Autodesk SIGGRAPH Event News — including future of Naiad

Well that’s was known since the begging, that there are going to rewrite Naiad into Maya. they even said it that they are implementing a new ICE system with the help of Naiad tech.

This is really sad news. Probably even worse than Autodesk buying Naiad itself. At last I thought they would sell it as a separated software.

I can’t belive that Autodesk keeps killing MAX..

I’m a Max user from version 1.0, is so big the lack of power publicity from Autodesk for Max in the visual effects and motiongraphics realms that in some place that I make 3D freelance, when I say that I work in Max for visual effects they see me like a little nerd o freak, and only the result make then believe that Max can do that. Even someones ask me is some part are make in Maya or C4D !!!. WTF Autodesk !!!

I’m surprised people are surprised.

It’s only the pesky third-party devs who keep any hope of using Max for VFX alive.

Autodesk have obviously wanted nothing to do with VFX for Max and pushed it towards arch vis, despite the figleaves of multi-release deals for particles, and the bullshit of splitting into Max and Design.

They may as well rename it combustion.

The writing was on the wall at the siggraph 2012. I watched all the AD presentations online and you could tell that Maya was the focus of all their tech development. Max was relegated to the status of a web creation tool for the most part. Maya also has native Alembic support and Open Subd. Its not like it would be hard to put these in max. Hell people have already done so as plugins but AD doesn’t have any intention of doing so. The reason comes down to positioning the software to particular markets and AD has decided that Maya is the tool for film work. End of story.

V Miller, the list of features is just too long, it’s not just ptex and opensd, and if you consider the things they are cooking right now for maya like xgen,skyline and now naiad, it’ll drive you insane! it’s beyond sad and unfair, it’s discriminating.

I love Max, and I love working in it but this is becoming frustrating, my only beacon of joy recently was pflow’s upgrade, which they did after so many years and by integrating a product that was already around for a long time, in fact I actually enjoyed and appreciated the 2014 release but when you consider how many things are still missing in there or how many things are outdated and left unattended and the fact that there’s everything but hopeful news of the future, and when you see all these amazing innovative features added release after release to these other tools, it just makes you sad and frustrated, and yes the user voise is pretty much a joke. pitty, silly, sad.

I wouldn’t read too much in a single presentation 🙂

@Hristo
I kinda agree but the timing of that single presentation couldn’t be worse 😛

>>It’s only the pesky third-party devs who keep any hope of using Max for VFX alive. Autodesk have obviously wanted nothing to do with VFX for Max<<

Steve, one thing to remember is that is was at SIGGRAPH which stands for "Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques". This includes all aspects of computer graphics in every industry…not just VFX.

There were 7-8 presenters at last night's even which was almost 3 hours long. Every one of them were focused Maya pretty much exclusively and the only time I saw the Max UI was when they briefly showed a prerecorded video of rotating around a 123d Catch/ReCap model. Ducan Brimstead did a roughly 45 minute long presentation of Maya paint effects where he showed vines, more vines, vines growing on other vines and vines on a tree house. Even the games presenters talked exclusively about Maya.

At the after party I personally thanked Shawn Hendriks for making my decision to not renew my Adesk subscription next time around so easy! I let him know that as a longtime Max user and loyal customer who has spent thousands of dollars over the years I was insulted by the lack of any mention of Max and that it was a "slap in the face" to Max customers everywhere. He claimed that they had a few Max presenters lined up but they all cancelled at the last minute, to which I replied that it was a lame excuse.

Probably the most sobering part of the evening was my conversation with Marcus Nordenstam (formerly of Exotic Matter) after the event. During his Bifröst presentation he continually referred to the "host DCC application" while demonstrating all the new fluid solver features in Maya, giving some of us hope that a Max connection was in co-development but just not being shown. He was quick to point out to me that he made a conscious choice to say "DCC" and not "Maya"…but when specifically asked about the state of Max development his response was a sheepish "Well, I cannot say anything official but if I where you I wouldn't get my hopes up anytime soon. But if enough Max users rage over it there might be a chance it would happen." I informed him that "rage" amongst the community was very likely 🙂

Am I surprised – no.

They don’t care about Max any more since someone left as project manager, maybe he saw the writing on the wall. Xsi users have equally been savaged by Autodesk, and it’s been brutal for them- hardly any dev. All Autodesk are focusing on is Maya. Maya. Maya.

How long before Max too gets to be a secondary app like xsi?

They should never have been allowed to own all three. Two will be allowed to fail.

@Hristo

I would read lots into it if I were you.

Thanks for the additional info Mitch and standing up for every max user who couldn’t be there.

I don’t work with 3ds max. I work with plugins for 3ds max like vray, fumefx, krakatoa and tp. So I really don’t care about max dieing, when I see that I can just move to another package with the same plugins available. If TP is released for maya, max is done.

If all this is true, I have no choice but to move to Maya. Max is done for serious animation.

@Mitch
You can check LinkedIn for Frank’s current job description/role at Autodesk…

@Thinkbox: That would be interesting.

@Joe
For one the customer support would be better. 😉 (Ignoring increase of people they’d have to deal with)

@Mitch
If that whole story of the 3 mystery presenters is true why not say something during the meeting. So you’d at least acknowledge the max user base. I know that would be far from ideal but it would leave a better aftertaste than only mentioning that story when confronted with their lack of max news/coverage.

Spacefrog, yes I heard rumors yesterday that he moved to the games division but this confirms it! The big questions are: was it by choice and who the heck is in charge of M&E division now?!? I’m aware they are looking for a senior 3ds Max product manager but that announcement last week still lists Frank as head of M&E.

I don’t get a good feeling from all this ambiguity.

This is a rather interesting post, and while I’ve never heard of Naiad or Bifrost (other than the virus mentioned in a wiki when you Google it), I have been using Maya since 2004.

Honestly, most Maya users have felt the same about Maya that you folks do about Max. We haven’t felt a lot of support from Autodesk, and it generally feels like they’re killing Maya as well. That said, I don’t follow the Max updates religiously or anything, and Maya 2014 does bring a lot to the table.

But I’m not sure what Naiad can do that nParticles already can’t do, so it’s kinda like… “Yippeee! Yet another physics solver we don’t need.”

But everyone has different needs and uses. I use Maya for arch/viz, not VFX, and most people think I’m crazy to do so.

2 years?

And the rest… It’s been knocking around in some form or other since 2006 at least.

Well,

the thing is they simply think in terms of how much money they can gain from *not investing* and I believe that’s related to all of main three AD apps. SI seems dead, Max is not getting anything, not sure about Maya as I don’t follow it but I would bet Maya users have lot to complain as well.

That’s not related to AD only. I was reading about C4D 15 “new bevel tool!” Wow! Really?!? Folks, these guys just think in terms of profit, that’s it. Just look at what a few developers can do with Blender, read the long list of updates they bake every new single update and then you can surely laugh and feel fooled by big companies that buy apps, integrate them into their packages (Naiad/Maya), update a (bevel) tool and call this “New Release”.

Autodesk has been trying to kill Max for years now, because they’re still paying licensing fees to Gary Yost for the base code.
Strangely enough, you know what’s looking really good?
Blender. No shit. I didn’t believe it either, but there ya go.

@Andy B
Try to find a work in IndiaCanadaChina.
With your’s working expirience in 3 major places sure you find it.
You can work in other packages who forbiding to do this.
There are a lot of another places where Houdini used. But it’s of course not in Your’s town.
@joe
For what Naiad at all to Archviz ?
It’s different story at all. Then learn anything you can get in you mind because maybe you can’t find a job near your’s house.
I think we not talk about Andy’s local area problem here.

Max combined with it’s main plugins easily rivals and surpasses Houdini when it comes to FX, and not to mention how much more intuitive and faster it is when it comes to poly modeling and animating, so the potential is there, if only Autodest would stop neglecting this software, I really believe in a matter of 2 years they could turn it into the holy grail of ease of use and power, if only they’d stop treating it as a second citizen, which is really sad since the desktop DCC as we now it today started out with this wonderful tool, god if only the Yost group could reassemble and take over this software again or even a third party company that actually cares about Max could take over the development, things would look very different for Max.

Under a week 2 news from autodesk first iray for maya and then naiad for maya !!! what about other 3dpack users ?!! AD only thinking to money and think their customers are Fixed ! only change one software to other softwares from their company again ….
when I see how many users having satisfied from sidefx,foundry,Luxology,.maxon and etc then see what autodesk doing with their users , if I forced to change my 3d software never trust to autodesk again .

@igor
Thanks man, I’m doing alright.

I got something lined up locally here in LA. That’s actually the point I was trying to get across.

I picked up a gig no problem with my past of maya/max use.

Other guys here are going to have to wait out the storm or move out of the country to keep working in houdini. Always pays to diverse yourself, you end up not caring so much what software does what. Ofcourse in the end though, you always prefer one over the other. Atleast I do.

