3DS Max 2020.3 released
Nov 27, 2019 by CGPress Staff
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Autodesk has released 3DS Max 2020.3. The latest update adds improvements to the ATF Imported for improved Skethcup importing, further improvements to the Chamfer modifier including new mitre types in editable poly, viewport improvements and more.
MAXtoA has also been updated to expose several new shaders including clip_geo, shader_override for overriding all the scene’s shaders, and aov_read. There are also now options to have no background, support for normal and height maps and bake elements transfer.
Visit the Autodesk blog for more details and the 3DS Max roadmap. For the full list of smaller improvements and bug fixes, see the release notes.
Suck it Houdini 18 !
hahah omg
lol! At least max users can enjoy life instead of spending all their free time learning how to use new features while Houdini users have no life and can’t sleep to learn all the new stuff!
Yeah under this criterion M$ Paint users have best life.
Yeah yeah yeah… the next 10 years of 3ds max dev will be chamfer mod revamp. Keep it up, Autodestructoid.
Sorry, losing 10% of customers annually by simultaneously increasing the price by 20% annually is still a win-win situation!
Short-term, yes. On the other hand, 3D DCC software is only a fraction of income for Autodesk, so this is also why the development is simply unimportant to them.
I am really afraid the chamfer modifier will become skynet one day…
one of the best comments i read in recent history. slow clap, then fast. thanks for the chuckle.
There is a possible issue with this update and railclone 4.2’s style editor causing it to open as a blank white window. I’ve only tested on one machine and I am rolling back the update. Will advise if the roll back fixes.
People keep bagging on the Chamfer mod updates, but we keep asking for improvements to it and they keep delivering. This is a good thing!
The issue is not the Chamfer mod development….the issue is the way the max devs continually tout it like some flagship feature we should all be excited about….when it’s hardly worth mentioning compared to all the other things in max that should be higher on the priority list.
Can’t say that I agree with that assessment. They call out the new/important features when they arrive. Shouldn’t they also mention when they’ve made improvements to an existing feature that were highly requested? Just because YOU aren’t excited about it, doesn’t mean it’s an irrelevant thing to note for others (like myself) who use it consistently and are genuinely excited about updates to it that make my work/life easier.
Besides, if you want to see the rest of the ‘high priority’ features, they’ve got a roadmap that is continually being updated and lists ALL the features they’ve been implementing over the last few releases.
To me, they’re simply making note of important updates that customers are requesting. That’s an important thing to show and prove their commitment to keeping max competitive with other DCC packages.
Autodesk seem to be sleepwalking to oblivion. Hope Blender can improve the CAD import side soon.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/autodesk-adsk-beats-q3-earnings-222510612.html
ah yes, the two indicators: how much have we squeezed our user base and how much are the gamblers willing to bet on us.
surefire indicators of success, no question.
but you see, i would be deeply, profoundly embarrassed to shill for a corporation that has shown time and again utter disregard to their user-base, most recently by announcing the (illegal) discontinuation of activation codes for 3+ year old version,
just as a last example in a long line of unquestionably anticonsumer behavior.
wait…no yeah, even if my livelihood was depending on it i could just not swing it.
i would just be utterly ashamed as a human being.
but you do you jon, its all good.
it takes all sorts i guess and this world isnt going downhill by itself now is it.
lets just hope when the layoff lottery (just that regular corporate streamlining and cutting the fat) comes around again, in order to satisfy those same shareholders and make up for the expectations, you dont end up on the chopping block.
growth is the word.
all the best.
Technomancer, I’m responding specifically to the comment “Autodesk seem to be sleepwalking to oblivion.” No, the company is successful, regardless of your (or my) personal opinions on every one of the company’s business decisions. 3ds Max is one of the Top 10 products at Autodesk (out of 150 different software packages.)
As a person who’s been in the CG industry for nearly 30 years, and has worked with (and for) Autodesk off-and-on during that time, my perspective on this may be a bit different from yours.
3ds Max is the most successful 3D content creation app in the world, with the biggest user base and the most widespread penetration in every DCC industry. However, that widespread use is a double-edged sword. No matter what features Autodesk puts into Max, *someone* is going to complain, “but you didn’t improve this specific thing that *I* want and use and value above everything else!”
It happens every single release.
If we put in improved modeling tools specifically requested by architectural and engineering modelers (like the Chamfer tools), some vocal members of the VFX crowd think they’re silly and useless, since *they* don’t use them.
If we put in VFX tools that TDs are asking for, some arch/viz users complain that they didn’t get *their* most-requested features. They want to import their models seamlessly from other 3D apps and render them beautifully — not blow them up, regardless of how cool that might look in a VFX shot or demo reel.
Every release, a huge number of people say, “no new features — just fix bugs!”
Every release, an equally huge number of people say, “it works fine for me — add new features!”
And every release, no matter *what* new features we add, someone gets angry that we didn’t add the specific thing that *they* wanted.
Every release is a balancing act between fixing bugs, adding new features (for the most diverse DCC user base out there), *not* breaking existing features, and then dealing with complaints because someone felt slighted by Autodesk’s decisions.
For the record, I’ve been friends with many folks on the 3ds Max development team for years — some of them for decades. Every single person on the Max team works hard to make the software better, manage features and defect fixes, and fulfill the mandates established by upper management.
It’s a balancing act, and we’re doing our best to please as many people in our user base as we can — not just folks in a single industry, with a single focus of interest.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
I won’t enter in the discussion about the releases or features.
But showing the company shares success when a user is complaining about the evolution of the software as I said is like insulting the user.
Just out of curiosity, can you share the latest quarterly results of the Media and Entertainment division? It’s public information if I correctly recall.
I’d have to look up how the M&E Division numbers are broken out (I don’t have that info offhand).
The issue is, for every single person who is complaining about the feature that *they* want, and the areas that they think are being neglected, there are many other users who are happy because *their* features have been implemented.
It was instructive a while back when, after some folks posted positive comments here about some features in 3ds Max which helped them in their arch/viz work, some other people here said, “I don’t care about architects and what they want!” As I mention elsewhere, the arch/viz/engineering community is huge, and we have to support them.
No software package is perfect, and there are many things about Max that I’d like to see improved and fixed. But if we work only on one specific area of Max to please a specific group of people, then it’s inevitable that someone else is going to complain that *their* feature was neglected.
If 3ds Max were only a VFX tool, or an arch/viz tool, or a motion graphics tool, then making it excel in these areas would be far easier than trying to please all the people working in the diverse fields in which 3ds Max is used. As I said, the fact that Max is used as a CG workhorse in a wide variety of industries is a double-edged sword. It’s good for overall success, but challenging when you have to try to please as many people as possible in each industry, many of whom care primarily about their specific industry, and not about the ones they’re not personally involved in.
The answer of Technomancer is a good one, also the one by Stephen Green.
I won’t enter in the discussion of “this is better” or ” this is worse” regarding features or releases as I said.
What I’m saying is that showing the shares of the company when a user is complaining is like insulting the user.
As I said before is like you are saying: “David what you said is true… but look… our shares are growing so no need to do any more effort or investment, we are good, we don’t care about you…”
That’s not a good way of treating customers, but well, this is already standard, we WERE Autodesk customers and because of things like this we are not anymore, and the abuse with the license change to ONLY RENTAL, and the SUPER abuse of not activating PERPETUAL licenses that are 3 years old (or something like that), this goes in the Autodesk line of misstreating the customers/users.
i appreciate your reply and a classy on at that. many of your points speak to the general sentiment on upgrades and can be applied to every single software package out there. it is just a symptom of human nature. to be clear, i positively hate the peanut gallery, never satisfied bunch, the armchair critics. with years i am sure it has become worse, which directly stems from our growing entitlement and the outrage culture online.
that however has nothing to do with the animosity people feel towards autodesk.
story time: i also have been a max users for years, infact probably have had your book in my hands at some point.
first came the subscription program, making it impossible to opt out for a year or two, locking one in. then came the growing prices for that same maintenance plan, in tandem with ever shrinking updates, the argument being “core rewritten, patience”.
excalibur never came, max started to fall off fast, not in any subjective “i want this or that” manner, but by not keeping up with the basic standards. alembic, vdb, basic fuid sim, just to name a few. bugs were aplenty too. userbase would rightly revolt each year, often here at cgpress (thank god for cgpress btw) and slowly the word started to come out that max is to be differentiated from maya in order to aim at a slightly different niche – archviz and product design.
i will always remember “max isnt that kind of app” reply to some of question regarding the standards i named. this was shortly after the softimage debacle (user were lied to about EOL point blank) and people were getting nervous where things are heading.
the user request forum was a joke. it only served to highlight how little adsk cared for actual user needs. each and every time we asked about the long term roadmap the answer was the same: no can do, adsk is a publicly traded company yada-yada. more on this later.
so just imagine having invested a decade into a piece of software just to see it is becoming obsolete in so many ways. i lusted after mograph and animation stuff from c4d and character /vfx stuff in maya. it was like being chained to a rock.
then came the rental announcement. we were told year or so in advance where things are heading which is incidentally the only thing i am grateful for. autodesk also said: “hey guys, if you really fancy permanent licenses, better stock up now while the getting is good.” more on this later as well.
the rental scheme was introduced and presented in such a scummy way ofcourse, making the maintenance as unattractive as possible by cumulatively upping the price each year. the marketing blurb was insulting in its condescension and the “pros” of giving up ones peremanent license were laughable.
my dealer presented my with the best viable deal – 3 year maintenance option as to not to be affected by the increases. the balls on autodesk man.
you see at the moment the rental was announced i started looking into other software. subsequently i bought clarisse, terragen, vue, houdini, and many, many other tools. breaking away from autodesk made me proactively look for other tools and that was a rebirt for me. instead of that 3 year sub contract i have actually gone with c4d license and it cost me just a bit more and i got a massive addition to my toolset.
after i opted out a rep called me asking why, oh why. i mentioned the lack of much needed features and the girl said – well you can buy maya for that. i laughed.
i still have max installed for some of the plugins like growfx, fume and phoenix, but just recently we were informed that licenses older than 3 years will not be activated. now take that info together with the “better stock up on permanent licenses” and let me know what you make of it.
on the autodesk forum there were people exactly in this situation, sitting on licenses they acquired only because of that marketing messaging. scummy af again, criminal infact.
so rental is under way and i truly dont give a single fark. indeed there are improvements and embracing of the standards but the pertinent question is why wasnt this the case before? that roadmap? oh it turns out autodesk can publish the roadmap, which they did at the exact moment 2.8 dropped. its really comical in its transparency. oh also indie was “introduced” but only if you live in belize or some sh!t.
the success autodesk has and you cite may aswell be there. the stocks have skyrocketed, revenue is up- but for a small consumer such as myself, all of that is irrelevant when you take into consideration the undeniable disrespect adsk have shown for us.
studios will still use max or may, pipelines dont change that easily and scalability is a rare pro of the rental scheme, but more and more one hears about the blender being widely adopted by studios, not to mention houdini.
as for blender, well thats my baby. i am totally in love with it.
for comparison, i used to dread rigging. i was actually traumatized by catrig bugs and never managed to actually properly rig a character in years of using 3ds max.
in blender it took me less then an hour to have a character setup ready for animation. i am so happy where i am now creatively and in a way have to thank autodesk for being so vile as to drive me away.
so to pack it all up: the venom does not come from some niggles or dissatisfaction about a certain feature, its a simmering, deeply rooted hatred for everything autodesk. as emotions go, it can be irrational i dont give a fak though. i hate that company with every fiber of my being and always will. that trickles down to adsk employees, as unfair as it may be.
rant out, sorry for the long one.
Amen.
It’s not all about features, it’s the treatment of customers, or ‘mugs’ as Autodesk seems to treat us.
The steady narrowing of choices under an umbrella of bullshit ‘simplifying’ it for us. Ending perpetuals. The constant stick. The condescending marketing. I could go on.
This has nothing to do with the development teams, or product managers – until there’s a real and honest change at the top to do things differently, it’s just going to get worse.
