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News

3DS Max vs Houdini vs Blender startup time

Oct 04, 2016 by CGP Staff
26 |
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Canadian artist Strob compares the startup times from various 3D software. More on Strob’s website.

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Charles
8 years ago

Great Work Adsk! you can make a Coffee, other check the email with Max.
Poor Blender-People Just Work!

JaMa
8 years ago

Blender is the smallest one – do not need much disk space for installation – something xx MB? Maybe 100MB?

Houdini needs around 1GB

3DS Max need something around 6GB

Houdini is best when you compare size, speed and features – absolutely amazing simulation tools, character modelling, rendering and procedural modelling. They are also doing great job for basic modeling tools – soon they will gather 3DS Max 🙂 I hope so. Now Blender is good modeling software with Houdini 🙂

Blender is good for basic 3D-modelling (also sculpting) and animation, rendering (fast but not physically accurate and still missing many features – cycles) and for 2D-animation 🙂 Tracking tools were kind of OK, simulation tools are not production quality. There are so many features in blender which are left dying… there are features which are not improved for a long time and looks unfinished. But its free, anybody can download it anytime and start learn it – so you can’t request anything from their development team because you can not vote with your wallet.

What comes to 3DS Max – it is still the best architecture modelling soft, but I have feeling that AD is going to make people use Maya someway – maybe they will make 3DS Max so bad that AD customers will “choose” Maya because there is no real option for it. Like they did for XSI / Softimage 🙁

Would be interesting see also: Maya, Modo, C4D, LW, Shade3D… and maybe even eias3d, ZBrush, 3DCoat, MudBox, Silo… and Moi3D, Rhino 5 🙂

Also comparing After effects, Nuke, Fusion, Silhouette FX, Apple’s Motion, Natron, HitFilm

Or – Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Gimp, Photoline, Paint shop pro, pixelmator 🙂

Marco
Reply to  JaMa
8 years ago

Blender’s folder is about 340mb on my drive.

About Maya vs Max, I’m really disappointed to see something like MASH and motion graphics features pushed on Maya whereas Max is left behind. That’s what I asked for a few years now, and Mash is happening on Maya. I understand it’s a third-party bought by AD, but still…

Strob
Reply to  Marco
8 years ago

Looked like I made the news!! lol!

someone commented on youtube: “About 100MB from this 315MB is actually for crappy Collada exporter binaries which will be replaced in upcoming months”

Strob
Reply to  JaMa
8 years ago

Jama, I think kind of the same actally, good comparison! Don’t forget Zbrush which is the best sculpting app. I do almost all my modeling in zbrush nowadays.

Arunderan
8 years ago

Turn on some addons in Blender, then compare again.

Juang3d
Reply to  Arunderan
8 years ago

Yeah… then install some plugins in max… then compare again XD

Arunderan
Reply to  Juang3d
8 years ago

I didn’t say install. I said turn on what is already onboard 😉

But yeah, that’s of course a point. And it was even my point. Addons can increase the loading time dramatically. And when you simply turn off everything, then the software boots of course much faster …

Strob
Reply to  Arunderan
8 years ago

At least in Blender you can easily turn everything on and off, max can’t do that.

doodle
8 years ago

That’s the difference between a horrible codebase that hopefully nobody can check (3ds) and a code that is accessible to anyone and kept clean for reputation and commits purposes. Houdini is getting fat since version 14.

thomascheng
8 years ago

I loaded all the plugins and put the blender folder on my server, and it loads pretty. Nice Program.

snarknado
8 years ago

That restart of Max 2016 gets a boost from the Windows cache so the 1 minute load time is the “real” time to use, unless you’re starting the other applications for the second time as well.

Three Dee Max
8 years ago

Really? What the specs for this demo?

how bout using SSD for this demo.. i suspect that the HDD technology is soooo yesterday.. and hell yeah.. the protection program is not so time friendly..

Strob
Reply to  Three Dee Max
8 years ago

It was done on a SSD yes.

Strob
Reply to  Three Dee Max
8 years ago

Here are my full specs:
MB: Supermicro X9DRi-LN4+
CPU:dual Xeon E5-2680 v2 2.8 Ghz (40 logical proc)
Ram: 96GB
OS: win7x64
system drive: SSD crucial CT512M55
and 6 other SATA hard drives for around 10TB.

wurger
8 years ago

The Max start times in the video are not really valid. After you have run Max for the first time, any subsequent opens of the software will be considerably faster than the initial open.

The first open of Max 2017 on my workstation is 1:54. Subsequent opens clock in at 0:25.

Strob
Reply to  wurger
8 years ago

It was a second open for me, first one was more than a minute. I have a bunch of plugins cause max can’t do much by itself.

Anonymous
8 years ago

Really?
Is it worth to be posted as news?

Strob
Reply to  Anonymous
8 years ago

This is just my small ring to wake up every max users and invite them to install Blender and Houdini indie along their max installation and have a lot of fun with those apps and prepare themselves for the near future! I have myself a lot of fun discovering everything those apps can do and that was just one of many impressive surprises I got from Blender. I think Blender has reached a turning point where the user base is now strong enough to make it unstoppable. Autodesk also has to react and offer some alternative to a 199$/y app that can do much much more than max and a free app that is slowly but surely catching up on max and already do many things max can’t do.

Chris
8 years ago

Years ago I once did a test of removing a few hundred plugins and their associated scripts from the install of 3dsMax. These plugins and scripts were of little importance, or for forgotten features that no one uses anymore.
Once I did that, Max started up in 3 to 4 seconds. And it took very little memory as well, being somewhere in the tens of Megabytes as I recall.

The so called ‘XBR Diet’ tried to alleviate some of that using some fancy linker techniques. Perhaps it didn’t go far enough?

Max being written in the old fashioned days put no restrictions on plugins. Plugins were called on startup, and plugins allocated lots of memory even if they were NOT used. This is the fundamental architectural decision that in 1995 may have looked good, but is no good in 2016. And unless they are willing to refactor the core the problem will persist.

Look at Character Studio for instance: Max starts up, and even if you never used character studio, and shut max down, the plugin allocated lots of memory. Same with just about every other plugin out there.

Meli
Reply to  Chris
8 years ago

Sorry Chris, but this is simply no longer true.
Starting with 3dsmax2014 the default behavior is deffered loading of plugins, unless the developer explicitly decides against it.
You can read about it in the SDK help.Legacy plugins might still be loaded ahead and there are some restrictions whenever 3dsmax can defer the loading, but it`s not true that there`s no mechanism for a more efficient startup behavior.

Chris
Reply to  Meli
8 years ago

Yes, I know all about deferred loading of plugins. But that represents an optimal workflow, and still doesn’t negate my basic premise. As the article shows, it still takes a really long time to start up max. Not everything can be solved by a delay load linker switch. I know, because I used to work on max for nearly 10 years.

idris3d
8 years ago

If you think blender is poor you dont know about it and you are afraid of learning blender is the best for modeling,procedural,hair,sculpting,compositing mention any problem you encounter

Deko
8 years ago

Wish to see same comparison by updates installing times. Obviously, Autodesk guys never installs any of own service packs.

Strob
Reply to  Deko
8 years ago

Ouch!!! that one would really hurt Max!!! Service pack installs are a nightmare!

Duttyfoot
8 years ago

oh man blender opens freaking fast. Really impressed with how quickly houdini loads

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