I am not trying to get into it with you Simon, but believe me, I wish it were just my opinion. I have been with Max from the beginning and am friends with some of the developers whom I believe are making the best ability growth plugins for 3ds max. We do not see a trend of the top studios today migrating to 3ds max for fx (and by fx I do not mean cgi in general, but the simulation, particle, dynamics type stuff). We have a couple studios doing really well with it, but at least one of those has a MASSIVELY proprietary tool that is a strong contributor to their success in the industry. And, as great as their work is, and it is great, none of them have even come very close to achiving what ILM, Weta and some others have done effects wise in recent years. On top of that, we are now seeing some of the best fx-centric Max plugins migrating towards Maya because they don’t want a 3ds max solution. And this shows me that Maya is not the best solution for fx tasks right now and needs help. Autodesk’s offerings are not solving all the vfx needs we have today. And while pluings are a great stop gap, they do not always work well with each other, solving one problem only to create another. The fact is, there is a significantly better tool for doing fx out there right now than what Autodesk is offering. And unfortunately, it is not an all around dcc solution in and of itself. It is this very thing that gets me upset with Autodesk these days and sparked my responses here. Not only do they have two fairly solid, solutions to pick through, they have a strong existing user base of these products. And yet they cant seem to decide how or where to put their resources in growing them and we are left with the need for split tool pipelines if we want more. Autodesk should have the resources to give us a tool that could do nearly all we could need, and yet they are not. At this point I am coming to terms with things as they seem to be, and my hope for a single tool solution, or a strong, well integrated mult-tool solution from Autodesk fades. I can only hope that we dont have all the facts and we will all be laughing about this next year. 😛

Hi all,

I wanted to add some color to some of the concerns here.

Yes, it was unfortunate that some of our max customer demos got canceled last minute. Siggraph was a bit different for us this year vs previous years. As a corp company, unfortunately we can’t disclose the roadmap of our products anytime we want like the good old days.
Not by choice, but by revenue accounting laws. Since our product ship dates are not aligned with Siggraph, this causes us to have limited news to share about our products.

This is why we have our own event, the Unfold event. This allows us to share the roadmap that is aligned with ship dates.

Then why did Maya show up with some cool stuff this year at Siggraph user event and not max?
It just so happens that the technology preview for Maya was ready for Siggraph, whereas the 3ds max work that we are doing is gearing up for a update soon and we will be discussing the details of that in the near future.The timing wasn’t right for Siggraph. Again not always in our control on what trade show they line up to.

On the general direction of Maya vs Max, nothing has changed. Maya was designed for entertainment customers whom need a platform to extend.
Max was designed for the democratization of content creation for all markets. So Maya may be better for deep pipeline integration, Where Max is good for out of the box artist toolset for a broader markets.

It also means that the Maya team focuses all its energy on entertainment features and the Max team divides its energy on a variation of markets, from design viz, VFX, Games, etc..
So naturally, if you are a VFX artist only, you may see more progress on the Maya front than you do on Max depending on the releases.

When I took over the product for the 2014 release, I made some significant changes. I refocused a lot the energy on stability and performance. I also put a significant focus on “small annoying things”. This resulted in some significant performance and stability improvements and cleaned up some workflows.

Did you get fluids :), No, not yet.. But it was the right thing to do for Max’s continued growth. Meanwhile, we still managed to get in some impressive features.

As a Maya user, you would have noticed the same thing for the past couple of years where Maya was pretty dry in the new feature department but had significant scalability and API enhancements.

Sometime it takes entire teams to make big shifts like that. So let the Maya team enjoy some new fun features :).

As for Max, we are hard at work on features that have been raised up from our customers. Some will be for entertainment, games and some will be for design viz.

For the NiadBifrost concern, Bifrost is being developed as an engine with Maya as the first customer.
We aren’t disclosing many details at the moment, but it’s being designed to be agnostic to any one specific tool.

I hope that clarifies a few things for everyone.
Frank DeLise

I would vote for you Chris 😀

don’t hope so much because it’s very clear. native Max will NEVER compete with native Maya when it comes to VFX
– Autodiss

really..?

Ok, 3dsmax has had fumefx and krakatoa for years and Maya hasn’t. Let it Maya be cool for once. 🙂

It’s notable that everything you list there is created by someone other than AD.

And, yes I would dearly love Thinkbox to be in charge, to see some genuine innovation.

When I think of VFX I don’t think of Maya.
But with this being the last year Digimation if offering their Suite, I think it would be a good idea for Max to grab Lightning, Glider and Chameleon. Can’t go wrong here as these will greatly improve Max’s VFX capabilities.

Its clearly settled. Thinkbox should manage max. Lets make it happen and game on!

I haven’t seen this mentioned, but the fact the 3ds Max sells so well means Autodesk probably don’t feel a strong pressure to update it in a major fashion. I reckon 3ds Max is still the best-selling 3D package out there, which hopefully means it has a healthy position despite the lack of headline-grabbing upgrades. (It would be interesting to see a sales curve over the years compared with other packages – is 3ds Max keeping its lead, or is it loosing to other software? If it is, to which ones?)

I really appreciate the focus on stability and minor annoyances. 3ds Max has had a ton of these, and while a lot has been taken care of in 2014, there is still many many more to wipe out (damn you, file requesters).

Autodesk have a very tricky PR and development issue to solve. They have three very similar (at least superficially) major 3D packages, and each packages’ userbase wants to have some major groundbreaking feature each year – preferably something that no other software has! And they have to do that under an umbrella of a major company with strict shareholder directives and probably a marketing department with tons of conflicting input as well – and the widely differing userbase with their crazy input as well (which I’m proud to be part of).

I’m not saying that I’m happy with the state of Max, but I don’t see a reason to be as negative as the majority here. There are major problems to solve with 3ds Max, but I personally can’t find a proper alternative yet. My biggest issue is the pricing, I just don’t feel the software and its updates are worth the money Autodesk charges. And I still wish Autodesk wasn’t that greedy to buy all these conflicting software, so that we could have a more healthy competition.

That would be a amazing – Thinkbox in charge! Opening the possibilities for Max while the current Autodesk developers could play (more?) frisbee ouside 🙂

How many developers work on Max at AD and how many for Max at TB? Would be great to compare, since it seems the TB team is 5-10 times larger from the number of innovations in recent years…

Frank,

Let me tell you what concerns me, I know Max, I know what it can be capable of and how much more intuitive it can be compared to other tools, but those who just want to start in this business don’t know that, and they will never get to know that because they will look at the long line up of the features of the other app and decide that that must be the way to go, and before you know it, there won’t be a lot of people to enjoy those long term plans that you have for Max, I really think that, that trend has already started, and frankly this last decision of yours didn’t help at all, that’s my bulk of concerns.

And Chris, stop teasing us, we all know that will never happen, if only…

Hey Scott. I still remember the golden age of turning Ghost into Brazil. Good times.

I guess my main complaint about Max’s development would be the cost compared to new features.

Frank,

I really appreciate you taking the time to respond to this thread. A lot of of what you just said may be reassuring to some Max users out there, but to others it will simply come across the the same old company line that AD has been repeating for several years now. As I’m sure you are aware, many of the “legacy” 3DS tribe (myself included) saw your return as the product manager as a very welcome ray of hope for the future of our beloved Max. After the somewhat lackluster 2014 release a lot of us have been in a “wait and see” holding pattern to see what changes and improvements manifest after the first full development cycle under your direction. What is not clear is to what extent the future of Max is being guided by you since your job title now says “Head of Games” and AD is apparently seeking someone to fill the Max PM slot.

To your and Shawn’s point about having multiple presenters cancel at the last minute, thus the complete lack of ANY Max representation at the User Event…I find it amazing that nobody on the AD side said “Hey, we have a big problem here! There’s zero content in this 3 hour presentation about our number one selling DCC application. Approximately half our audience tonight will be Max users and given our lack of any presence on the exhibit floor that ain’t good! Let’s come up with SOMETHING we can show.” Instead, we were left setting in that auditorium Tuesday night feeling completely unappreciated, confused and downright angry. Was this allowed to happen because there currently isn’t a Max PM? What aggravates me most about AD is the apparent lack of direction and communication with the user base in recent years. I have yet to see any major sign this will change and Tuesday night went a long way to crush any remaining hopes I had.

As to the whole Max vs Maya for vfx argument, I’m not going to dilute myself into believing that Max should be marketed or widely accepted as the industry standard tool. That title is held by Maya and it will most likely remain that way for the foreseeable future. I also understand the dilemma AD is faced with having to develop and market 2…make that 3 major DCC apps that have so much overlap in their feature set and target user base. But this is, after all, their CHOICE. We the customers didn’t ask AD to purchase both of the rival primary DCC apps and then not pool their development resources to bring a next-gen 3d application to market.