+1
Thank you to sum it all up again! I’m 37 working over 17 years with 3DSmax and teaching students on a university in 3D and VFX. Its very sad but no single student (in the last 6 years) use 3DSmax anymore. Our main package on the university is Maya but private most students goes with Blender, C4D and Houdini … every 3dsMax user feels since years like an old dinosaur in the 3D market and if Autodesk doesn’t change something very radical overnight 3dsMax and Maya will be dead and forgotten very soon.
Pat, could you please note your thoughts above and vote for better educational support at the 3ds Max Ideas Page? (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-ideas/idb-p/164) This observation does concern me, and I’d like to get strong user feedback to send to upper management. Thanks,
@pat, where do you teach at? More specifically, what region/territory? Just curious!
I know you can get Houdini apprentice for free, Blender is obviously free, but I don’t believe there’s an educational version of C4D (according to their website, anyway). Shouldn’t these students be able to obtain free educational copies of Max? Even Max Indie is cheaper than your students using C4D, unless they’re finding hacked copies 🙂
The point about pleasing “Archviz” users is just off in my opinion. Archviz users already have everything they need and much more in Max since versions far before 2014 – coupled with Vray and a scatter tool available via forestpack pro. Done deal! what else do they need for rendering walls and a bunch of trees really?
I would vouch for double precision for max that would benefit all including archviz but I gave up on that one long ago.
So lets not bring them into the mix of user pleasing, if it has to do with some CAD file imports then that is not a real “Major” issue and can be fixed at a future or present date it is something unrelated to core features.
Focusing back on more important things:
Max users haven’t really been asking for much really.
Allow me to remind you of the key points:
Character animators:
1 – Rigging tools much behind Maya and Houdini.
2 – Muscle system non existent not even through plugins!
3 – Character studio – CAT seen no love since forever.
4 – More character animation friendly curves and layer system!
Simulation and VFX – related to the above:
1 – They needed Fluid you came in too late, Phoenix FD beat you to it on every level. Any pro will just purchase a one time perpetual license and move on for years without upgrading.
2 – Cloth sim – you have yet to make Cloth sim multithreaded this kills any proper cloth workflow in Max let alone updating the damn thing already since 2001!!!
3 – Particle flow – forget it, Tyflow beat you guys to it and made the Beta free. there is no way you are going to catch up to that unless you buy em off!
4 – Hair? Don’t bother to waste your time, Ornatrix beat you to it already. Focus on priorities first!
5 – Granular solver: we got Tyflow and Storm coming up we can live with this by the time if anything gets implemented natively, again priorities don’t bother here.
Modeling and UVs:
1 – Incorporate Mudbox already!
2 – Maybe Make UV unwrap faster and better. It is still ancient and slow!
3 – Modeling over all is still OKAY but look at some of Houdini’s new modeling features they are surpassing Max in areas!
What else? …. nothing much really. Lets start fixing things that can’t be achieved via superior plugins already available for any pro user and then ONLY then we can come back and focus on the areas to implement in order to avoid purchasing plugins!
You CAN”T do BOTH at the same time knowing Autodesk’s current state of affairs (even though they have more money than ANY other 3d software company out there!) and we can’t wait for Autodesk to achieve superiority if ever over the plugins already available because we have deadlines to meet.
So we are simply asking to focus attention on those areas that really matter!
For crying out loud I have to download a dozen free scripts to do basic shit in this software, something as simple as a Timeline slider bar – See “Extended Timeline” script for MAX.
“The point about pleasing “Archviz” users is just off in my opinion. Archviz users already have everything they need and much more in Max since versions far before 2014 – coupled with Vray and a scatter tool available via forestpack pro. Done deal! what else do they need for rendering walls and a bunch of trees really?”
I’m including engineering users in the arch/viz category, and the number of people in those fields is a much larger group than the VFX-specific community. Once again, just because you personally don’t think a feature is important doesn’t mean that others — like, 100, 1,000 or 10,000 more people — depend on it daily.
The arch/viz/engineering segment of the 3ds Max community has enormous influence on the design of Max, because most of these people also use other Autodesk products — AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Revit, Inventor, Fusion 360, and non-Autodesk products, like CATIA and SolidWorks. For these users, interoperability is crucial. They want to be able to export their models to a variety of formats, import those models into Max, texture them, light them, render them, re-export them… the list goes on.
Now, my primary (personal) interest in 3ds Max historically has been for doing cool VFX shots (when I have the time to do them), but I’m also aware that the less-flashy parts of Max are the bread and butter of the program, and disdaining them ignores a crucial segment of Autodesk’s market. The reason why certain modeling features, like Chamfer, have been emphasized recently is because of the above customers specifically demanding these improvements. However, if you’re not in these industries, this emphasis may seem strange to you.
The point wasn’t that those customers aren’t important, the point is that their demands are not as major as those of us in character and VFX business, if at peak they want an import-export or a mere chamfer modifier (something us modelers have also been asking for) then compared to muscles – rigging -particles – layers – etc. there’s no comparison here. Same goes for archviz. They have their solidworks and Autocads to take care of most their business, they need to bring it into max for render and finishing touches.
No! The problem is Max got in the last 10 years no real and innovative feature! a feature artists would say wow! That changes our way to work – there is nothing! Especially for VFX! All great tools like PFlow, Cat was bought in and discontinued in development without being well integrated. I’m pretty sure MAX would be today a way better Animation and VFX tool if Autodesk wouldn’t have bought them.
Look at Tyflow there is one single guy who give us more innovation and functionality than the whole 3dsMax Team was able to do in 10 years … that’s a real shame!
Can’t get why you have no new ideas! …what about a node based crowd simulation tool(I don’t talk about arch viz toy!!!), AI supported Retopo, AI unwrapping, AI muscle sim, easy projection mapping, focus on one animation system, mocap support, a physic based AI animation assistant, PFlow 2.0, modern and easy physics simulation (fluid, fire, hair, cloth), 3D camera tracking, sculpting, GPU rendering in viewport with UI overlay, a consistent/modern/easy/fast interface, seamless VR integration for preview and modeling ect. …do something!
Just read the roadmap.
AI supported retopo is there, and has been showed at siggraph.
AI unwrap is on the roadmap.
Improvements on animation is on the roadmap and they show Something during siggraph, improvements affecting populate, biped, cat and bones.
Fluids based on bifrost is already in max!Smoke and fire coming later.
Gpu rendering on viewport with UI overlay, its inside 3dsmax Since some time already!
We can always ask for more,… sure!
The strangest thing to me about these complaints is if Max had everything being asked for (equivalents to tyFlow, Ornatrix, Phoenix FD, etc), there’d be no need for these developers to innovate and challenge Autodesk and other DCC devs to reach out and partner with these plugin developers and innovate externally. TyFlow didn’t come along because of Max’s lack of options for particle sim. Look at Thinking Particles! That’s been an industry standard in VFX for eons. And it’s only available for Max. This hasn’t hurt the development of Max at all, as far as I can tell. Max not creating something on par or better has allowed TP to exist and be profitable for years now. TyFlow brings another layer to that pie now, so there’s more options suddenly. It’s all a matter of perspective, I think.
And, as Eloi has pointed out (and of course anybody who takes the time to read it in the plainly pointed out link in this article) the road map has a lot of exciting things planned for the near future. People may hate Autodesk for being a corporation that wants to be profitable, but Max is doing perfectly fine.
Not really a matter of perspective, Thinking particles is overpriced and expensive and does not even include half the features Tyflow does in an intuitive artist friendly way. Which is why many never opted for it and always eyed Houdini until Tyflow came along.
Thinking particles is out of reach to many artists and pros.
I have yet to see Sigraph presentations on animation improvements I will believe it when I see it.
TP isn’t overpriced for major VFX studios, but they can afford it being that they’re major VFX studios. But, again, what’s expensive to you might not be for someone else. Perspective.
TyFlow is till in beta. How can we be sure it won’t be as expensive as TP when it finally has a major release? Many assumptions being made here. Still, I’m glad tyFlow is a thing we have access to now! Great to have some choices.
Hey, are you happy with max? Awesome! keep using max 🙂
Now the question is, are you an Autodesk user or an Autodesk customer?
As you say, perspective…
I hope that, after Tyson Ibele releases TyFlow, that all the people currently using it in free beta will buy a copy in support. (I’m going to.) Supporting the plugins industry helps the entire ecosystem in which 3ds Max lives and thrives.
“Thinking particles is overpriced and does not include half the features tyflow does”. I love tyflow, but saying that its clear you have no idea of what tp does.
Pat, please see my comments above, and Eloi’s below.
Is it true that perpetual licenses will no longer be activated after 3 years?
I have a max 2018 license that I depend on. What am I supposed to do in 2021?
you’re screwed.
Buy Max indie for $250/year 🙂 I know that’s not a great answer for people who want to keep a perpetual license forever, but if you are full-stop on paying for 3D software, Blender is a great alternative! And I say that because nearly all 3D software companies are moving toward subscription-only now and are starting to EOL older versions (C4D is doing the same, not sure about all other software companies though!).
And, some people might bring up that Max indie isn’t available in all regions, yet. I do think that’s a foolish move on Autodesk’s part. I do hope they change that ASAP. $250/year for a full version of Max is a great deal. They’d be swimming in subs if they made that available worldwide, in my opinion!
I was always on subscription, so would have no problem with paying for Max indie, if it did not mean handing in my perpetual license. I want to continue using Max and all the plugins I’ve been using over the years. Blender is great, and I’d like to use that alongside Max. I don’t need free software, just something I can afford, as a freelance generalist.
Max indie at that price seems OK, but I’m not sure if it is going ahead as something we could rely on. Seems a bit risky, though.
You can simply buy a new, additional seat using the 250$/Indy price scheme and still keep your perpetual. At least this has been stated by some autodesk personell ( not marketing though, so i dont know what they would say. … ) So don’t mention this too often and too loudly, or the sales management might come to ideas to prevent this… 🙂
Still the issue remains not selling the indie option in europe , which is – to but it bluntly – idiotic…
As you already stated $250/year if you are in one of the selected countries and the other important thing is that there is no guarantee that the next year you will be ablle to access Max indie, by default it will automatically renew to standard 3ds max pricing, not indie pricing.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this…
Well, Juan is actually incorrect about the automatic renewal at full price. They made it automatic so that it does not renew at full price, or renew at all. It’ll be up to you at that stage as to what you want to do. Even if it’s just one year, $250 is killer.
This is info I received directly from a Max engineer/rep 🙂 If you have any doubt about that, I’d just email them about it.
I don’t know all the business details of why 3ds Max Indie and Maya Indie are currently restricted to the Americas, but I love the Indie concept for independent contractors. It makes Max accessible to almost everyone and (ideally) renders the ongoing issues over Max subscriptions moot for the most price-sensitive customers. I hope we can continue and expand this, because this is a win-win, IMO.
It’s a solution, but for US, who are in EU?
How can we do…
I think there’s a misconception with perpetual licenses being “cancelled” vs. no longer being activated. If you keep your perpetual license working on the same machine, it should continue working. However, I don’t know how long multiple activations of an older license (on new machines) will continue.
I don’t think a perpetual license was meant to be tied to a certain PC. And if you think about it… what if my PC breaks and there’s no way around buying a new one? I’m still on maintenance but seeing how this loophole is getting played now I can’t help but feel screwed… by a company I’ve been loyal to, contributed to as a beta tester, helped as a vivid community member (years ago when forums were a thing) etc.
