Autodesk has officially released 3DS Max 2015. The software is available for download to subscription members on Autodesk’s Subscription Center. A free trial version is available.
3DS Max 2015 released
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First Impressions ..loaded up quite fast. Active shade with mental ray seems like it would be useful. New Outliner is cool specially like the hierarchy mode.
It would be cool to see a review of how Max 2015 is working to get peoples mood a little better.
Don’t get your hopes up
Funny thing … lately I’ve been digging lots of info about FX work in movies and watching reels of the studios involved … and I must say that the work done in 3ds Max is more real and beautiful than the work done in other apps. On top of that, ILM used Max for lighting, destruction of the most complex scene in the movie (the helicarrier crash on the building) with Thinking Particles and lots of environments. All rendered in VRay. Now, they wouldn’t use it if it wete crap. So I’m confident. 🙂
Some other small improvements i’ve not seen advertised or mentioned:
– when navigating around the viewport in a perspective view, 3ds max will now always update it’s perspective camera focal point so you are always orbiting around your mouse if nothing is selected. This very handy when trying to navigate pretty much any scene. Especially when Trying to get really close to particular points of geometry.
– The zooming has also been fixed so if you are in a massive scene and want to zoom really close to a small object, you no longer have wear out the mouse scroll wheel for 5 minutes waiting for the camera to ‘zoom in’.
– Rendered thumbnails of materials in Slate material editor also seem to update quicker/stick longer without having to re-render.
@Michael.. The last one is because they’ve parallelized(multi-threaded) their texture baking system in the material editor, so they’re going to render faster everywhere, Michael Russo pointed this out in one of the expert challenges…
I really like antialiasing in viewport.
It would be really helpful for qcing 3d track with viewport preview.
Another hidden improvement is hw hit test.
What does it mean?
It means selection and navigation performance is lot better than before when you have dense mesh,
Nice improvements, really. But, you know, this is a “major” release, not a service pack or something. If we don’t demand and ask for more we won’t get them…
Max’s releases just feel like an annual trawl for cash now. Other programs get a new version when new features are added.
Autodesk just milks the customers for more money each year regardless of what work has or hasn’t been put into it.
I miss the old point releases, when they added new features.
Now it’s just about the money, advertising and excuses for why nothing has been added, fixed or changed.
@Maziar, Thanks for the info, I wasn’t aware of that!
It seems it is a bit ‘smarter’ too about when it has to re-render. I find in 2014 and below that the material previews keep re-rendering between sessions or even during sessions when i’m not updating the materials. Maybe i’m just imagining that though…
I don’t know, man. I think this new Max team might actually turn things around. I’m not betting the farm on it or anything but when you hear them talk they seem genuinely excited. I get the feeling they can’t wait to blow everyone’s minds, although the Max crowd has been let down for so long they’re gonna be tough to please them no matter what.
Even Paul Neale, who’s been (rightfully) critical in the past, is excited and he’s about as credible a Max source as you’re going to find. If that’s not a good indicator I don’t know what is.
Regarding this point:
“perspective camera focal point so you are always orbiting around your mouse if nothing is selected”
I cannot recreate this functionality, which I would very much like.
Are you sure it is present?
Dave
This would I like to know also
– A better zoom system
– Focal point and orb around the mouse pointer
Is this sure it’s inside max 2015?