The honest truth is that the current level of success Max has enjoyed in the vfx industry can almost solely be credited to all the wonderful 3rd party developers out there. I’m sure nobody reading this would argue that without Vray, Fume, Thinking Particles and Frantic/Thinkbox we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now. Max would have instead drifted off into the obscurity of being nothing more than an extension of Autocad long ago. Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t offer a huge amount of the credit to the original YOST development team for creating such an open architecture which allowed all these plugins to even be possible. Sadly, we haven’t seen that kind of innovation coming from the Max dev team in many years.

An oh…I also vote for Thinkbox/Bond as PM 😉

i want other company buy 3dsmax and develop to versus with Maya.
autodesk always kill 3dsmax

Thinkbox should take over 3ds Max not 3ds Max Design. Autodesk can keep that viz product alive and let Chris drive 3ds Max where it needs to go!

@SK: Hi Scott! Good to see you around.

I’d like to hear Frank reply to some more of these comments, and in particular, deal with this huge chasm that lies between Autodesk and it’s users.

Some big names on this page. I think it’s time for Autodesk to sit up and listen.

Definitely – when the area first appeared, Combustion was left to languish on the old board because its face didn’t fit.

I gave it a chance, but rarely go back there compared to when I was a fairly regular contributor when Kate was running the old board.

Mitch Gates,

I know I for one do.

For all the lack of hope that the title of this post presented in the beginning(which is still a shame really), at least since last night this page has turned into a place for some very interesting ideas and discussions with interesting people at it’s core.

letting an innovative and passionate team take over it’s development, and a true Max centric community for people who actually care about this product are things that both Max and it’s user base desperately need.

A Maxunderground Board would be fantastic! A light interface and I would love to frequent it 🙂 Not sure how to avoid noob spamming, the old Board had mostly just high quality Q&As…

+ 1 for Thinkbox to take over. Honestly? I think it can’t / won’t happen for two simple reasons.

In case AD should buy Thinkbox (please no!) they’ll kill another great company, TB will be sucked into the AD machine that, we know for sure, lacks in terms of communication, development and so forth. So, I really hope that will never happen.

In case Thinkbox should buy Max and take over, hell yeah! It won’t happen either as AD will never sell MAX, they know / we know MAX brings profit.

So, I’d love the Thinkbox idea, simply I don’t believe is realistic.

I love MAX and i’ve used it since the very beginning. But I stopped my subscription at 2012. Going to use 2012 as long as i can, while watching whats going on.

I compare Autodesk to the management of my favourite hockey team. They sell out every game, tickets, food and merch are insanely expensive and they haven’t won a cup in 67 years. Yet, everyone still goes…and everyone still buys! The fans love the team…and they know it! This is the problem!
From a Autodesks standpoint, where is the incentive to be aggressive with development/innovation knowing that they have a whole lot of people passionate and loyal to the software that they use. Its shamefully opportunistic…maybe even parasitic…but completely predictable. They are a company that is in the industry, but not of it! It is no longer a busines entity to facilitate the love and excitement of the 3d world or push the boundaries of what is possible with software innovation. Its just big business! Max is a widget….and we are widget consumers. Not our opinion, but i think it may be theirs!

My only recourse, is to speak with my money. It seems to be the only language they understand at this point!

“But with this being the last year Digimation if offering their Suite, I think it would be a good idea for Max to grab Lightning, Glider and Chameleon. Can’t go wrong here as these will greatly improve Max’s VFX capabilities.”

Seriously?! I hope this was meant as a joke 🙂

Multithreaded Pflow that would be something. But seeing how slow AD reacts I suspect by the time they introduce something half decent Thinkboxsoftware and Co already has them beat with another fleshed out toolset.

Awesome to see so many old school max users speaking out. From my perspective, take away all the 3rd party plugins, and max completely, and totally dies. period. It’s whats propping it up.

Thank you all for the good words and the enthusiasm. It’s the first time I see a forum being publicly demanded by people.

I wanted to say we’re listening, the whole MU team is listening.

Special thanks to JokerMartini for actively offering to help.

@Stefan Didak:
> Wow. Is this the officially designated old-timer zone? 🙂

It certainly is…

It sounds like it was a condition of employment for it being deeply embedded into Maya. I recall from the press release, that they said, they wouldn’t release standalone, not sure why anyone is surprised by that. But, in some other interview with Nordenstam, he mentioned that they would have built in deeply into Maya in the first place, if they were able to from the beginning. I’m not sure why, and I’m almost certain, no one at AD knows, which app it will go/not go into next.

I’ve been using 3dsMax since it was 3d studio under DOS. I persuaded my Rebellion to buy character studio and we made AvP1. More the a decade on I know 3dsMax inside out, and I’m pretty sure that biped is the backbone of half the games on the market.
I’ve done award winning vfx work with 3dsMax. But I’ve had enough. I love 3dsMax but I’m sick of playing second fiddle to Maya. (… and quite Honestly right now I’m looking at Blender and thinking why can’t Max do that? )

I’m so frustrated by AD that I’m seriously thinking about Houdini. This is a very hard industry to stay afloat in. We need a clear roadmap so that we can plan ahead, and this yearly lucky dip feature set is driving me insane.

I would have demo’ed if anyone asked me.

Autodesk, please give the plugin developers what they want, so they can develop what you don’t want to.

Damn, this is like old times, had to post something for the heck of it. I too vote for a MU forum, would be great to get the feel of the old community forum back!

As to all the complaining about Maya over Max…honestly, I agree with the perception, but in reality…AD hasn’t really done much innovation in any of the 3 DCC applications. Ya, Maya gets BiFrost but that’s not innovation, its just integrating an already existing product. Rather I find it unfortunate that it does not exist for everyone as a stand-alone application as it did previously.

The most exciting time in terms of innovation between the 3 DCC applications was when they were all actually competing products owned by separate people…those were the days when it was always one trying to one up the other and we saw some pretty damn awesome innovation each year at Siggraph. Seriously since the three of them came under one controlling body there hasn’t been a whole lot of “new” ideas in any of them. And I don’t envy the position AD has put themselves into trying to concurrently develop/roadmap three products that “essentially” compete. I am not sure how personally Max directed we should take it…you might be surprised how much Maya users complain about AD and Maya.

The most interesting developments in the field have all been from plugin developers, specific toolset applications (like Zbrush) and in-house RnD teams. I would love it is something new emerged, something that really tweaked the industry and kicked things into gear again…who knows maybe something will come along and shock us all…and heck ya I would love it if it was Max, but who knows.

In the mean-time I will continue to pine for the days I got to use MAX in production. Currently its relegated to home/side project use and showing people at work (in a Maya/Houdini centric pipeline) how much easier/faster certain things are with it, just so they know I am not crazy with my impatient notes 😉 But in the end don’t ever forget that its us, the artists that make the awesome images we see…even if max died tomorrow we would all live on making awesome images.

Nice to see some old names from my history. I used 3ds since dos version 1. Then I defected to Maya around 2001. Well defected is wrong, because few big VFX houses used Max. It just didnt scale and it’s always been on the wrong OS for large scalability.

Anyway, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I’ve been out of the biz for 2 years….my last movie as a lighting artist was “John Carter”. Just wanted to say “hello” from Japan.

Chris,

it’s so great to hear this enthusiasm from you. I wanna dare to ask something, I’m not too worried if it may sounds simplistic, so please bear with me for a moment.

I moved to Max because I was sick of C4D (horrible modelling workflow, old and plastic/fake render engine, slow viewport with MoGraph just to name a few). So I looked for alternatives and I’ve found Max, and now I’m stuck to it. Many say that Max is great for Motion Graphics and I totally agree. Its Particle system it’s simply amazing and you guys are doing wonderful stuff with that. Thus now I’ve in my hands a powerful tool that, for the first time in my career, allows me to achieve hi-quality results. Said that, ironically when it comes to create fast (sometimes boring) motion graphics stuff that C4D dominates so well, is not always easy for me to get the same results in the same amount of time. Cloners, Effectors and so on are strong points in C4D. I just wish Max would have something similar and I specifically mean something as fast as C4D to setup. Sure, Pflow is a different story, and no doubts any skilled Pflow artist can bake same (if not better) results. But that requires lot of knowledge.
So, what about a cloner system for 3ds Max with modifiers to scale, randomize, control position, delay, and so forth (I can provide a detailed list of samples if needed) to give Max users what C4D is all about? Basically a Mograph tool?

Have you ever tried using the dated dynamics engine in Maya? Max users have it better than they think. Sorry but the grass isn’t greener on the other side, in fact it’s worse. I’m glad it’s coming to Maya as the tools within Maya have become pretty stale throughout the years.

@me,

Wow, just wow, I won’t get into this here because I really like the direction and flow that this page is having, because it’s about Max, but here’s a hint buddy, your application has a Unified Physics/Dynamics Solver, Appreciate it!… look that up, and just appreciate it.

+1 for all the well perceived suggestions here. Thanks MU for being the place you are.