I sort of understand why Autodesk employees choose to close their eyes on problematic or downright fraudulent behavior when it comes to customer relations but it doesn’t help the negative aura of Autodesk if this is all they have to say about it.
jon, you are well aware what the realities of working on computers are.
i for one had to reinstall my whole system twice just due to windows updates screwing things up, even after disabling them.
also technology progresses fast or often enough dies, and buying a new gpu card or any component would invalidate the activation and make the permanent license we bought and paid good money for maintaning null and void.
your “proposed solution” is to keep a configuration intact, preferably offline (because windows) in order to use that single piece of software, and just hope nothing ever happens to it. and you have the mendacity to say that with a straight face.
for people not keeping track – autodesk explicitly stated they wont be activating versions older than 3 years, no ifs and buts. read about it people:
http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/06/autodesk-to-stop-issuing-activation-codes-for-older-software/
there is some vagueness about the roll-out of the scheme, mostly just autodesk citing arbitrary lifecycle nonsense they came up with to justify this crap.
i am not sure if you are feigning naiveté or take us for fools.
either way, shame on you man.
misconceptions smfh, the nerve…
Technomancer, nowhere did I say that keeping your current license on the same machine was the “solution.” I just stated that as a fact, and elsewhere, I said that (as has been explained to me) offering unlimited activations for X number of copies of software for X number of years is a far more complex (and expensive) technical challenge than you (or I) may think. That’s a fact as well, whether we agree with it or not.
jon that is why i put “proposed solution” in quotes. whatever you meant under it, it is not at all a viable scenario and infact is simply a straw man argument. no one ever heard anyone say that they feared 3ds max software will not work all of the sudden, that is ridiculous. you were correcting non-existing “misconseptions”.
to you second point:
in your post above the thread you cite record breaking profits, autodesk is killin it. profits better then expected! yay!
then you have the cojones to turn around say that activating our perpetual licenses we have payed thousands if not tens of thousands, is too expensive or inconvenient for a billion dollar company.(!!!)
that, my friend, is beyond disgusting, and again – shame on you. your double think in defending your corporate employer is straight up dystopian.
we are not talking about some legacy OS that needs to be supported 20 years from now.
same windows, same software version, no activation anymore.
even if we should take autodesk “reasons” at face value or as a “fact” as you laughably call it, it is a cost of doing business to provide activation for a system that autodesk put in the first place or find an alternative solution. we did not ask for the licensing system that is in place, you put it in there and should bear the cost of maintaining it.
or how about removing the activation on these “obsolete” versions? no?
but the truth is just so laughably simple and transparent: older licenses wont be activated as yet another effort to force users towards you rental scheme.
dont get it twisted, i dont give fuk about your 3ds max, its features or the roadmaps. i simply want to keep using plugins such as growfx, fumefx, phoenix and others that i was forced to buy in the first place because of the stagnant development.
with adobe, for all its faults, i can still use my cs6 bundle. autodesk is straight up criminal. and you know what, i wont let it go. i will call you on your BS anytime of the day.
Keep in mind that the “Indi” license is a trial concept that may or may not be continued after a year.
Improvements in shares is not equal to improvements for users LOL
Showing this is like insulting users IMHO, it’s like “David what you said is true… but look… our shares are growing so no need to do any more effort…”
Just saying LOL
Anyone with an Indie License here? They forgot about the poor freelancers in europe 😢
Exactly – this is essentially the deciding factor regarding 3ds Max’s future for me…
For me too!
Same here. Next year is likely make or break time for my future with Max.. considering my perpetual will soon have a limited life – soon to be bound to my hardware.
I have been away from 3dsmax now for about 5 1/2 years now, and occasionally check in here to see what the news is. And yep, looks like some people who hate 3ds max still obsessively still hang out to complain every time a new release comes out. Still gnawing at their old bones years in a year out. My recommendation is to go write your own software, and start your own company.
My Maintenance has just been renewed, I don’t have to pay for it but it looks like it’s the last time. Next year I’ll have to pay for it myself (if I can still renew it) I probably won’t. I like the software it does everything I need it too but it’s just too expensive. I don’t like rental software at all but at least Adobe got it about right giving you a lot for a reasonable price.
The comments about the profits and share price are just insulting. Pointing out how rich you are by fleecing me does not sit well.
that infact triggered me to comment in the first place.
I did not post Autodesk’s earnings to offend anyone, and I apologize for doing this. Won’t happen again.
The only reason I posted that was because no matter how many times it’s said, 3ds Max isn’t going away. [It’s not Softimage, which simply didn’t have the sales numbers to continue — whether at Microsoft, Avid or Autodesk.] Max is successful, has a very large and long-term installed base across a wide variety of industries, and the developers and product team want constructive feedback on how to improve it.
If you want your most-desired feature to be given top priority, please nominate it and drum up votes for it. The responses Autodesk gets from customers absolutely determine what gets priority. https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-ideas/idb-p/164
If Max is crashing for you, submit your CERs, with your email address, so the developers can see the trends and fix the most egregious defects. (Yes, the CERs go into a database that all the QA, tech support, development and product teams can look at immediately, and we pinpoint the exact module where the crash occurred.)
If you have a specific technical support issue, please create a support case and we’ll do our best to help you. If it leads to a defect, I’m happy to escalate it.
And if you feel that Autodesk isn’t listening to your concerns, send me your comments and I will forward them to upper management — uncensored, verbatim, exactly as you wrote them. That’s one thing that I can promise.
👍
But Jon, I think you have not understood the “max is going away” thing as it has been said.
It’s not because Autodesk will crash or will terminate max, Maya has more odds of being terminated than Max, Autodesk is and will be a company for many years, for many reasons, even with their lack of ethics.
It’s because Max and Maya are loosing users, well, not loosing users, bleeding users, and that’s not going to stop, the time to stop the bleed has passed, max and maya won’t fade out suddenly and they will stay for many many years, but it’s not anymore the “go-to” app for the majority of people, there are many alternatives, and many of them with a way better and cleaner image about the respect to their users, and I’m not talking about Blender here, Houdini is a perfect example of this.
You want numbers? Sorry I don’t have numbers, I have my own experience, yours will difeer, of course, you ARE Autodesk right now,but right now my experience is as it is, studios reaching me and others to teach them how to use Blender in their pipelines, small businesses in arch/viz (yes, where max is the king of the hill) wanting to migrate from max to Blender, animation studios wanting to eliminate Maya and Max from the equation, and go to Blender because it fills their needs and they can even modify it to adapt it to their pipelines in a much better way than max or maya.
Of course I mention Blender because it is where I am and is the reason why they approach me, but not everyone is going away from Autodesk to Blender, they are going to many places, but the main concern is to go away from Autodesk.
Do you agree with this?:
Do you agree with the newly surprise decision of not activating PERPETUAL licenses suddenly anymore after some years? (the word PERPETUAL means what it means, no interpretation can be done of that word…)
Sorry but the “technical” explanation is non sense, and you know it, there are many other tech solutions to the problem, that’s mocking users, my license is perpetual, you have no right to avoid my activation because law protects me and what you are doing is looking for a way of forcing perpetual license holders into your rental business.
But the thing is, do you agree with this behaviour?
Are you going to justify it telling me “that should be settled in court” or something similar?
Or do you see an abusive pattern here?
What about the “Softimage is not going to dissappear” thing?
Where is softimage?
Why Autodesk not improve Max up to the level of Maya for animation if they already have Maya?
Do you think is correct and ethical to answer a client “if you don’t like what it’s in max and you want more, why don’t you purchase also Maya”?
When we all know Max and Maya are both technically capable of doing the same thing if you develop it without too much effort.
You really don’t see a pattern here?
When you say you will pass the words of the people to the superior management, what does this means? you will send their words to them, yes, but what are they going to do with these words?
What if you tell them “reinstate the perpetual licenses together with rental”, what will they tell you?
Can you confirm or deny that one of the key plans of Autodesk is to have software that run in the cloud without the user installing anything in their local computer?
Finally, can you disclose how many developers are currently actively working in max core tools? please ignore Solid Angle, Bifrost or other satellite teams, since those are different “apps”, we are talking here about how many people is improving the chamfer modifier and solving 70 bugs per quarter.
When someone says the things you say, I know you have good will, but you are no in control of the company, and I can only see two possible behaviours here:
– Justify company behaviour because you bought the idea of “rental is better for everyone”, something that is non sense… why do I know? because it’s not good for us and many others like us, medium/small companies (or even big ones that won’t accept the risk you want to put into them), so that makes it not good for everyone, is passing the risk of lack of evolution and slow development over to us instead of Autodesk taking the financial hit because people don’t see an actual reason to upgrade their licenses.
– Recognize what Autodesk is doing, the bad practices and the lack of ethics, the seek of profit for profit without caring at all about their customers.
But I doubt you do the last one for obvious reasons.
As others said here, the problem is not with the software, max is great, maya is great and they both could be better than what they are today, the problem it’s with Autodesk.
Juang3d,
In the post above, you asked me 16 separate questions. I can’t answer every single one of them, but I’ll try to hit the high points.
1. I understand perfectly the “Max is going away!” comments; that rumor has been circulating for years, and it keeps recurring. I can talk about Max being successful, having seen the sales figures, but this rumor persists no matter what I or anyone else says. In this very thread, someone posted another “I guess Autodesk is letting Max die!” comment. And that leads me to this:
2. Softimage was EOLed because it didn’t sell enough copies to justify its development costs. Autodesk bought Softimage from Avid in 2008, and kept it going for another 6 years.
3. You posted a quote: “Non-maintenance perceptual-license customers are “not our customers” because they don’t give us money anymore… Small customers are most unhappy with subscriptions: ”If you don’t see value in subscription, you should probably find another software solution.” Where are you getting this from? [Edited: these quotes are partial and taken out of context, as others have pointed out.]
4. In an ideal world, I believe (personally) that a perpetual license should allow you to reinstall your software when you want, if you move it to a new machine, forever. However, even with previous Max perpetual licenses, you couldn’t just keep installing the same serial number copy of Max over and over on different machines and having them be activated automatically. After X number of activations, a human being with access to a license server somewhere had to look at the customer’s history, hear his/her explanation and then authorize the new activation. The issue becomes, how long does a company keep doing this? How do you handle customers wanting to get automatic authorizations of a 5- or 10-year-old piece of software, especially if he/she’s actually installing it on a dozen machines? How do you handle (potentially) millions of customers with different versions of 150 different Autodesk software packages released over X number of years, in perpetuity? Is there a point at which you have to draw the line because you can no longer reliably authorize all these packages all the time? (Remember, it’s not just Max or Maya we’re talking about here — decisions made on behalf of a particular piece of Autodesk software licensing may have to apply to all the other products.) As has been explained to me: not re-activating (moved/reinstalled) perpetual licenses beyond a certain point does become a technical/server/personnel issue, not some scheme to force people to upgrade. As to whether or not I agree with this, well… that’s complicated. I see both sides of the issue, and it’s actually harder to do this than you or I think. It’s not a straight-up “yes” or “no.”
5. Also re: perpetual activations. There’s the tech support side of things: if people are running versions of software that are 5- to 10+ years old, and contact us for technical support, in many cases, the issue that they’re facing was fixed in a later version. We either have to figure out a workaround for them (if possible) or tell them that their best bet to fix that issue is to upgrade. You always have to improve software, update your compilers and make things work differently (and hopefully better) that you did 5, or 10, or 20 years ago. Otherwise, you’d be updating R1 of XYZ Software forever, when the software and hardware ecosystem that program lives in has evolved way beyond what it was when that R1 was originally created. (True story: I once had a customer contact me asking the best way for him to optimize a “newly-built” Windows XP PC to run his copy of 3ds Max R3… which dated from 1999. I spent 20 minutes on the phone with him, amazed that he’d even gotten it to work but chatting happily about the CG world way back when R3 was out, and dinosaurs walked the Earth.)
6. “When you say you will pass the words of the people to the superior management, what does this means?” It means exactly what it says — I pass along important customer comments, good and bad, to upper management and act as an advocate for changing things that I agree with our customers on. And when changes do happen, I’m happy, but I cannot (and wouldn’t) take sole credit for it. I want to make 3ds Max a better piece of software, and so does everyone else I know on the Max team.
7. “Can you confirm or deny that one of the key plans of Autodesk is to have software that run in the cloud without the user installing anything in their local computer?” I can do neither, because I don’t know of any specific, concrete plans to do this. If I knew more about this, then I could comment better. But I don’t — it’s really that simple.
8. “How many developers are working on Max?” I don’t know the exact figure right now (people are shuffled around to different teams sometimes, and the number fluctuates). I also don’t know if I can state that figure publicly, but I can ask.
