, and even in some point updates of the OS) and in two years you will receive nothing because… you know.. composite… Combustión… Softimage… and many other things.
A game Engine is not something you can choose easily if you are serious about programming, and if you are not… well… Unreal can easily beat that game engine for viz… and now with Vray integrated, so not really a leverage but another situation were Autodesk throws max users some piece of software they think is garbage or failed with some pretty marketing to convince them about the theoretical benefits of it, were in reality was zero effort by Autodesk part, and a real insecure choice for any programming, but hey, you can see it as “Hey! Why do you complain? You got a game engine!” That is like, hey you did not asked for oranges, but take this orange, even if you don´t want it and what you needed was to be able to have a bunch of grapes ( grapes being render network licenses).

And finally, what packages do have such spline toolset?, I´ll investigate but I´m pretty sure all those things can be done with other packages, and I´ll investigate Blender specifically, because the thing that amazed me the most from Blender is that it can do so many things that people think only Max or Maya can do, and it has so many tools that people ignore completely that while I can´t say that it has all those tools, what I can say is that I will investigate and tell you something back.

And BTW barely no one was complaining about this when you wrote your post, even I refrained myself and was silent until you posted, there I decided I was going to answer XD

Cheers.

The only one that works properly is the max2ae plugin unfortunately. The built in one uses states sets which is a pain in the ass to use. After some major issues with it i never touch it.