Back to topic: What’s funny (and sad in the case of max…) is that VFX-related features are really really helpful to all kinds of markets (well, maybe not games in the first place).
Without the people who target the VFX market there would no ZBrush, no Ptex, no OpenSubD, Particles, hell even no motion blur I guess, and so much more. Someone who focuses on Archviz only will bring a camera correction maybe… or an architectural glass material 🙂
As some already stated the real force is brought to max through 3rd party devs and their focus on VFX for the most part. This way all people take advantage of some very clever tools.

I don’t understand why max haven’t many modern CG technologies ? ptex,alembic,stereoscopic camera,OpenSubD,python support and etc ?!
Haven’t standars tools we can see in more 3dpacks similar : good layer manager,outliner,powerful reference project and character manager,Measurement pack,standard dynamic and simulator tools and …
Continuous updates for old and Incomplete tools : CAT,animation tools,bullet dynamic,quicksilver,MR and etc

Nowadays user know max (without expensive plug-ins) only for arch&design and modeling tool
this is democratic for all markets ?
I hear voice of death coming for max in more markets and companies …

I think this is a good news, because there will be no more 3ds Max vs Maya threads. We can focus only on one software. I hope the studios will also change their main software.

@Marco – Have you tried ATK?

From what I see, it makes the same things as a MoGraph tool in C4D.
http://animatorstoolkit.com/atk/index.html

Oh please no, no more new 3d apps, as if we don’t already have enough of them, if you can get your hands on Max then by all means please go for it and I for one will support you, if not then just focus on all the amazing plugins that you guys have and help Max in that way.

Also +1 on a MU forum.

…and maybe Vray as default renderer, that would be nice.

I would be the first, actually talked on the concept of this with bobo once in Amsterdam and liked it already

Autodesk scaling back their siggraph presence is not all that surprising.

They seem to have been trying to cash in on the conference money themselves with autodesk university, instead of paying big bucks to some other independent organization “just to be there”.

Its very sad that a company that partly owes its success to the international and professional communities like siggraph (which is not only vfx) now essentally stop supporting them at the worst possible time.

Oh and honestly, i don’t wish the development of 3dsmax on thinkbox, i really like those people.

I would happily drop 2k if you guys made a Think-max-box. How much would it hurt to Kickstart it. Think of the dev you already have with your products, and adding a timeline, max stack that works in 2d instead of linear and we would have an approachable bit of kit that I would pay through the nose for.

I’ll be the 2nd to help that fund

+1 MU forum

@ Mpcdev: yes, ATK is a great product I really like it and I’m glad the devs came up with that solution. It made my life easier already several times. Said that, I see ATK mainly as a tool to speed up some animation process and help handling keyframes among several objects yet with some imagination can definitely be used to create interesting motion graphics combinations.

@ Chris: that sounds exciting! I’ll prepare a detailed email and I’ll send it to you. Thank you! Just only listening means a lot.

re: blender – unfortunately the specific license for blender means that any code we connect to it [plugins etc] become attached to the GPL meaning that we have to provide source code which also becomes GPL. I dont want to get into a debate about the details/benefits of this, but right now we own everything we write and license appropriate things [h264, QT etc]. i dont think i’m prepared to jump on a support only model at this point!

cheers

cb

By my expectation, AD will add fluid to max in the near future. And they will publicize it greatly. But it must be PhysX fluid. BTW, Do we want it actually? Their great big new feature of mCloth is really cheap for the high end production. and also massFX hard body dynamics. I think that, it does not match a price of subscription.
I want more modan feature some like bullet, flip and more. max cares too much about MS(ribbon) and NV(physX). As a result, a user suffers a loss.

if they have a million users, even if only half of that on subscription that equates to £250m per year! how the heck can they not be developing this product, where on earth is the money going! they need to reinvest asap into its development

@paul gill,

It just doesn’t add up no matter how I look at it, there are things in Max broken and/or outdated that could’ve been fixed or updated/polished in a matter of days, there are workflow/speed issues(like a hotbox system, for gods sake pretty much every app have them these days) that could have been implemented a long time ago and haven’t, there are many big or small plugins and tools(in many cases simple modifiers) that are ready to be integrated into Max and make life easier for people which are ignored, there are fundamental technologies like catmull-clark(now opensd) subdiv surfaces at their disposal that have been integrated in other packages that are ignored when it comes to Max, and lastly there are feature that are plain missing in Max’s toolset like a fluid simulator which actually could be there at the next release but got dragged away from it.

I just can’t understand what this company is doing to this software that requires the overlook of the majority of the problems in Max and the least amount of attention to it’s needs, Max has become the old guy that they’ve held captive in the basement just to collect his social disability check and don’t really care about.

Can’t you just come back and rescue him?

You probably won’t, but even thinking about it is comforting.

Really? you guys are crying because your sister(maya) will get more than you? If you can be so software agnostic change over to maya, since autodesk is trying to sell max for design/archViz and maya for vfx, it’s just marketing.

I have to admit that after so many years of “war”, I am happy that maya keeps getting better, somehow. Maybe this is the right time to move, I was a 3ds max user too, and maya can be so much better, dont be afraid of change.

Cheers

Pretty awesome to see so many 3ds vets here along with the new blood (albeit under frustrating circumstances).

Like many here I grew up with 3ds – first at Autodesk with a beta called THUD which became 3D Studio Dos 1. As I moved through games, cinematics, music videos, TV and film, max grew with me.

Some releases were chock full of features (admittedly with varying stability & usefulness) but in the early days there was an exciting sense of innovation, competition and sheer *energy* from the developers. I remember Gary Yost & Jack Powell demoing their baby at Siggraph, mingling with the crowd and answering questions. Would be something to have the current developers make a similar attempt to foster direct connections with the max community..

It makes sense that we would see things settle down as features matured and max grew, but over the years that sense of energy and passion no longer seems apparent. I’m sure the developers who slave long & hard over each iteration of max DO have that passion & dedication… but I wager the layers of bureaucracy and impersonal corporate nature of Autodesk stifle their ability to connect with us as they might want, and to incorporate features they hear us clamoring for..

I still hold out some hope for max – it has kept me gainfully employed for close to 2 decades, not to mention all the rewarding artistic experiences and fun I’ve had. Having said that, I’m spending more time in other apps – currently in a Maya/C4D/VRay shop.

Please get a MU forum going – I do miss the old pre-Area board.

Thank you for the plug on Andru and I’s ATK tool. We continue to develop and work on it to better improve the animation tools in 3ds Max. As a hint to everyone on this thread, I do have in the works and animation tool that will be a very very large game changer in regards to 3ds Max over Maya. Coming soon…. I’ll be sure to have the MU team announce it here on the site when I release it. Just another tool AD should have done years ago. Instead we have to because AD doesn’t listen and takes to long.

I managed to finish college in 3D animation, then learn programming/code on the side to finish tools that AD couldn’t develop with a team of people over the course of a nearly a decade. I know for a fact that AD has a talented team of programmers who are well capable of developing more than what we for as artists, it’s the higher ups who are at fault. My personal frustration goes to those people. There are a lot of things that go on behind closed doors at AD and decisions that are made which only sadden me about a program that I so strongly used to vouch for. I find it harder and harder to do that anymore.

I think I speak for everyone on this forum when I say ‘we all seem to care about a program a hell of a lot more than the people who own it’.

Where as people at Thinkbox truly continue to inspire us all to push the envelope with ideas and suggestions as they continue to develop and innovate in a collaborative manner.

High five to THINKBOX!

I’m impressed people still use Max, Maya or XSI. Isn’t there something better yet?

Guess all the innovators left the business. 😉

j-me
you see me trollin’ the web site
just know I’m writin’ dirty

Its a shame that Max has been left in the dust as far as pipeline integration goes. How hard would it be to add native Alembic, Python,Open Subdiv, etc. It seems like the only innovations to any of the Autodesk products have come by buying existing plugins and including them with the base packages. The problem with this is that they aren’t offering us anything we didn’t have access to before, and some times as in the case of CAT mess it up a bit in the process. Autodesk is by far the leader in 3d DCC but they seem to be happy to sit around on their monopoly and leave the innovation to others.

Chris Bond for President ! 🙂

since Autodesk selling 3Ds Max is very unlikely, this how I wish Autodesk to cooperate with ThinkBoxSoftware:
1 – Keep “3Ds Max Design” + XBR + MS(ribbon) to the developers at Autodesk
2 – Send “3Ds Max 2009” source code to ThinkBoxSoftware, Bobo and others will know how to push the product from there
3 – wait two or three years for serious cutting-edge development
4 – 3Ds Max is Born again with all its expected glory
5 – everyone is happy

It is really nice to see this discussion going forwad with a lot of artists and well known 3ds max users talking about it.

As a lot of you I’ve a lot of concerns about 3ds max future, I use it since 1st MS-Dos release and I love it, it gave me the possibility to start doing 3D/VFX in a different way, before it I was writing code to see my rendering in progress with stuff like Pov and DKB. I had the possibility to work on different market before landing on my dream, working on FX for commercials, movies, game cinematics etc etc.