Final thoughts: liking 3ds Max and working for Autodesk doesn’t automatically mean that I consider any other competing software “the enemy,” that I hate it, or that I want it to fail. Overall, I think competition is good, but not all 3D apps are created equal, or serve the same markets. Sometimes, doing direct head-to-head comparisons between programs just falls apart. A Ferrari and a Ford pickup are both vehicles. One’s good at driving fast; the other is good at hauling stuff. But using a Ferrari to haul lumber or a Ford pickup to run the Daytona 500 isn’t the best use of either vehicle. Bottom line is, use what suits you best, and please work with the manufacturer to help make it better.
I hope this information helps.
First off, I want to say thank you Jon for taking your time in here.
I’m one of those that did leave Max behind after being a dedicated user for 14-15 years.
I work both freelance and in a small animation team, mostly working with massive CAD models, making marketing animations. My background is in character animation, advertisement (product viz), and arch viz. I do know Max pretty much in and out, doing both small and larger scale projects from A to Z across the whole pipeline.
I am not going to try to speak for anyone else, but what drove me away was a mix of performance getting worse and worse, the features that were implemented, often were in a half way, and then usually they were left that way, with no further development. IMHO, a DCC package needs updates across the board more or less annually to stay up to date in todays market. It made me both sad and angry to see competing software packages come from nowhere, with probably minimal budgets, and pass Max left and right with features and functionality. Maybe not in all areas, but it did definitively seem like Max was just chilling in the water, staying afloat. A very typical the turtle and the rabbit story.
Slate editor, CAT, pflow (besides adding on the BOX features), X-Ref system, State Sets etc. Are all critical, core areas that are either half functional or in dire need of a massive performance overhaul. Then Ty-Flow comes like a slap in the face – developed by one guy. And AD can’t come up with anything like this? Another major issue that drove me away was the sluggish UI performance that just deteriorated with a heavy scene. Watching icons being slowly redrawn one by one with every mouse click, having minutes with white screens because you try to rotate the perspective view etc. was just a total killer. I know much has been done in this area since though – so maybe (hopefully!) it’s better now. All in all, I like Max. I like competition too, and wish Max all the best. I write here because I care. But if the software is in the top 10 AD product range, sales are going great, stocks are up – then I think the customers deserve a bigger dev team focusing a few more areas at once for those $200/per month. The same price I can pay per YEAR for the competing software I use now to do the same CAD based animation projects.. And I do them better because I have a larger toolset available – no plugins required!
Hi Trono — your points are well-taken, and I agree about the feeling of Max “treading water” during a 10-year-long period. Regardless of the past, the current Max team is working hard to make the software better today and to keep it moving forward.
Thats a long list of questions Juan.
During Siggraph they showcase some new improvements (important ones!) in animation… yes in max. They showcase running examples, its on the roadmap. Its coming.
Why you should ignore people working on “arnold” or “bifrost”? to quantify the people working in 3dsmax? Is not Arnold the main renderer in 3dsmax by default? We should ignore the people working on cycles? Is not Arnold part of the 3dsmax package? Same for Bifrost, will not be bifrost an important part of 3dsmax? We dont have fluids in 3dsmax totally based on Bifrost?
Eloi: Because they don’t belong to max team, they belong to Bifrost or Arnold team, why do you think different features of Bifrost are present in Max/Maya? Because the implementation is a different thing than the development, don’t know if the implementation is from the inside of the bifrost team of from the max team, but it’s not so much as important, in the worst case it means max has one less developer or a developer focused in something not core so, it makes no real difference.
Those people are focused in what they should be focused, Bifrost or Arnold, but those people won’t improve core features of the software, their core package is a different thing.
Anyways, yes, there are improvements coming, improvements promised 10 years ago or more are now seeing the light it seems, but as I said it’s not a software problem, but an Autodesk problem.
@Jon: the quote is from your boss, Andrew Anagnost, you can find those exact quotes in many places over the internet where the interview was reproduced. This is their general view of Autodesk.
Don’t worry, I don’t think you are a bad person because you are working in a company with that vision, but yes, that’s the vision of the company you work for, and they demonstrate this with their actions over the years.
1. I still think you don’t understand this, is not that Autodesk is going to EOL Max because of lack of users, it’s that Autodesk is not caring at all about the loss of users, Max is one of the most sold pieces of software, that’s true, but how many of those copies are inside Collections that include max, and max may be never used?
Many of our clientes own several copies of max, yet they will never use the, Max is installed and forgotten, so those Max numbers are not a real representation of state of things.
Anyways, I have to rethink that of “Autodesk don’t care”, that may not be true.
What do you think about Autodeskonline.com?
(Where a comparison between Maya and Blender for example says that Maya has more powerful sculpt tools than Blender LOL and other gold od captions I like this)
4. It’s not in an ideal world, we are talking about a legal world where the customer is protected, there are laws, at least in Europe, that protect us from that kind of behaviour. There are many many technical solutions to this, you could deliver a patch that allows activation of the software locally, even if you want you can track how many installations of the same number are active even without having to deal with activation itself, there are many solutions there IF there is good will.
No one asked about technical support, that is reasonable, what is not reasonable is the try to “disable” perpetual licenses, and Autodesk don’t have any right to do this, this has been discussed in many forums, included Autodesk ones, and Autodesk don’t give a single official word when the law is presented to them, they just stop the talk…
6. I understand that you mean this, and I also said that I truly believe that you will do it in good will, now, what the managers do with those words is a totally different story, those words are not new, and they reached the managers many times from many places, yet nothing changed, so I know the good will, I doubt the usefulness of that.
7. You can ask around, IF you can disclose such things, which I doubt, but it’s also something said by Andrew Anagnost in the past about where the cloud/subscription solution ultimate target was.
8. Ok, ask about it and see if they allow you to say it.
About the conclusion, I think there are a misinterpretation here, I mean, of course no software is the enemy, and I think many people thinks that write something along these lines, it’s not the case really.
As I said this is not a matter of software, it’s a matter of a company that decided first to acquire nearly all competition they could, to later, “kill” many of their historical customers just because they could, not paying attention to them, ignoring them, and ultimately taking them by fools, which is what they did with the several mails I received to turn out my perpetual licenses for a 3 year rental, are you kidding me? I would have been forced to be on rental now, as I said it’s not a problem for us, but I know people that could have been in that situation.
Also they took us for fools when they said “rental was good and it was not going to be more expensive” while they were raising prices, and no, I don’t have a document where this is said because it was said to me on the phone by an Autodesk representative trying to deny the cost raise to me.
They took us for fools when they said it would benefit development pace.
They took us for fools when they said many things, but specially they took us for fools because they silently ignored a fact, as soon as a pipeline relies on rental software it does not matter if development is fast or slow, that pipeline cannot easily change to another software, so no need for real evolution.
Many studios were aware but thought it was not going to be a problem, some studios see that as a problem now, and they want out, it will take years.
I said it already, no problem with Max or Maya, they are both greate pieces of software and it’s a profound pity they they are managed as they are.
On the other side, that opened the eyes to many people that discovered other software, Blender being one, but not the only one, C4D or Houdini are also there (but C4D users are also angry now for the plausible future of C4D being only rental, like what happened to substance, they theoretically nothing was to change until Adobe took over and removed perpetual LOL, I really laugh nowadays about promises made by CEO’s that sold the company to a “big” one, there is good will, no real power to do anything related to what they promise.
If you buy a car, and it comes with a bike rack and advance bose sound system, you dont have to take it into account if it comes in to the package?
Autodeskonline.com,,,, I guess you know this is not autodesk, right? You see the page, I can create tomorrow blenderonline.com and write whatever I want there.
@Eloi
I think he’s asking about how many full-time developers in the Max team who are not focusing on schwarzenegger & beefroast development.
Exactly, the core devs of the max team, the ones that are in charge of the chamfer modifier and the 70 bugfix per quarter
And the ones working on bifrost integration in max, and the ones working on Arnold integration in max. And the ones revamping the core system in max, so Deforming modifiers are 20X faster than in blender or 5X faster than in Houdini. And the ones working on the UI, And the ones working on animation improvements, the ones working on integrating OSL, the ones working in faster viewports, the ones working with better integration with CAD programs, or sketchup, the ones working on a new render to texture, the ones working on python3, the ones working on making everything accessible to maxscript, the others working on USD,…. And yes, the ones working in bug fixes, where max for the last 3 versions has gain a lot of stability, and the ones working on Chamfer modifier, that I dont have to use much, but people in need of it, they love it. They are… quite a lot.
I asked for what I asked, if there is a dev working in the core team implementing Bifrost, I said that it should be counted, but it won’t actually affect general features.
Anyways, I asked this because I think it’s something that has been brought many times and has been asked many times, but no answer is given.
You say they are quite a lot, but there is no mention of the actual team, and you know that “quite a lot” are not “quite a lot” 🙂
The ones working for Arnold are working for arnold, there may be one person in charge of the arnold integration for max, arnold is a different software.
The same goes to Bifrost, a different software, the Bifrost team won’t improve CAT, they will design a way to do rigging with Bifrost, and someone in the max team will “link” Bifrost to max, but Birfost is a different software.
So what I’m asking is how many people are in the core dev team of max, because usually those working in bug hunting seems to hunt 70 bugs per quarter, which is quite a low number for any software, but this may be reasonable if the team is split between fixing bugs and development.
This is not something new, I want to understand the development pace per quarter, if we take into account all the history in the software we could start talking about the ones that made the development of the actual bone system, dated from Max 4.
Yes, this is the core team, these are the ones I’m asking about.
Why do I ask about the core team?, apart of the reason I gave upwards, because max should have a pretty big core development team to reflect the theoretically big income it generates, and the development pace of max (not bifrost, not arnold) don’t seem to be on pair with those numbers, in other words, the investment users make in max don’t seem to have a proper return, but that’s just a conjecture until we know the amount of main developers in the max team.
I personally know the number, I personally don’t have the right to disclose it, that’s why I asked Jon, he may have the right to do so.
Anyways, I don’t want to derive the conversation from the main talk, as I said, I still think max is a great piece of software, Maya is also a greate piece of software, the main point here is not the software itself, is the company owning the software.
Hey, and I gave you the link for the
website ownership, just so you know there is no conspiracy theory, I wish it was that way, I think it’s a very disgusting way of doing marketing.
Juang3D, http://www.autodeskonline.com is an Autodesk Partner — a reseller, which creates its own content for that page. Not Autodesk itself.
Don’t feed the trolls with logic and facts Eloi! They hate that stuff!
Matt, as far as I know I have not insulted you, I’m not a troll, I’m having an educated conversation making questions that could be interesting if they were answered.
Eloi and I know each other, personally, I respect him a lot, in fact more than A LOT, I admire him, his work and his profesionalism, and while we may have different opinions on some things, and we can have educated arguments, I think he knows that I’m not a troll.
If you don’t like what you read, please disagree, but avoid insults, and yes, I see “troll” as an insult.
I may question the development pace of max, but that’s a conversation that I will rather abandon after Eloi’s answer, at the beggining I said that I wanted to leave aside the features presented here, the conversation is not about max or the features, I won’t argue about that anymore, if max users are happy with the development pace and the features presented, or future features, why should we question that? the past is the past, I see now the max evolution from the other side of the fence, and I follow Bifrost evolution with a lot of curiosity, because I know there is a passionate team behind it.
The main topic I wanted to tackle is Autodesk, how Autodesk treats the users, how is their behaviour with their customers (because not all the Autodesk users are Autodesk customers, I have been an Autodesk customer and user for many years, now I’m neither of those, but I have friends and clients that are, both or one of the two).
And the conversation started because Jon A. Bell, without any bad will, answered to a user complain with the autodesk shares result, and it felt like an insult, he already answered it, apologized if it was interpreted that way, and after that the conversation continued, nothing more, nothing less.
Eloi you’re still going with “deforming geometry is faster than in houdini”, I wonder what kind of tests you did. I’m pretty sure you don’t know houdini very well and your tests are not very accurate. I’m telling you so because vex is very fast, c++ speed, and scales very well. Also what you call deformers is a 3ds concept, in houdini you have vex, where you can write your own deformers and do much more than just deform.