I think we have two main issue there, Naiad/Bifrost issue and general communication/management issue with Autodesk/3ds max.

Naiad was a great piece of software and having it as part of 3ds max would be really really good, actually Marcus told us that its code is standalone so it can be “linked” to any DCC software and that would be great to have it inside 3ds max, but the idea to have it just inside Maya is not good for me because Autodesk will forces its users to buy suites and it is not right, I’m a freelancer, I use just 3ds max and its plug-ins, why I have to buy a suite with Maya to use it just as host to work with fluids and then move it back to 3ds max ??? It is not a good way for me. There’s an other issue, there are users that hates the Maya UI and workflow, why I’ve to use a software that can give me problems to have a feature like that, so it would be better to have it in 3ds max or having an external software as before….in these cases you are free to decide, if Autodesk will decide to release Naiad/Bifrost just for Maya, you’ll not free.

Talking about 3ds max development and its future…Autodesk is managing stuff in the wrong way. Too poor communication, bad development decisions and sometimes/often, it seems that ideas are not clear, (UI design, Ribbon, etc etc). Users don’t want some features or development plans and they do it, users asks for some features/fixes and they don’t do it…it is a really strange way. Developer are great guys, I’m sure, but upper level of the company has no clear vision or has strange clear vision about 3ds max future.

Actually there are some problems for me, urgent problems. 3ds max is a really old piece of software, it needs to fresh its code/features. UI needs re-design, but I think it needs to mantain its core design because some stuff are great, so for example ribbon are not useful, new menù and search feature in 3ds max 2014 are really good, but we need to have a re-design of the command panel, it is old, it needs to be larger to give more space for texts/windows/buttons/options. And there are a lot of ideas I’ve about it and a lot of things that can be done over it.

Layer manager needs love, Node-based UI needs love, object selection list needs to be faster, Animation needs love, Skin/rigging needs love, and I can continue 🙂 we need some modern features as part of base feature lists, (I mean Alembic, Python, PTex, etc etc).

We need to have more multi-threading usage on complex features like PFlow, Cloth, etc etc. It is not normal to see 5% CPU usage during complex cloth simulation on my Dual Xeon E5 workstation, or imagine how PFlow can be faster with a lot of particles or complex setup using all my 32 threads instead one….

I love 3ds max, I think that its open architecture, stacked modifiers and a lot of its features are amazing, but it needs love. Latest version is not bad, I mean, we have no new big features, but a lot of work on bug fixing, feature speed up, some UI working, are not bad, but it is nothing to say that it is a new version, maybe a revision…we can see how other packages out of Autodesk are moving, SideFX, TheFoundry, Fabric, etc etc. I’m sure other software have a lot of problems like us or more than us, and infact I still use 3ds max as my favourite software, but it needs to start moving in a different way and at different speed….so maybe I’m writing too much things all together but it is nice to have the possibility to contribute and talk with you guys.

Last thing…Area is not a good place I think, we are a lot of people but not so much people are on Area, and that’s why Autodesk is doing bad work on it I think, so having a MaxUnderground forum or a place like that where it will be possible to give right space to 3ds max community it will be really great.

Let’s continue talking about 3ds max, it will be really useful I think, and maybe with a lot of noise someone in Autodesk can hear us 😉

So how much new features was added after Naiad death?
If they stay like it be at the end FlipRBDfluids – then it’s take to much time to develop “ready” framework if there are NO deep integration in Maya.
At the end it could be like Houdini DOP context inside Maya.

BTW: guys is it necessary to post from what version you start with 3ds max?
Is it add a weight to your’s person 🙂 Same repeating every year.

Great discussion everyone.
+1 for an MU forum from me too 🙂

compeletly Compliant with Alessandro

this thread is indeed like a who’s who of 3D max. Now max needs a lot of love thats for sure. maybe it could be a sort of unique problem if it being aimed at so many different distinct fields. often tools that are used most require a fair few mouse clicks to reach. with the 2014 release matters were compounded. The aim seems to be to have ‘a’ solution to a problem as opposed to ‘THE’ solution to a problem. populate for example is a prime example of this, it could have been so much more. I’d advise them (if i was ever asked) to not wall the user in….give them a chance to do crazy things with tools …often then you will see some unique user based solutions.

But it does ask the question is Maya being used in as the main fx tool because companies prefer it and it having mac and linux versions or because every good fx development seems to go to Maya. I honestly think max is getting to a critical mass point where the code has now been through so many hands over so many years that the only way forward is to either look at ripping it into bits and doing a major rewrite or even a total rewrite. Max isn’t alone on this, many apps now have bugs stacked on top of bugs because of extended years of development and sometimes mind knumbingly crazy decisions. There is only so long you can stack the wooden blocks on top of each other before the whole lot comes crashing down.

bridging in Thinkbox and Bobo (who both have my utmost respect) to oversee (as I see a takeover as every unlikely) max development would be a good idea. There needs to be more artists and programmers involved in that side that have actually used the software in anger at a high level. Your guys in charge ideally should have experience of using an app before bring involved in planning its future. Their first experience should not be on suddenly being thrust in charge. media and entertainment is not like running a factory making batteries or cars!

Like many I am keeping an eye on this and planning for the future….. max has amazing support from plugin developers and users and many are now feeling ignored. I,m sure I’m not alone in having often wondered about what could be done with all the code I’ve got on various drives that would be nice to put into an app where its future plans are certain and not prone to the change of executive positions in a year or two.

That wont end well…for either side…it never does. but as for lack of new features…well it could be worse…. softimage guys get next to nothing new…. mudbox users are close to storming the castle with burning sodding torches…. something needs to be done fast to stop alienating users…more than lip service should be paid to there needs. Bring people in who know things at the sharp end PLEASE. No matter how good someone is at sales, accounts or marketing; if they have no serious knowledge of the app they are in charge in then it is doomed to failure. Ignoring this tiny fact gets things in the situation they are right now. (and it will get worse I have no doubt)

fabric engine is something that i am keeping an eye on…. as no one is buying softimage in great numbers..maybe ripping that into a sdk library and allowing development to go forward that way is an option (putting the customers in charge of the direction it goes in according to their needs)….although ideally I’d like to see that done for max. Having new ideas isant the problem…..getting them executed by autodesk often is.

In case you missed the announcement Ember is know a part of Stoke 2. Beta to follow later this summer.

Thank you for all the kind words for us at Thinkbox. We don’t always get it right, but we promise to never stop trying.

Wow, this thread has certainly been a trip down memory lane! So many names from over the years really shows how passionate the Max user community once was and still appears to be. What a rare treat to hear from Gary Yost, THE man himself (complete with haiku).

I clearly remember the uproar when AD announced it would be dismantling the web board and moving it to the new Area site. Everyone warned them that it was a big mistake and they kept trying to reassure us that it was going to be great. After a very rocky start and plenty of complaints about the lack of usability of the new format AD came back with a promise that they were “working on it” and in time it would be a thriving community hub we would all be proud to frequent. Of course this never came true…ironically similar to the last several years of Max development.

@Carl
>>Would it be a crazy thing to as Autodesk if the users could have a structured round table on the future of Max? Even if nothing could be promised<<
Didn't this exact thing exist once upon a time in the form of the Max User Advisory Board? If it's still around I've not heard anything about it in a long time.

While we are waxing nostalgic, does anyone know what happened to the following people?

John K. Jordan
John Versluis
Graham Navarro/Calhoun
Steve Blackmon
Doug McNabb
Vince Ibeachum
The rest of the original 3ds/IPAS/Max dev teams (Rolf, Larry, Tom, Don, Dan, Jack, Darrel, etc.)

+1 for a MU forum from me, and it’s great seeing all these old names on here.

@Mitch

John K. Jordan retired and is living on his farm in Oak Ridge, TN I believe.

John Versluis – Last I heard he was still in LA and working on some mobile apps/games. I’ll try to get in touch with him.

I miss Eni Oken, and then i would have the feeling i am warped back in the 1995, in some 3dRing.com circle 🙂 I saw here all those great people, the idols from my youth, and i am happy they came back for one more time.
This also shows how critical, dramatic and crucial this moment is.

I am sure this is also the last time we see the all whole who-is-who 3dmax society and developers at once in one single petition. There will be in a year or two, if this lethargic situation persists, no such gathering again. It will be silence.

Every government and every company should use the situation where the mob is loud shouting to do something. Once the mob is silent, it is too late.

My opinion: Naiad was is this case not important. It was just the trigger. We know, as many has written above, what is the cause for the current revolt.

MU as forum: it is nice idea, but a very complicated, demanding solution: you need a team of reliable co-workers to sit in it 24h a day and clean if from spam and trash posts, reduce conflicts and remain professional. I don’t know if Pablo has financial means for such enterprise.