Eloi, in fact theoretically is not Autodesk, but check who is the domain owner 🙂
http://whois.domaintools.com/autodeskonline.com
@Juang3d there’s no doubt that website belong to Autodesk company.
@Eloi clearly you’re trying hard to present Autodesk as a customer caring company and I get that because I assume you’re one of their employees, but as many former and current customers know that the reality is completely different from that. do you know why so many artists and studios both small and big like Ubisoft switching to Blender? it is because they got tired of Autodesk, I just wanna say that Blender Foundation actually gives a fu*k about the users and community no matter if you’re a single poor artist or big AAA studio your voice is taken into account and will shape the future of the software. not only that, it’s not rental or 200$ month no hell no it’s 100% FREE forever.
you know that free software like Blender is BIG and giving Autodesk hard times when you make a video and try to show how bad it is in pushing some verts compared to competing software 🙂 since Blender gets hundreds of bug fixes/improvements and many new features in about every three months, I’m confident that it’ll outperform the competition sooner than later.
FYI; http://www.autodeskonline.com is owned by an Autodesk Authorized Partner — a reseller.
I’m always appalled by the sheer amount of misinformation Juan brings to the conversation.
Man, Bifrost is not Max core team? Guess what? They are not Maya core team as well, just as Arnold, but both are developing WITH Max and Maya in mind. There’s feature difference (for the time being) between Bifrost in Max and Maya simply because the bridges are built differently, and for it to work properly on both platforms, translating and understand both particularities is a daunting task. After all, Max didn’t get that 20x performance improvement over Blender over night – same with BiFrost.
TL:DR – They will have feature parity. It’s on the roadmap, and so far they have delivered what was written there.
About team size, there are photos on the number of the “core” team size. And it’s the largest Max team since… ever? You try to “hint” it’s a small team, but the fact is you have no idea (no offense intended). Why don’t you join the Beta a see for yourself? If you do, make a presentation message there so other betas and devs can talk to you 🙂
And, they continue to hire more and more people to join the Max team. That is direct investment of the customer money into more development power. And that seems pretty good to me.
Oh, and thanks John Bell, for the uber patience and sincere honesty trying to give answers here. Stating that ADSK has been still growing and surpassing expectations was a direct respond to the assumption (many gave here) that Max (ADSK) was going into oblivion – it was NOT an attack nor an insult to any customer (I’m a customer, and you did not offend me at all).
Saying that it is insulting is just a red herring to put you on a defensive position while you were giving just cold, hard facts to show no one is “going to oblivion”, nothing more, nothing less. And equating that growth to “how much have we squeezed our user base and how much are the gamblers willing to bet on us” is a serious misunderstand on how a business work, or how a public traded company behaves. ADSK is not a startup selling a new hip product – it’s decades old, used on several critical tasks around the globe, providing solutions that literally touch almost every industry.
Yes Arnold ist the default renderer. But I ask why? With Mental Ray we get 999 render node licenses. With Arnold, not a single one. I’m still annoyed.
Mental ray was not owned by Autodesk. Nvidia licensed it and the licensing agreement changed.
+1
3ds Max is an amazing software, but the updates have become boring, like Modo.
What is nice about Blender is the transparency, you know how many people are working on it so you have quite a good vision on the future, it is very very bright.
3ds max you don’t know, a lot of people have been fired, this we know.
Then they bought Arnold, ok, but how many developpers are actually working on new or old features ? 3 ? 4 ? 5 ?
Competition is very awake, Houdini, Blender, and Adobe is probably planning something, they did buy Substance after all, they licensed Mixamo rigging to C4D etc..
And Autodesk’s boss just said he is a “simulation” guy not a “graphics” guy…
Maybe they’re just letting it die slowly, they know it’s over, they just milk it until the very end.
It is sad, I do love the sofware, my brain likes how it functions.
But then my brain learns to like C4D too, and Blender.
Adapt or die…
Just get me what`s laid out in the current roadmap and then some more things of what i heard, and it will be fine.
Alberto, I’d love to know where you read that “Autodesk’s boss just said he’s a simulation guy, not a graphics guy.” Can you please direct me to that quote?
And again, 3ds Max is in the Top 10 of Autodesk’s 150 products. It’s not “dying slowly,” and it’s being improved with every update to address its user base. Some of those improvements may not be useful to you, but some of them are exactly what various customers have demanded. As I’ve said before, the wide variety of 3ds Max customers make it difficult to please everyone with every feature update.
Andrew Aganost (sorry if this not the right spelling) and Carl Bass had an exchange on twitter last week…
It is online, it is public.
Nothing alarming but to me it says a lot.
Modo might be boring, but it’s a very complete software if you do modelling and rendering. Blender only matches if you buy plugins (remember another software that does this)?
And BOUM Adobe just bought Medium !
The industry is moving fast.
Of course it’s “just” VR, but this is modeling tech.
So now they have modeling and the best painting/texturing…
What they need now is rendering.
What are your bets ?
I bet on VRAY…
maxon, and integrate vr into cinema. redishift comes bundled 😀
Blender users inferiority complex playground:D
BTW check that out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VmTBCFZE6Q&t=429s
ahhahhahahaaa:D
Impossible! Blender is perfect … Eloi is definitely lying.
There is a thing that I’ve always said, the Undo in Blender is horrible, it’s being worked on as we speak, you can even follow the code they are modifying to improve it if you want.
But you know what… in Blender you won’t work with those kind of meshes in edit mode at all, you work with the sculpt tools, those are much faster for working with that amount of polygons, and anyways… do you think is useful to use edit poly on those meshes? WHY?!
I still have to watch that full video from Eloi, but many people sent it to me bringing to my attention the soft selection usage he does, because they think what he does is not the correct way of using it on Blender or something like that, I’ll watch it ASAP.
And yes, now I saw the video, and he mention the sculpt mode, for working with that kind of hi-poly meshes you use sculpt mode, not edit mode, regarding the soft selection I still have to re-check what he said, because I’m not sure about the problem he sees, probably that it’s not topology binded, or selection binded, but brush binded, it’s a different concept, but you can limit the topology distance or if it affects the same mesh or the connected mesh only and such things.
It
s alright Juang ... the main point is, Blender still have problems. It isnt a perfect software, but it gets a pass because its free.I guess theres software for all tastes so it would be nice to not fight about it.
Max users have been shafted so much over the year I better they can’t sit down let alone use their revamped chamfer tool. Houdini 18…now there is an update worth talking about.
I few months ago would be interested in this kind of news. But meanwhile we switched to blender and I don´t care anymore. Blender does more features updates every 3 months than Autodesk in years. And that for free. And if you notice a bug, our software development team can fix it by our self, no waiting on “bug fixes” years later anymore 🙂
If you don’t care why are you here trolling Max news comments? Haha. Jealous much? Max gets bug fixes every few months. Your point is moot.
Bug fixes every few month ? You are funny ! We spend hours over years to send our studio bug reports to autodesk and still today most is unfixed. Sorry, NOT EVEN CLOSE to Blender, sometimes you got a new build hours later.
..just to find out something else was broken in the fixing process? No, thanks. 3dsmax users can`t handle daily builds.
Matt, please stop insulting me, I have not insulted you.
I already explained how the conversation started, you can read it in a previous post.
Don’t take what I say personally, Juan! I’m just seeing all the Blender trolls coming out of the woodwork every time an article about a Max update comes out. Why say anything about Max/Autodesk at all if you have no personal investment in them and their software? You’re not converting anybody with long rants and preaching. Just my two cents! 🙂
Personally when I see someone or company doing bad behavior, I don’t need to be personally invested in him to say you’re on the wrong direction, I’ll definitely try to show him how bad his behavior is.
If that’s your mission, what do you hope to accomplish by doing that? Your personal feelings aren’t enough evidence that a company is actually going in the “wrong direction” or that their behavior is “bad.” These are straw-man arguments. Nothing more, nothing less. And it’s perfectly fine that you feel that way and choose to no longer support Autodesk, and by extension 3ds Max, with your money. But that’s a personal choice. Autodesk hasn’t done anything legitimately wrong from a legal standpoint. They’re within their rights to run their business as they please. You may not like it at all and feel they’re morally wrong for doing what they do, but that does not make it so. There’s simply no evidence to support your claims. And from the interactions I, and many other 3ds Max users, have had with Autodesk reps recently suggests to me that they’re very serious about giving us quality software that allows me to get the most out of what I use, which is what I care about the most.
At the end of the day, I’d rather celebrate the advancements all our preferred 3D software packages are making together! After all, we’re all part of such an exciting industry! We should be working together, not against each other! All this competition is advancing things so much faster now, it’s wonderful!
@Matt
I agree with some of what you said, but…
Sorry my English is not very good, but I think I’m not talking about feelings, I’m talking about behavior (actions made by people) specifically those actions that effected me(former customer) and many others in bad ways, and since you mentioned feelings, I always felt hostage and ignored by Autodesk when I was a paying customer, I feel much better now in my new home (Blender).
Allow me to answer that by asking you what do you think about companies who put customers satisfaction & needs at their lowest priorities and getting their money at highest? when customers ask a multi-billion company to deliver more and quicker fixes/improvements, features they need to make their lives easier but that company simply don’t care much and can’t even deliver half of what free software can?
Couldn’t agree more, only if you exclude Autodesk, they’re not helping a lot in advancing things 🙂
@Dan we may not agree on everything, but I am glad we can find some common ground as 3D artists 🙂
I went to an Autodesk event recently and saw some really impressive things not made public yet that aren’t part of the roadmap. In time maybe those things will become reality and you might change your mind, but time will tell! Until then, I have to disagree with you that they’re not innovating 🙂
And of course I think it’s very important that these companies put customer priorities first. Obviously we all have had very different experiences dealing with Autodesk. For whatever reason, all my experiences have been positive and I see them listening to customers and asking us users how to improve Max, which I greatly appreciate. It’s taken too long for them to really listen, but now they are and doing a good job of it. So that’s my perspective.
I’m not an Autodesk employee or apologist, I just haven’t seen them do things that warrant such outrage against them. I can understand people being upset about their pricing but they’re also just following suit with most other software companies now. I get the motive: always stay up to date and get the latest and greatest with a subscription. It doesn’t, and won’t, work for everybody. I imagine that’s a risk they were willing to take to the detriment of some customers. I do think that’s unfortunate.
Development may be slow at times on some updates/fixes, but Blender has just now, with 2.8, finally felt like a really viable alternative to all the rest of the existing DCC packages out there. And it’s been around since 2002! Better late than never though, right? 🙂
In the meantime, I’m glad we can co-exist using whatever software we want my friend!
So you think Autodesk is doing things right, and their CEO comments are fine?
Are you sure? do you want to represent autodesk when they try to invalidate perpetual licenses? you know that’s illegal, at least in Europe, and as far as I know, also in the US, and they don’t clearly answer when the law are shown to them.
As long as they honor the contract acquired, as long as they do things in “good faith”, you know a judge can invalidate any change done pruposedly just so the client is not conscious of the change and the change the client, right?
The law?
And what about Autodeskonline.com, do you think there is no evidence of autodesk owning that domain?
http://whois.domaintools.com/autodeskonline.com
Are you ok with that kind of marketing movement or do you think that’s miss-driving the potential users?
What Autodesk reps exactly?
The same reps that decided to go rental only because it was more beneficial to them in the short and the long run saying that it was not going to be more expensive when at the same time they were doubling the per-artist cost?
No, I imagine that were their bosses, not the ones you talked with, the same that said that it was a great deal to turnover your rental license for 3 years discount int he rental licensing system.
The same than when they saw that perpetual owners were not going into the trap decided to stop activating perpetual licenses, even when they knew that was not legal.
No one is working against you, or even against 3ds Max.
You want people to work together? that’s great, why don’t you ask Autodesk to release FBX as an MIT licensed file format without having to accept their EULA to use the SDK?
Have you read the EULA in detail BTW? It’s an exiciting, rather complex, reading, but you may discover interesting things.
Why do you think all this type of conversation is focused in Autodesk news and not in SideFX news for example?