Max development: Rune Spans brought it to the point: AD is in a terrible dilemma. Something like Catch 22, and i must admit i see here no perfect suggestions or ideas how to solve it without at least 3-5 years extra work. I know this sounds crazy, but if they are already crazy about putting all efforts into maya, let them 1 year to port Max UI 1:1 to Maya, and full compatibility so i can open my Max scenes and work there. Then we could maybe talk about the migration. (this step is also something i can’t understand in Blender – if they would make an UI Max Scheme, with shortcuts and Max typical workflow, my God, i would be the first one to work in it. It seems they are also a bunch of developers driven by own ideology and no interest in attracting other part).

@Igor
It is too funny you mention Eni because I was just looking at her website about 30 minutes ago!

http://www.enioken.com/jewelry/artist.html

One of her renderings came up in the 2014 “what’s new” online doc and I thought “Hey, what ever happened to her?”

http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/16/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/images/GUID-13B9E79E-B52B-40DC-B6DD-538A773CA4A0-low.png

@Mitch: Steve Blackmon is working at Caustic/Imagination, building the cross-app Visualizer that does real-time raytraced viewports. He frequents their forums quite a lot, and I have a feeling he’s reading this.

The Splutterfish guys had a really really good feel for how to make something advanced, easy to use, and fit inside the (pre 2010) 3ds Max GUI design. They would be my dream-team for re-designing Max 🙂

Been using 3D Studio since the dos days, and though I’ve been using a lot of proprietary tools at the last few studios, I continue to freelance with 3DS Max and create my own animated films using it. It is great to see this thread, but it is also disappointing to see the lack of concern on Autodesk’s part for this incredible piece of software. I find it more and more difficult to find the kinds of high end resources for 3ds max that I can for Maya, and yet I am so comfortable in Max. I’ve created entire pipelines using 3DS Max, doing all kinds of stuff with NPR rendering all thanks to maxscript. In the end though, I find it more difficult with each passing release to justify holding on to it. If Autodesk really isn’t looking at 3DS Max as a viable option for VFX, then it makes little sense to stick with it. I like Igor’s idea of creating transitions tools, to open files in Maya etc. They should offer a reduced price cross grade or something for all of us who have used 3ds max for vfx all these years.

I would also want to see forum on MU.

@Thinkbox : I really would love to see fluid simulation (liquid) plugin for 3ds max from you guys. There is just phoenix and glu3d gpu that’s only integrated in 3ds max. I wonder if you guys consider buying glu3d gpu (and push it further) or make your own plugin which will also can use advantages of Krakatoa and Frost as well as other products. That will be awesome! Whether thinkbox should handle 3ds max or not, but I would love to see this (fluid sim plugin for 3dsmax) from you guys.

I’ll be consice:

Chris bond and Thinkbox to manage Max: I VOTE YES!

Please put naiad in max and it will become THE soft everybody want for FX work.

If AD wants develop both maya and max, be it, but please don’t tell us which goal the work we do with those 3d softwares should serve… The goal af a 3D software is to be able to reproduce the visual reality on a screen (in other words to recreate the world visually). Every 3D software shoul just try to be better at doing that faster and with more accuracy. Then if someone use those visual elements for games or for movie, architecture or the web, it seems to me that’s not autodesk problem…

Woah, where did this thread come from?!
Now I wish I checked MU during Siggraph 🙂

I must say the Autodesk presentation felt somewhat like a timeshare scam. You had to sit through 3 hours of presentations if you wanted to receive your free drink. Personally I gave up about half way, there are only so many renders of vines I can watch without a beer in my hand 🙂

To be fair though, the features Marcus demoed in Bifrost looked really cool, especially direct rendering of voxels. Good job!

Wow! Seeing all these names here is like being back in the good ol’ Discreet-era forums! It’s awesome to read the names of so many people I talked to back then and haven’t seen in quite a while… Cheers y’all!
I guess it’s not worth re-posting what others have posted before. As some others who work in VFX, I’ve had to move on and stop using Max since a little ago. Based on the type of work I do, Max has ceased to be a productive and viable tool. I still use it, of course, but its no longer my go-to DCC. Most of my employers in VFX are based on Maya, so that’s what I use now. I still get some work from Max, but it’s not VFX related.
As for my own personal projects and freelance gigs, Max also has been quite relegated by the amount of broken tools and unfinished features. I’ve spent a while looking around at options, and after considering Maya (it has all the features you need for VFX and freelance work after all), I decided to settle on Modo and Houdini for some non-profit special tasks. To my surprise, Modo has a pretty good toolset now, even surpassing Max in many areas I didn’t expected it to, so I’m pretty satisfied with it. I still have some exploring to do (completely changing your toolset takes a little time), but it seems to be headed in the right direction, and honestly, Modo being backed up by The Foundry gives me a certain level of hope. In short, the last few weeks using it have given me a pretty good breath of fresh air, something I haven’t felt from Max in quite a while. But that’s just me, and I will continue to use Max because some people I work for still use it, so I know it will still be around.
@ChrisB: If there’s a company that really knows Max and VFX it’s you guys. I’ve always felt you were the ones capable of taking Max to the next level, if it wasn’t for Autodesk’s dissinterest in supporting Max in the VFX world. Anyway, I won’t rant to much about it. I know the Dev team personally, and they are great people who really do their best. Kudos to them.
Great to see ya all!

Compuserve?

Now I do feel old…

This thread needs a spitoon.

Thanks JokerMartini for putting so much effort into this.

As Gary Yost said, we have not taken a dime from Autodesk for years — they own the code we wrote outright. So please don’t blame Gary or Yost Group for what’s going on. We have NOTHING whatsoever to do with the current product.

That said, I’ll toss in my two cents’ worth…

When I see Max used for things like “Star Trek: Into darkness”, “The Incredibles” and many other mainstream films, it tells me that Max is an important element in the world of CGI, and it deserves to be supported. There are thousands of artists out there with a tremendous investment in the product in terms of their time and talent, and they produce some damn good work with it.

We put a massive amount of time and effort into 3ds Max. In the years since we started it, it has evolved far beyond what I had imagined. I love working with it and am continually amazed at the fun, cool stuff I can do with it using features that were added after our involvement ended. I do a fair amount of coding to customize features for my personal needs and to help out some long-time friends who use it in their work. It’s exciting to see it do more and more via the plugin architecture.

Last September, I sent an email to the 3ds Max product manager and pitched a number of tools I have in various stages of development. A pretty cool modeling tool that lets you create branched spline-based structures with really nice skinning (think trees, blood vessels, bone matrix, etc.). A force field that lets you define custom forces using any number of splines to define the forces. My ShapeBoolean tool, used for doing booleans with shapes (a feature I was kind of amazed that Max never got, but I needed for re-making my old “Corner Stone” film). A “Distance” WSM, useful for parameter-wiring to control things based on distances (something you should be able to do with the Tape helper but can’t). I have others as well that I’ve used for various things.

Well, I thought they were pretty cool and would be useful for lots of people (the guys I developed them for were very happy with them and enthusiastic about getting them into Max, at any rate), and I thought they’d be a good addition to the core code — but after sending a bunch of sample animations and screen captures showing them, there was no response from Autodesk. Nothing, not a peep. Not “We’d like to see more”. Not “Take a hike, we’re not interested”. Nothing. I was surprised, because there wasn’t even basic courtesy in letting me know they had bothered to review the material.

The other day I was contacted by a Max user who was concerned that Max is being neglected in favor of Maya. Not being privy to what’s going on inside Autodesk, all I can do is relate my experience, which is that my pitch for adding some useful tools to Max was completely ignored. Not that what I had to offer was the Second Coming or anything, but it would at least be nice to know that they had looked at it.

The only real stake I have in 3ds Max any more is that I use it in my work and enjoy seeing other people do cool stuff with it and make a living using it. Sure would be nice to see that continue.

Money talks. That’s the only language Autodesk will ever understand.

We have to organize a subscription drop on a large scale. If everyone is willing to pay late fees for you or someone else.

For the past years, I have the impression that only a very small percentage of your sub goes into development, very small. That will never change if we keep supporting them with money.

And if it won’t change when subs drop, it means it was already a lost case and it would be time to move on.

@ Tom
That is so disrespectful of AD (if they don’t have a valid reason to why they haven’t received the email for some technical reason?). I share any frustration you might feel in this regards.

Like many of you others, I too have been making my living of Max for the better part of 15 years.
Reading this thread is both depressing and uplifting at the same time.
Depressing for the increasing feeling of staying on a ship headed for an iceberg and uplifted by the strong incitement we share to make Max sail through the troubled waters and hopefully come out stronger.

I support any initiative, that will make Max users carry more weight in the eyes of AD.

@ JokerMartini
Can’t wait for a follow up if you manage to get them in dialog.

@JokerMartini : We might need to compare notes as I have been communicating with Adsk as well and have been doing that for a longer time already during the past years in relation what we are discussing down here and more.