Competition is good of course, and part of that competition is caring about your customers, when you forget that, you are missing an important part of the competition, and Autodesk forgot that several years ago.
Now it seems Anagnost is shifting again, from being a “graphics” guy to being a “simulation” guy, I hope you understand that it’s not VFX type simulation, but AEC type of simulation, which is the simulation that gives them money, Maya and M&E are a minimal part of their business and if it starts going down, rest assured that it may die, in the same way Softimage died, it has been said here, Softimage died because the lack of profit and sales.
If small and medium studios stop using Autodesk software, well, they won’t doubt on cutting the lights off, they don’t care about you, nor as a customer nor as a user, no need too, even if they decide to stop any evolution, what can you do? you are on rental, you will have to pay them forever to use their software, IF you are a customer, if you are a user you simply don’t care about this. (but you should, your future may be in danger and you don’t even know it).
Of course max will stay, that’s a fact… it’s part of AEC, will you like it? that’s up to you to decide.
Hey Juan! I’ll try to include everything in this reply to cover both of your very long posts, haha 🙂
First of all, can you point me to the quote that the Autodesk CEO said about design vs simulation? I haven’t seen it in any articles on the web. If it exists I haven’t been able to find it yet. I would like to know the context of what he said before I make a judgement on it!
As far as all the legalese of their business dealings: I don’t know business law. I can only assume what they’re doing is legal. If not then I’d hope they would suffer the consequences. I do know that when they switched to sub-only, we buy our licences through a reseller who got us in on the ground-level with a deal that is quite good (roughly 70% off the full sub price) so that’s how we obtain our licences as long as we keep renewing annually. I’m in the US so I know nothing of European laws on this. But, again, it’s their product and they can make changes as they please. If that causes people to leave them for other software, then there are many alternatives out there, so that’s great for everyone that doesn’t want to give them their money! By the way, are their contracts to use their software? Or just an EULA? I don’t think we’re guaranteed anything under those circumstances. But I’m just a 3D guy, what do I know other than I want to use this software to get my work done! 🙂
As far as the autodeskonline.com site? I can’t imagine it’s anything but them owning it so that nobody else tries to squat on that domain to try to sell it back to Autodesk for a large sum of money. Anything beyond that is just a conspiracy theory at this point 🙂 If they went full cloud, I’d seriously consider jumping ship as that doesn’t sound ideal at all!
I’ll be honest, it seems with so much talk against Autodesk it really feels like a thinly veiled attempt to steer people away from the software they like to use (Max/Maya) simply because you don’t approve of Autodesk’s business practices. Whether they’re truly unethical or not is not easily proven since many other DCC software companies (Adobe, Maxon, others?) have switched to subscription. Do you still use Adobe products? Substance? Personally I want to use Quixel now! But I digress! If you think people should have the freedom to use whatever software they want…why not just celebrate the wins of Max alongside us? I’m very happy for the progress Blender has made. It’ll help spur on even more innovation within Max (and other software) and if Max Indie was a direct response to Blender, I think that’s fantastic so that it’s more affordable for everybody now! If the Blender Foundation did a 180 and decided to start charging for Blender, I imagine the apocolypse would soon be upon us, haha 🙂
I’m part of a very small (there’s 2 of us full-time) studio and we still use Max and have had positive interactions with Autodesk (really, 3ds Max dev team) reps. To me, they’re the face of the company and they’re showing very positive steps in a direction that proves they care about customers. If I thought otherwise, I would not be OK with using their products. I suffered through the dark times as well! I think people should give them a path to redemption but it doesn’t mean they/you have to give them money. You can simply look at what they’re doing now and judge for yourself if you think they’re making positive moves toward putting the customer first. In my humble opinion, they are!
In the post below this response you said you’ve been around since the Max Underground days. Me too! I just never posted anything until now. I know you used to be a Max beta tester and all that jazz. You’ve made yourself and your work very public, which opens you up to a lot of criticism, too. Comes with the territory. But I respect you and what you do my friend! Certainly, I’m glad you bring a different perspective.
Except for when you think I’m insulting you, right? 🙂 I’m not, and I hope you know that now! But sometimes our feelings will get hurt. That’s just part of this glorious thing that is freedom of speech! I don’t want to silence you. Just understand you better!
At the end of the day, I just wish we’d all come together to enjoy the progress our favorite 3D apps make instead of devolving these comment sections into flame-throwing against Autodesk, or whoever the flavor of the week to rail against is. They’re never going to do everything right. However, as long as they keep making Max better and easier for me to use, I’ll hang with them.
Well look, now I’ve written a ridiculously long post. Enjoy the read! Cheers friend! 🙂
Matt, as I already said, this is not about max features, this is about an Autodesk employee answering to the complains of a user with the raise of the Autodesk shares, do you think that’s great?
Well, there are no long rants or preaching, there is reasoning, and to actually reason things you need to explain them, and to explain them you have to speak, and some times long explanations so many corners are covered.
Have you read what I write? I try to mention Blender the less I can, I’m speaking about Autodesk.
Do you agree with Autodesk behaviour?
Regarding “not converting”, I’m ok with that, not trying to convert anyone, no need to convert anyone, if you are ok with all the Autodesk behaviour, godo for you, not good for business ethics, customer care or CSR, but good for you.
Easy, I want people to know what the Autodesk behaviour is, were and will probably be, some people care about ethical companies, about companies that work for good AND for profit, some people makes decissions based not just in the direct economical return, but also in something more, I just can’s stand watching and Autodesk employee showing the shares as an answer to a user saying that the evolution of the software is not good enough, it’s like insulting a user.
That same employee was not conscious of the words of his own CEO in many ways, like his words about their customers, or like the decission of going rental only, or like the future plan, already stated by that very same CEO, of going cloud only, and when they say cloud only they mean, CLOUD ONLY, do you like that idea?
Maybe you do, maybe it works for you, do you think it will work for everyone?
Even if you think just in yourself, that you may or may not do, think that Max or Maya wouldn’t be what they are now without all the small and medium companies, do you think Autodesk pays the bills just with the big studios?
A few thoushands licenses don’t pay the bills, and those licenses are the ones from the big studios, without small/medium studios under Autodesk hood things will start to change, they thought there was no exit from Autodesk world, they thought they were the king of the hill, well the fact is that there are alternatives, and some people take that alternative because of economical reasons, or because of performance reasons, or because security/risk reasons or because many other reasons, even because they don’t want to support a company with Autodesk’s behaviour.
In general, I wish Autodesk could change it’s behaviour, will they do that? I don’t think so.
Are you ok working with Autodesk? ok, go with it, you are free to do so, in the same way you are free to say whatever you want whenever you want, in the same way I’m free to do so.
To be clear Jon already apologized about the shares thing, he did not thought about that as an insult, he thought that it was a way to demonstrate that max was not going away, what he have not understood is that the “max going away” thing it not because Autodesk will or won’t kill max, it’s because Max and Maya are bleeding users, and that happens mainly because of their license idea and their lack of ethics.
I don’t know since when you are a cgpress visitor, I’m a visitor since way before cgpress was a thing, since maxunderground years, and I won’t stop visiting cgpress or talking here just because I don’t use max.
Why to speak here? because there was an insult coming from an Autodesk employee and I wanted to point that out.
Juand3d said – “Matt, as I already said, this is not about max features, this is about an Autodesk employee answering to the complains of a user with the raise of the Autodesk shares, do you think that’s great?”
Now you’re just, simply lying, Juan. John Bell answered to THIS comment:
“Autodesk seem to be sleepwalking to oblivion. Hope Blender can improve the CAD import side soon.”
This is far from a complaint – in a complaint you show a point that you dislike, something that is bothering you, here is just bashing (and with a good dose of misinformation). And a bit of spotlight to Blender (why not, heh?) since the bashing might not be fashionable enough.
And you deem yourself as someone fair? Misrepresenting a employee and what he said in what context? This is just disgusting – you’re doing no one a favor, but just ranting and giving your “moral high ground” over the others based on a software choice! How precious!
So much for “station your opinions”… If only they were grounded in unbiased truth and not in a deep resentment 😉 I really thought Blender guys were so happy (and busy with work!) that they would never have the time to even bother posting on threads of OTHER softwares they assure, over and over, they have left behind. Guess I’m wrong!
“3. You posted a quote: “Non-maintenance perceptual-license customers are “not our customers” because they don’t give us money anymore… Small customers are most unhappy with subscriptions: ”If you don’t see value in subscription, you should probably find another software solution.” Where are you getting this from? And no, I don’t agree with it, and am curious who said this.”
@Jon A Bell, that was Autodesk’s endboss Anagnost himself. Max is not the problem here, it’s Autodesk that ruining the party here. Alot of small companies, including myself, have parted with Autodesk for exactly this and various other reasons.
On the hand max development is slow, lack of resources and mis management in the past, resulting in a technical debt and general mess now.
On the other hand Autodesk is screwing over users big time in various ways detailed already. And no matter what golden features the max team adds it will still be in Autodesk’s dark shadow.
Almost all critism in the thread is focused on Autodesk and not on Max, that’s just the lightning rod here.
Jonathan, I want to see the original quotes from Andrew — not paraphrased versions. Can you please send me a link or point me to the exact things that he said?
Man everytime there is a new version of its the same cycle of comments. You could literally copy the comments from the older posts and no one would be able to tell the difference. Its getting tiresome guys.
Max keep delivering great releases,
when I see new Houdini, Maya or Blender versions I see they trying to catch up with Max and they market as new features things that Max had 10 or even 20 years ago,
that amaze me,
so be ready for chamfer improvements in Blender, Maya or Houdini 10 years from now.
@Xerges
You really made my day, thanks for the great joke.
lol…i hope he’s being sarcastic.
just the facts,
it’s sad that you don’t see it,
but hey, you can be all happy toying with Blender, wasting time with countless hours of caching in Houdini, or with the broken abandoned Maya,
meanwhile I can make anything 10 times faster in Max, I know because I’ve taken my time to learn all of them and see first hand how they have less tools and perform worse than Max.
You know what it’s really funny?
when you see a video of the new features of any of the programs above and they talk about adding IK, adding edge bridge, or target weld, booleans, making 3d meshes from lines, shading graph, scene explorer (or outliner), new layers…
that makes me laugh,
maybe in 10 years you’ll get nested layers, and a viewport that can manage hundreds of millions of polys, or a way to edit geometry with millions of polys.
Xerges, how is the sculpt toolset in max?
sculpt? Just use Zbrush…or even mudbox;)
Yeah, that’s the perfect reasoning, right? Just purchase another package.
Of course a third party software can be used (nothing beats Zbrush for sculpt), we could argue the same as an Autodesk rep, when a customer asks for improvements in animation: for that we have Maya, why don’t you purchase also Maya?
I’m guessing you edit your videos on Blender since it has an editor right?
Juang3d, just create a website called IHateAutodesk.com and be done with it.
You don’t understand the point Mauricio.
Of course you may use other software, but he is talking about other packages catching up max, like if max was teh one with everything, and that’s not the case LOL
He don’t enven understand that Collections in Blender are not simple Layers, like in max.
BTW if you make a request about Max not having enough evolution in animation area, are you ok with the answer of the Autodesk rep?
And for a website against autodesk, there is already one, and it keeps track of everything Autodesk kills:
https://www.cadnauseam.com/autodesk-graveyard/
BTW I don’t hate Autodesk, I hate what Autodesk is doing, if tomorrow they change their route, I would probably never come back to work with them, but I would applaud them for fixing their mistakes and wrong behaviour.
I don’t like Autodesk, especially after they axed Softimage. I still feel like Softimage was the perfect in-between Max and Maya.
I would use Softimage over any currently available software if I could. But I won’t go on a crusade to try and educate people as I believe people are smart enough to see what Autodesk has been doing.
I’m not educating anyone, I’m answering and stating my opinion 🙂
The animation revolution is coming to Max 🙂 I assume you mean character animation, right? Obviously I can’t say anything but some things I saw presented recently show that the Max team have completely re-thought character animation in Max (and probably Maya too at this point).