@Tom Hudson,

Wow, that’s exactly what I’m talking about(and very worried about), it was really sad reading that, sad and typical, there are so many great tools big and small, and so many great technical talents out there developing for Max that they could take advantage of and just make this product better, in any and all directions, and they just IGNORE them, the ideas, the tools and the talents. I just can’t understand the reason behind this kind of treatment.

They at the least owe people, their clients to explain this kind of behavior, hey maybe there’s a good reason behind it(though I very much doubt so, how can there be a good reason behind ignoring things that can not only help you but also benefit everybody else around you?), then have the courtesy and tell us if that’s the case, if not, and you don’t have a good reason for what you are and aren’t doing then I’m just gonna stick to my analogy a few posts back and I’m a fool for trusting you.

I just simply wanna know why they are doing this, limiting what Max can be and ignoring things that can make it better at what it already is.

@Robert> +1

At the rate I see once die hard Max centric people putting their feet in the water with other programs and some just plain leaving the platform, I hope if they do such a thing it would be soon. Sergio Mucino taking off pretty much for other pastures for example, is a drain on the platform for sure but on another note, it’s not just paid work that is moving away from Max. Take a look at the number of schools that have switched, I may be old now, but health wise for the platform where are the new students coming up with experience going to come from if schools are not teaching it. Schools are a sign of industry shift as well for platforms. VFX is just one industry, but they are your future user base to some degree and having less of them means you will not have the student that can walk into another field that needs 3d. One of the reasons Max has so many users is the Viz base that has grown in recent years. If VFX shifts to another package a teaching platform due to oversight or possibly neglect who is going to render my next washing machine? Sounds funny but as the industry seemingly pulls away from broader tools like Max it does not have reach it did and the industry shrinks. What if their was only Lightroom on the Adobe side and say they started to neglect Photoshop and no one was really developing a Photoshop replacement? Would the industry itself weaken? Dunno.

I keep getting people email and message me about this thread and want me to put in my two cents worth.

I want to first state that everything l’m about to say is my opinion and nothing more. It is not based on inside information and is only based on what is public.

Autodesk is a huge corporation and the media side of it is rather small in comparison so lets keep that in mind as we talk about specific pieces of software. Autodesk doesn’t care, as a whole, individual programmers might, that any given piece of software is being given more or less attention or is being developed for the future in a given way. What Autodesk cares about is the bottom line. This is a fair thing for it to be doing since a corporation that is publicly owned is about making money and nothing more.

Autodesk owns the top three 3D animation softwares on the market, one we already know is being killed and that is XSI. The development team is gone and it is a free add on to the suites these days. Lets also note that of the three XSI is the best one from a core stand point. It is the most uptodate core and can do things that neither Max or Maya can do or do as fast. So if you wanted to put all your eggs in one basket XSI would be the logical choice..right? Well Autodesk isn’t about developing the best product for us the users, it is about developing the most profit for the share holders. XSI was the least used of the three and didn’t make the profits that the others did but was costing money, share holders money, to develop.

So now we are down to Max and Maya, well really we are down to Max, Max Design and Maya.

So if you are a share holder in Autodesk wouldn’t you be scratching your head and asking why are you developing three products that basically do the same things? And why are two of those softwares identical out side of a couple tools. Now Max, as far as I understand has always out sold Maya and done it with a smaller development team then Maya does. As I think we all know now Maya has a development team some three times the size of Max. This points at the assumption that Max can keep making profits without being developed much. Small things are added like the viewports and plugins tacked on here and there but really as far as an entertainment tool Max development has crawled to a halt. Hell I can rig characters in Max 8 just the same that I can in Max 2014.

Max Design is just riding along on the coattails of Max but fills a unique area in the Autodesk Suites. The CAD side of the business, that is about a 1000 times larger (I don’t know the real number but it is way larger) then the Media & Entertainment side needs it currently for visualizations.

Now Maya is known for doing ALL the large movie FX, (OK, so we know better right?) at least how it is seen from the out side. If you ask a class room full of students that are learning both Max and Maya which is used in all the feature films they will all tell you Maya. If you ask them what Max is used for they don’t even know. Why is that?? Simple, that is the message that Autodesk has been pushing for many years now. Remember, Max is still selling and doesn’t need to be advertised, this was at least one of the excuses that I remember hearing.

So if Max has the most seats out there, at least that is what we are told, and Maya is the assumed number one software, if you were Autodesk and wanted to phase one out and put all your eggs in one basket which would it be. Let me rephrase that, if you were only interested in making money and you didn’t have to use the software which would you choose?

Lets say you decide to choose Max. Max has the most seats right so it is easy to take over the rest of the Autodesk 3D market. From a dollars standpoint this means that Max doesn’t have far to grow to take up the rest of the market and Maya will die quickly if not developed and you could lose market to other companies. If you choose Maya however it can grow and sell lots of seats and Max can support itself during the switch from one to the other. People like us, the die hard Max users will ensure that.

Lets look at what has been happening for the last many years.

3DS Max has had little development that hasn’t been just the addition of plugins like pFlow box 1 & 2. The viewport are being worked on and are looking better then ever but that isn’t helping VFX or Animation, what it does help is Visualization. Over and over again we are promised ground breaking new tools and what is delivered is half baked, half completed garbage. Does referencing work? No, could it, yup. We were sold on containers being the biggest and best thing coming and it doesn’t work at all. I could write a book on features that have been half completed in Max and not further developed as they were supposed to. Slate.. I will restrain myself from continuing with the list. Max is sitting idle for the most part. We keep getting thrown a bone and told that new things are on the way but we never see them. Just enough to keep our hopes up, just enough to keep us from running to another software that isn’t owned by Autodesk.

Now Maya has a development team about three times the size of Max’s. Even Kees, who was a Max developer when on the outside is developing for Maya. I’m not knocking Kees, great position for him and I wish him all the best at it. But why didn’t they hire him to develope for Max when her already knows it?? I will let you answer that for your self. Maya is getting ALL the new tech that Max doesn’t get. This thread is all about just that. Max is better at VFX then Maya so why isn’t Max getting these new tools?? Maya isn’t being pushed heavily at Features, Broadcast, Games and VFX and Max isn’t being pushed at all. It is obvious from this that Maya is destined to have these markets, that is what Autodesk wants and is putting all their money into. Max was the champion of the games market, has anything been put into Max to help this area at all in the last five years, not that I can see, it has all been put into Maya and has been pushed for Maya.

Another area that has been interesting is the education market. This is also an area that I’m in as a full time professor. I also know teachers that are at the high school level that teach 3D. When the sales team from Autodesk shows up it is Maya that is pushed and discussed not Max. Maya has all the packaged teaching aids, not Max. I spoke with one high school teacher that told me they were directly pushing Maya and telling them not to bother with Max and that no one used it and this was several years ago now.

The sales team for Autodesk will first try and sell Maya to companies and will out right lie about Max and what it can do. I was at one company a couple years ago that wanted cheaper rendering solutions. They were using Maya and were having to pay for every render node because MR is Maya doesn’t have an unlimited render seats like Max does. When I told them that Max did they told me I was wrong as they asked the sales guy about it and they said that it didn’t. I had to show them proof that it did and they were dumbfounded and didn’t know how to react. We then discussed what Max could do for them and much of what I was telling them what not what the sales guy had told them. You can read into this what you want.

I know that Frank responded here with excuses why Max wasn’t supported at Siggraph this year. Frank is a very savvy businessman and knows the business of 3D very well. I personally don’t believe that no Max guys could show up for the user group meeting, I think that either none were invited or just not followed up on because there were enough Maya guys to fill the show. If I’m wrong, how about the names of the guys that were invited, I’m sure that I know most of them and would love to ask them if they decided not to show. The idea that the Max development isn’t ready to be shown is bull, there isn’t any Max development worth showing, there hasn’t been for years so why would this year be any different. We will get some new viewport filters and enhancements and they pull the Adobe trick by moving current tools to new menus.

Please don’t tell me that People Power (or what ever it is called) is an animation tool either as it is a joke that took six years at least to develope. There have been Max scripts that were far more powerful then it. All it has done is make it really easy for Vis guys to populate a scene so that it doesn’t look so lifeless. Rememeber when the new Graphite modeling tools where added and we were told that Max was going down this road to a new UI, What happened to that feature, dead and not developed. Now they spend time developing the all new menu system in Max, but wait, it isn’t even turned on! You need to do this your self. Strangely enough I can’t even do that in my version of Max.

OK, so I’m starting to rant now, ok, so I was ranting from the begining. I think that I have earned the right as I have done more advertising for what Max can do then Autodesk has for the last six or seven versions.

Where do I think it is all going, again, I don’t have any inside information on this, I think that Max will die a slow death, Max Design will fill the Vis market and Maya will be for everything else in the Entertainment field.

There, I just shot a huge hole in my foot.