Also, I definitely agree that just buying another piece of software isn’t a great solution, it would be great to have capable sculpting in Max! I seriously hope they just find a way to integrate Mudbox into Max, as Mudbox has basically gone the way of the Dodo at this point. It’s a very light program that could just become a mode in Max!
However, it’s still totally reasonable to buy whatever software is best at doing one thing (Zbrush) if you truly want the absolute best tools.
We’ve been here before with the promises of what eventually became Populate.
Took ages to develop and when it arrived it didn’t live up to the hype.
Xerges, how is the VDB toolset in max?
All eyes will be on the next max update, The reality is Max is an incredible piece of software, it is easily the best modelling program out there.
However i do think its days are numbered,unless autodesk do something drastic.
Every one that I meet that is starting to get into 3D, and ask me what software they should learn, i tell them blender.
I have been using max for over 10 years and there is some stuff that max just does so much better than blender, but blender feels new it feels fresh, eevee is amazing and so are some of the plugins like decal machine,speedflow,box cutter etc and not to mention sculpting is starting to get really good on blender.
Max is overpriced in comparison, we are paying £220 a MONTH! And while the chamfer updates are amazing, it pales in comparison to updates happening on blender daily it seems.. I honestly believe in 3-4 years time unless autodesk do something soon, most people will have moved on from max, because I sure am.
Autodesk beats the modeling standards – 5th year in a row develops only chamfering.
Pretty ignorant comment TBH
Yep!
Also the Chamfer modfier might also be preliminary work for the new 3dBooleans. I heard the Dev-team is not satisfied how the current solutions on the market (Smooth Booleans, ) are doing chamfering and producing messy topology. Ever seen how the new chamfer modifier builds adaptive support loops with Flow Loops/Face inset?
“Max is making lots of $ for Autodesk! This must mean it’s great! Yeah… things could be better… but who are you to ask for features?” Some in this camp chose to willingly blindfold themselves.
I don’t get it. Are you seriously considering 75% of the software to be good enough for the future considering the concept, UI/UX, workflow has been around for 20+ years now? Go through Max and check for things that have been around for ever without being touched and improved. You have to be blind if you can’t spot the obvious.
The split community is only a symptom of years of mismanagement with little to no vision of the future. And probably a good bit of the Stockholm syndrome, too.
That’s not to say Max hasn’t seen improvements. In fact, I enjoy working with the newer releases and I got some things that have helped. It’s only that development is awfully slow. And the company behind has no ethics whatsoever and always finds a new way to screw their most loyal customers.
Max team has to grow significantly, that’s the only way out… could be too late already, though.
This might surprise you, but there’s a lot of pretty rad stuff in development for Max. Yeah, it seems to have taken forever, but they’re finally listening to customer suggestions and ways to improve and they’re implementing them now. The roadmap (linked in the article) actually shows the progress of this. It may not please everybody, but it’s being done.
Since the interface and underlying architecture are so draconian by now, it’s definitely gonna take some time but become modern, but it’s been underway for a while now. Good things are on the horizon, hopefully they’ll get things out to the consumers fast enough to satisfy the needs!
I remember in earlier days (around 2008) I really hated Max. It was buggy and unreliable. Thanks to all the jobs I’ve worked at I’ve kept using (or been forced to use) Max and finally am seeing it turn around. They’ve definitely lost some customers because of all the feet-dragging, but it’s improving.
I am indeed surprised… However, I would be not surprised to find out that only a fraction of what gets shown in NDA sessions actually makes it into the final product. Also, I would not be surprised if it takes 3+ years.
Again, Max team has to grow, no way around it.
Yeah I hear ya. I have no clue how big the team is overall, but there are quite a few things being worked on across the spectrum of what Max can do, so it seems the team is big enough to handle quite a few requests/updates simultaneously. I certainly would hope we’re not years away from those things seeing the light of day! A few things I’ve seen progress on get scrapped to re-think how to better achieve a certain tool so I think that’s definitely one of the reasons some things tend to take unreasonably long to become final and available to the public. Blame the beta testers for demanding higher quality 🙂
Being on the beta and asking for improvements I’d say I stand by what I said. You know, not users and customers are the problem here. Max is not given enough resources. Now whom to blame for that I don’t know… but in the world I live in it’s not their customers, and I’m pretty sure they don’t see it that way either.
I’m on the beta too! Maybe I just don’t see it since I haven’t been on it a long time, but it seems a lot of people are busy working on it? I suppose I could look around on the forums and see if adding more talent to the dev team has been addressed to speed things up. But I imagine it boils down to what they believe is the most important thing to throw resources at. Certainly I’d hope Max gets a lot of love, for our sake.
I find curious how there is no word anymore from Jon A. Bell.
Not about autodeskonline.com and not about Andrew Anagnost words.
Maybe he’s still waiting to find out what he can say. Or they took him to CIA black site to interrogate him and send him into witness protection? Haha! The downside is you never get notifications when people reply to you, so maybe he just got busy and never bothered to check back about further responses to his answers?
Matt, I’m still around. Just got busy over the weekend. 🙂
Juang3D, this weekend was a holiday in the U.S. It was the 4-day Thanksgiving weekend, and I spent several hours of it writing responses on this page and getting beaten up in the process when I could’ve been spending more time with family and friends. Regardless, that was my choice.
To address your points:
1. http://www.autodeskonline.com was registered way back in 2000 by Autodesk, for whatever reason the people who registered it back then had. It’s currently owned/maintained by an Autodesk Reseller/partner (as the page clearly shows at the bottom). If you want, I can try to find out exactly which reseller this is, but there’s nothing conspiratorial or nefarious about it. It’s a page that Autodesk originally registered nearly 20 years ago, for a reseller/partner.
2. You paraphrased Andrew’s quotes. I’d like to read *exactly* what he said and in what context before I pass judgment on it. Send me a link or the entire verbatim Twitter discussion, please.
And, for anyone who doesn’t know me… I’ve been a contributing part of the 3ds Max community since 1996. Wrote 4 books on it, did instructional videos, worked for Autodesk from 1999-2003 (where I was helping to design the next-generation successor to Max, then code-named Nitrous), spent 13 years doing hundreds of CG shots for television (all done with Max), then got hired back at Autodesk 4 years ago to do technical support and act as Max KDE (Knowledge Domain Expert) helping other techs with Max support, and being a liaison between customers, tech support, and Max product design and development.
Max has provided my livelihood for over 20 years, and some of my best friends have been instrumental in creating it and literally helping to change the face of the CG industry before some current Max artists were even born.
I like helping the community. But when this webpage posts a simple news item about a new 3ds Max update, it would be nice if it could be discussed constructively.
Yes, that’s why I said it was curious, and no suspicious 🙂
1.- The thing is that the domain ownership is from Autodesk, and that makes Autodesk resposible of what it’s being said there, if there was no knowledge until now, that does not neglect Autodesk responsability but it’s something that can be understood as long as Autodesk does something to remove that page now.
To be clear, I don’t think that page should be censored, it should be a truly third party page not under the hood of Autodesk since it’s saying deceptive things, like that Maya’s sculpt toolset is better than Blender’s one, or like a subjective opinion like Maya is for profesional use, Blender is for hobby or freelance people (like if freelancers wouldn’t be professionals).
That could be understood even as market manipulation and deceiving customers, something that should not be done by Autodesk.
If there is something shady or not that should be demonstrated with action, not with words, you work for Autodesk so you may be forced to say that Autodesk is not doing anything shady, obviously, but for that to be true something has to be made by Autodesk, they are the owners, they are responsible 🙂
2.- It’s as easy as look for the exact quotes, in that case it was not under any twitter conversation, it was an interview and it has been published in many places, just look for the exact quotes in google, you will find it.
3.- Regarding you publishing the shares, yes, I know you apologised and I said it many times, but I cannot explain the whole story each time someone speaks to me, they should read it, and they will find that you already apologised and all the rest of the conversation instead of just complaining about the conversation without reading where does it come from 🙂
But when this webpage posts a simple news item about a new 3ds Max update, it would be nice if it could be discussed constructively, instead of derailing and devolving (instantly) into another software flame
It’s not a software flame, it’s an Autodesk flame, nothing against max or it’s developers, they have enough to suffer over their shoulders.
About being constructive:
I would like to Autodesk not stoping activation of PERPETUAL licenses, which is directly against the law, I would love Autodesk selling licenses again, not just renting them for something as important as a main tool in a studio, that’s constructive, and ignored or justified by Autodesk employees and followers.
As a PERPETUAL license owner I’m being the victim of something similar to a scam, when they sold me a PERPETUAL license and now they are saying that my license is perpetual but they won’t activate it anymore, making it not perpetual at all by fact, and like me there are A LOT of Autodesk customers (that according to your boss, since we are not monthly paying, we are not customers anymore) do you think that’s constructive?
Will you justify again that Autodesk is not honoring the contract they acquired when they sold PERPETUAL licenses?
You say there are economical reasons to not activating them, and that justifies Autodesk not doing so, then:
Does it justify that I can legally crack the license to be able to use my PERPETUAL license for economical reasons?
Being those reasons that I don’t want to pay to Autodesk anymore because it’s not a good investment, the same reason Autodesk and you said that is the reason for not activating those licenses, it’s not a good investment.
Autodesk behaviour is the responsible of these threads, I tried to avoid criticism to the actual release features or the release cycle or any other thing about development itself, the problem is not with max, it’s with Autodesk and it’s abusive licensing scheme and decissions.
Agreed, it’s not a software issue. It’s a pricing / licensing issue.
As for Autodesk stopping the activation of perpetual licenses, I’m pretty sure that would be an illegal move in Europe.
Fixing all this would be rather easy for Autodesk:
Bring back perpetual licenses + offer the rental product at indie pricing worldwide.
Still no answer from Jon A. Bell to any of this…
In Carl Bass’s twitter feed :
Hey
@carlbass
: “Autodesk used to be run by a bunch of graphics guys and gals, and every problem looked like a graphics problem. I’m a simulation guy, and now, every problem looks like a simulation problem.” – Andrew Anagnost
Seems like a pretty harmless quote when taken into context. They have different views of problems based on their backgrounds. Nothing to see here, move along…
In this case I agree, it’s quite harmless and their conversation was polite, even friendly
I think it’s great that 3DS Devs are starting to improve the software more and more. Obviously there is a lot of animosity towards the licenses and updates cycle.
Indie license is the best thing that happened to a lot of users considering for individuals every 3D package is vastly cheaper; it’s currently stopped me from moving to another Blender!
When you think about the pricing point; users don’t just have to buy the software they have to buy everything else to support it which can easily double the cost.
If you took away the scripts and plugins that other individuals & companies have developed then 3DS would be fairly useless as a production tool in the modern world.
Every other piece of software is getting phenomenal updates to its tools and 3DS has been lagging behind in almost every aspect.
Really hope Bifrost, when it comes, out is easy to use/doesn’t require you to be a programmer to even understand the vernacular…. 😛
About Bifrost (Graph):
From my experience, most 3dmax users (apart from the VFX crowd) are not very technical minded. Most of them can`t even handle DataCannel, yet MCG.
Now they are throwing something even more low-level at them. I predict 85% of 3dmax users will never open the Graphview.IMHO, the only way is for the 3dmax team to provide ready-made modifers and tools, with big button tooltips so even the biggest technical illiterate can take advantage of it.
Is what they are doing. Bifrost graph will be there for whoever wants to do technical stuff. Bifrost graph will help max team and third parties create efficient tools that will work out of the box with multiple applications.
They showcase at Siggraph a scatter tool in 3dsmax based on bifrost graph (but that you just need to tweak parameters on a normal 3dsmax modifier), instancing a skinwrap character milions of times in realtime… in a laptop.
Yes, i saw that Siggraph Demo.Also that one with the tree instancing in the viewport. Performance of Bifrost is simply breathtaking.
I think the issue with us not using Data Channel or MCG, is the lack of good training material on it. Too much of “connect this to that”, without explaining exactly what you just did. Nothing going over different category of nodes explaining when you’d use them and why, etc. I’ve been able to modify some MCGs that I found to suit my needs, but there’s no way I could do one from scratch because I don’t know where to start and the tutorials out there don’t seem to help much other than a step by step process to make what they told you they are making. I’m not a programmer, so I do need the hand holding to get the concept across in my brain.
Compare that to Particle Flow or Slate, much simpler, but also tons of tutorials on how to use them and what the nodes are doing, so easy to expand on our own (more is needed for Data Operator). With Bifrost, I’m already seeing better examples for Maya, than the MCG examples for Max. With Bifrost being cross platform, we should be able to, for the most part, take examples from Maya and apply in Max and vice versa. As long as those making the tutorials understand that many artists aren’t familiar with programming lingo. Boolean, one of the simplest terms one should know as a programmer, still confuses the heck out of me because I always think cutting, adding, or difference in geometry. :/
Yeah, that’s it exactly – I seem to recall it being acknowledged that MCG needed to be more accessible.
I can get my head around data channel modifiers and TyFlow, but beyond that I just glaze over – and I doubt I’m alone in that.
No problem with something being powerful, but it still needs to be accessible – does anyone internally consider MCG a success or are they shelving development of that and putting the effort into Bifrost?
We never saw MCG in it
s full glory, IMHO.t complain.With the 2018 release of MCG, they tried to make it more accessible by providing a new node naming scheme,new operators and new sample packs+better documentation.
But then i guess they canned it in favor for Bifrost. Performance wise it seems Bifrost runs circles around MCG, so i won
Was is a success? No, wrong clientele.
It’s this doubling up on tools that gets me – was anyone screaming for MCG really? Was the shift to doing it in Bifrost really not on the cards, and if it was – why spend precious dev time on something that was going to be replaced.
Same with populate/Geppetto/people power – bigged up as a great new thing, and ends up being a bit of a disappointment, canned animation that can’t use custom meshes.
And then you have Tyson on his own coming out of nowhere with Tyflow.
Was anyone screaming for MCG really? No, but it would have solved several user requests for them, like cloning,stacking modifiers, procedural building generators and even more. Build your own tools.Like i said, it never came into full power. Using Compounds they could have abstracted away most of the low-level stuff and come up with something that would have been really easy to use.Just like Pflow. Hopefully all this will happen now with Bifrost now.
Maybe even the Bifrost team has learned a few things what works for users and what not.
BTW,it seems updates for Populate are on the roadmap.
Tyflow, and i say this with all respect for the developer and the tool itself, is just more of the same.
If you like the ParticleFlow workflow, then i can understand it`s the right tools for you.
Bifrost however will allow you to create your very own Particle System that will integrate with the all the solvers provided by it.And then will still go beyond that, with including rigging or procedural modeling.
However, like already discussed: Everything will stand and fall with the ease-of-use and accessibility for people…like you and me.
I’m not in a big studio system – most of my work is the ‘get it done’ quick and dirty variety. I don’t really have the luxury of creating my own particle system.
TyFlow is perfect for that – C4D/X-Particles too.
Autodesk are far too slow to react. Whether that’s the nature of the company or internal factions pushing one product over the other doesn’t really matter to the end user.
By the time fluids actually appeared, most people had found their own solutions.
If they deliver what they’re promising, all power to to them – put I’ve been burned enough times to not hold my breath.
As has been said often Max users cover a wide base, and the thing is if you deliver something that can only be utilised by a particular band of people – then you’re already stuffed with your wider, less demanding base.
Maybe that’s the future, that they’re going to make it more cliquey, and the mainstream can go to Blender or C4D or whatever.
I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that MCG was created because the powers that be wouldn’t allow BiFrost to come on Max. But MCG was so good in terms of development, that they switched the guy who created it from Max to the Maya dev team.
Last rumour I heard is in sync with what Jon or Matt said above, that these powerful Maya pushers aren’t at Autodesk anymore and that Max is having more space to grow, which is good for us.
I’m in the same boat as Stephen Green. Small studio (rather, small 3D team within a design agency) and the turnarounds on our work are days, not weeks or months. Most of our work are still-frame renders. Rarely animation or VFX. We’ve messed around with tyFlow since it’s so handy for multiple things outside of VFX. It’s great for uber-tech illiterates like myself. MCG was a great concept but still required you to be more developer than artist to use it, unfortunately. We have C4D at our disposal but rarely use it except for a few specific instances where there’s something we can’t do in Max without the aid of a plug-in. For instance, C4D’s voronoi tool is amazing. Some of their other MoGraph tools are really quick and easy for certain results that we’ll use it for. Otherwise it’s pretty sub-par for most other tasks compared to Max, in my opinion.
As for the future of Max being more ‘cliquey,’ it certainly seems like the devs are trying to avoid that by appealing to people who are using Blender/C4D/etc with the advancements they’re making and the way they’re approaching the areas of weakness within Max. If Autodesk ever does events near where you guys live, do yourself a favor and attend them. They’re usually called “Autodesk hits (city name)” There’s some very fun stuff in development. And what I’ve seen from Bifrost is super exciting for building custom tools/modifiers for repetitious tasks in my line of work, specifically speaking. The smoke/fire/liquid/instancing stuff is icing on the cake for someone like me.
Seems like development speed is picking up now and they’re playing catch-up but things are definitely happening. Better late than never, I suppose!
I think the driving force behind MCG was Christopher Diggins.It was always very interesting to read his blogs and articles on programming, especially on performance. However he left Autodesk for whatever reason.
Number of comments shows power and popularity of 3ds max:). And it’s just one of many point releases per year. Nice:)
Can´t help myself, I have to come back to the comment section for every point release…
A couple observations:
1. People keep mixing up Autodesk hate with software hate ALL THE TIME.
Its easy, as autodesk is a moloch of a company with over 150 different products and it doesn´t matter how dedicated and NICE the 3ds max dev team is, they are still getting trashed along with the whole company, especially when most of you criticizing autodesk are not just criticizing their rental or marketing politics, but the development of max in the same sentence.
For me its incredibly hard to understand how you don´t see how you are not only offending the 3ds max developers, but also EVERYONE that enjoys working with 3ds max.
Because you´re implying:
You devs suck. Either for not being fast enough, not doing what we want or not standing up to your employer and risking your job…(paraphrasing: “Do you agree that your boss is doing a shitty job here or there?”)
Because you are implying:
You 3ds max users suck. Because you are too dumb to see how you are being exploited (unlike ME, who has moved on and is now using softwar XYZ and is much happier).
Because you are using an outdated tool and the work you do with it doesn´t matter.
Because you work in an industry I don´t care about.
What, archivz? What you need? A bunch of walls and some trees? pfff…
I hope you are not doing this on purpose and I hope you know if you made that mistake and are willing to accept that you can do better, especially if you want other 3ds max users or 3ds max devs to actually listen what you have to say. Its important to undestand how what and how you say something also takes into consideration what the person you are adressing might take away from it.
If you want the “autodesk is a bad company”-person to listen, its probably better you write him/ an email directly, don´t you think?
Otherwise…whats the point in this, other than making yourself feel superior for NOT supporting autodesk anymore?
2. I get why people are annoyed with the software they HAVE to use on a daily basis.
I curse at max every single day for crashing for completely unexplained reasons (while simply opening the material editor. WHY.)
But I understand that I can even crash my fridge, if I´m treating it wrong.
I always try to understand what I might have done wrong, before assuming its a bug.
Which doesn´t mean, that its not NOT a bug and in some cases I KNOW its a bug that hasn´t been fixed in forever.
I rarely submit CER or contact support because of it, because that almost always would take too long, since I almost always work on tight deadlines.
I also want stuff that is not being delivered and some of it I undestand and some I don´t.
I understand why chamfer modifier is getting so much love, but FX stuff isn´t.
How can YOU not understand, that a customerbase that has 10.000 3ds max seats might higher up in the priority list, than a customerbase that has 100 seats (metaphorically, those numbers are of course not the real numbers. But you can look them up here for example:
https://enlyft.com/tech/products/autodesk-3ds-max)
3. We can all agree that we want to pay less for the software we use and that we want to own what we pay for.
I made that point before though: You also don´t own netflix, just because you pay for it every month.
You also don´t own your rental appartment, even though you pay for it every month.
Of course you can ask your landlord to fix the broken heating and keep the stairs clean, but you can´t ask him to put the house in a different neighbourhood.
And if you leave the appartment, you can´t ask the landord 10 years later to check your mail, that is still being sent to that adress.
Its not outrageous what autodesk does at a company from a business point of view and more and more companies are moving the same direction.
If they can´t keep up with development of their competitors, they will change.
If they won´t change quickly enough, they will fail.
If the business model fails, they will change or fail.
So, why all the hate?!?
4. which brings me to my last point:
A) If you are unhappy with the development fo 3ds max and want to use other software, just do it and don´t look back.
B) If you dislike the company behind it, move on and don´t look back.
C) If you can´t move on, because you have too many clients/projects tied to your software, OR because your employer won´t switch:
Either take the hard way and slowly, over time transition your projects to a different package, OR take active part in improving it, by talking to the devs and making your demands heard, where they are being heard.
D) If you have already moved on, but keep coming back bitching about it (it being either the software or the company or a mix of it):
You either do that to feel superior above others that haven´t, or you are insecure about your decision and want others to join you (because god forbid and you put your money on the wrong horse and only find out about it 10 years from now).
Or you miss Max, because its overall still a great tool for a lot of reasons….:)
You are like that boyfriend, that was left/cheated by his ex girfriend and now trashes ALL women on facebook.
5. For whatever reasons you are doing this, I feel affected by it, because I´m afraid people who don´t have the insights we have might get the wrong idea about the software, which might lead to less new people using it, which might lead to less sales, which might lead to less money for the devs, which means leass development for the software.
Or it might lead to clients getting the wrong impressions about what my software can or can´t do and how much its supposed to cost, what I do…
The wrong idea is: Autodesk policy=3dsmax development=3dsmax value compared to other software.
Its a wrong simplification, its hurtful and its damaging.
There are other ways to do it.
if I like my prius, why should I go to a forum for ford and tell them how much ford or their cars suck?
So, if you wanna take only one question to answer out of this rant:
Why do you keep coming back to these comments to trash autodesk and or 3ds max and what are you trying to achieve HERE?
3DS MAX is important to us. It’s how most of us make our living.
It’s not as trivial as a car, fridge being buggy, or an ex-girlfriend.
But there’s power in numbers, especially when the company is deemed to have behaved unethically and borderline illegally.
If we weren’t forced to pay subscriptions, I’d happily take out a permanent licence, and leave Autodesk in peace. But in being forced to pay £200 odd a month, I expect the company to deliver value for money.
You aren’t forced, you chose to. If you just joined Max in a time of subscription, you haven’t been long enough so that you cannot switch.
If you’ve been for that long, you probably own a old perpetual license. Use that, transfer your things to other software and move on.
It does not matter if I own the software or not. If the business path is unethical one should express it. I understand that in your point of view AD moves are perfectly ok and anybody who disagree should be silence as it disturbs your perception. If companies sees that they can go away with that kind of practices without any negative feedback then they will push harder, not in our, user favor. So accept others can have and express their opinions and move on. AD user.
Read again. I don´t say what you perceive I say.
A
Well, if 3ds max is more important to you than an ex-girlfriend, you have´t been hurt enough by an ex-girlfriend…:)
Sarkasm aside, again, the value YOU expect might not be the value OTHERS get.
And to reuse that metaphor: If you rent an appartment, you can expect to live in it, you can´t necessarily expect the landlord to improve it every month.
Such is the way of capitalism, is all I´m saying.
Which, by the way, I totally don´t agree with.
I just don´t have a better alternative to offer…;)
I´m all up for constructive, differentiated feedback and criticism, there is plenty of things one can find wrong with both the software and the company that makes it, no doubt about it.
Its just the lack of perspective of some folks here, the lack of constructive feedback of those wanting to stay with 3ds max and the bitterness of those that left that bugs me…
Please see Maya 2020 updates, small but useful list. Compare to the useless Max updates ….
What you say useless, for other people will be extremely useful. Maya had a good update fore sure. Now, I guess that Maya people will tell you that this 2020 comes with 1 year delay, where they didnt had much improvements, so was as well very needed.