I composed my post so fast last night with so many thoughts running through my head that I completely neglected to point out one of the most useful parts of the branched spline object (called PolyWire for the time being). Yeah, you can do stuff like trees and such with it, and not have crappy geometry like limbs jammed through the trunk, etc — but it outputs nice quad meshes with any source topology, and I think that one of the big appeals of the tool is that you could use it to quickly generate nice, regular quad base meshes for human/nonhuman characters and such that you take over to Mudbox or another sculpting tool for refinement. I do think this would be useful as a core feature in Max for a lot of uses.

It has a long way to go before it would be ready for prime time but my proof-of-concept test plugin is working pretty well. I’ve been working on it on an as-time-permits basis, and haven’t had a lot of time to devote to it lately, but Michael Spaw (who pitched the concept to me back around 2008) has been bugging me to finish it up and I think I’m going to front-burner it this week and maybe put some samples up on my website to see what interest there is from others.

Don’t drag me into this, Paul 🙂

As a (former) 3dsMax user and plugin developer I think some of the frustrations voiced in this thread are very understandable.

But to clarify, the reason I ended up at Autodesk where I did is because Frank Delise asked me to join the new Games Solutions Team. In that team we do not specifically think about 3dsMax users or Maya users, we do our best to find solutions for games customers in general.

I was only Maya for a bit while the Games Team was being set up so that is probably where the confusion comes from, sorry.

We do use Maya as our base program. But I am not the only one on the team who feels we really need to improve some of the UI and workflow concepts in Maya if we were to ever appeal to 3dsMax users.

I hope the energy we have at the Games Team is going to be nurtured at Autodesk and we get an opportunity to make that happen.

Thanks for the interesting read Paul. And what you just said makes a few things a clot clearer for me.

Since we cancelled our maya subscription 3 years ago and went the 3ds max route AD is “constantly” (at least 3-4 times a year) trying to make us switch to Maya again. I thought it was because the person before me worked with Maya and we are still registered inside their database as former Maya clients. But your story shines another light on their phone calls which makes a lot more sense at least in my opinion.

@Tom
I’m quite shocked to hear that AD acted the way they did.

I’m sure everyone remembers this:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120807005518/en/Autodesk-Lightstorm-Entertainment-Weta-Digital-Drive-Virtual

“Lightstorm and Weta Digital were behind some of the most visually stunning movies of the last decade. By bringing together their talent and experience with our own expertise, we are creating tools to help our customers take better advantage of important developments in moviemaking and visual effects,” said Carl Bass, Autodesk CEO.

Clearly someone at the top at Autodesk only sees one of their 3D apps as a moviemaking tool.

If there is no ROI for a product then it will die slowly by Autodesk.

Hi Kees,

the thing is – why are you trying to attract Max users?

I bought a seat of Maya back at R5 – never much cared for it and never upgraded it.

All my stock is in Max, buying and supporting a new seat of a 3D app, plus any plugins doesn’t make much financial sense.

If Autodesk want to make Maya available to us, that would at least be something – but I’m not going to plonk down several thousand after Max has been ignored for some long – that seems idiotic to me.

In the same way that I’d never use an Autodesk compositing app after getting dumped on, I wouldn’t switch to another Autodesk 3D app.

It’s not the app, it’s the company’s policies that are the problem.

@Robert Seidel: While a VIP/”Invite Only” MU forum sounds interesting, the most important feature for me that the old forum had was real names. MU is actually pretty good at this, so I hope that real names would be a requirement.

@Tom

Hi Tom, just wanted to say I did get the email and thought they were fantastic ideas. Unfortunately,I was let go shortly there after not able to push it forward anymore.

-Shane

All of the major packages are fundamentally flawed. Every single 3D package is focused on delivering features. Features aren’t what a dev team should focus on. Exposing a framework on which to build should be.

Imagine if the Google Chrome or Internet Explorer teams had to develop every website. The world wide web would be mostly useless. You would have MSN.com

What needs to happen is for the DCC tool to be first and foremost a platform. Autodesk shouldn’t be integrating Maya, Autodesk should be changing max and Maya to have been compatible with a tool like Naiad in the first place. Once we have a platform which is flexible and extensible enough for others to build on top we will see real innovation from developers enhancing the ecosystem. What a boneheaded idea it was when Steve Jobs was opposed to his operating system having no apps. Applications/Extensions are what define a platform.

The real root of the problem though for the immediate future is how obscene it is that I pay the same amount as a Maya customer but Autodesk steals my subscription money and puts it into Maya development. We spend $1,000 on subscription and Maya gets $600. It would be like buying a house and having the builder spend most of the money on my neighbor’s pool.

@Shane Griffith: thanks for clarifying that, I’m sure it’ll be good for Tom to hear it.

To be fair here, I’d like to say that most every time we’ve tried contacting PMs or other people at Autodesk from MU they have been very responsive.

I would be happy to see anybody out there integrate a max ui into Houdini or Modo. Maybe we should contact Nex. I foresee a large part of AD market walking off into the sunset in disgust over the treatment of max and its users.

wow! great to hear that so many old friends are still around and involved in either the development or use of 3dsmax.

I’ve been stuck on a maya show for about 6 months. while a great opportunity to learn python and catch up on some maya developments, every single day I miss the modifier stack. 🙂

As for the base discussions here, about 2 years ago I spoke to a local teacher about their maya 3d course and he was pulling his hair out seeing all the features, optimizations and money going into max, while maya was getting minimal (perceived) attention. he was actively pushing the school to at least entertain the idea of switching their program to include more 3dsmax.

I appreciate your response, Frank. It gives me hope that if we don’t see features, we’ll at least see stability improvements.

I’ve been using Max since dosR4. Since AD bought alias, it’s been common knowledge that they are developing maya for entertainment industries and max for arch/vis/games. I’m constantly excited and amazed at the dedication and skills of the community to really step up to the plate bringing much needed tools to the 3dsmax table.

Having spent so much more time in Maya recently, it’s ridiculous how much I need to code to get what I want out of the software. When I’ve run into problems with it, I can usually find one or 2 references to others experiencing the same issue, and NO solutions.
If I think there’s a neat tool that I can’t find in the interface, I typically can’t find a whole lot of help online, whereas I can find multiple solutions (scripts or plugins) out there for 3dsmax without any trouble. The max community is what makes the 3dsmax great in spite of AD’s development.

MU forum would be awesome!!

Thinkbox driving max development would be interesting.

Scott, how’s the beer out there?

Chris H, you’re right about the artists. I’ve always believed it’s not the tool, it’s the artist….and artists are usually able to learn new tools. If AD disappeared tomorrow, I think we’d all just learn something new. Anyone seen Blender lately?

Speaking of Blender, Thinkbox (hey Chris B) should look at porting the renderer to max….B-Render anyone?

My 2c
Conrad

“conrad dueck: developing maya for entertainment industries and max for arch/vis/games”

Max isn’t being developed for games any more and hasn’t for a couple years now. Maya is the app that Autodesk has that is pushed at that market. So Max is for Arch Vis at this point. Of course I’m not going by what Autodesk says, instead I’m going by what Autodesk is doing.

Wow, this is like old home week. Nice to hear from the old folks.

-Michael

Gees, wow what a thread!

I would like to say, as others have posted here that I know are on beta and the dev team, that the Max dev team (as well as a quite a few beta testers) are very passionate and love max, at least from my experience.

I feel bad for them in the sense that they seem to be the ones on the front lines of all of our (us the users) angst, when it really should be some folks quite a bit farther up the chain. Things are happening but there is sooo much that needs to be done/fixed/updated that to me it really seems like a daunting if not near impossible task.

All of the frustration from users has been building and building over the most recent years, I don’t even think it has reached its apex yet. I really hope for a brighter future, sadly enough, for even I am getting a little fed up. ;-(

Wow!
Reading this thread feels like riding a time machine. Good to see so many familiar names from past in one thread.

/me waves to all _o/

Well nobody can blame Thinkbox for making their plugins available to Maya users as well. It would be stupid not to.

@DAngel – Sorry, I probably didn’t word it so well. Just saying the dev team takes the most hits from the public because no one from way up above seems to jump in and say anything. Dev (and PM) are the only ones out in the fields.

just to clarify from my earlier post,
we still use 3dsmax for all our VFX work. you can see some good stuff in ‘the last stand’ (just remember, all you need to think about is the govern-ator shooting bad guys with a big gun)
anyway, very proud to say we did all our fx with 3dsmax2011, rendered in scanline, with fumefx and frost as the only commercial add ons.
I used it for 12 years at frantic/pfw and now for 3 years with our current company. it’s our go to software for vfx

@Paul, I hear you. my last post was spewing old AD pr. 😉
@Chad, so if blender is free, and open source, is there anything in the GPL preventing a non-commercial plugin for max? I haven’t tried it yet, but apparently blender imports alembic, and an alembic exporter for max was recently released, so that plugin may not ever be needed anyway…just alembic support right in the bas max package(oh how I dream 😀 )

Simply could not stay away from this thread. I happened to be sitting next to Mitch at the Autodesk presentation at Siggraph (and was nearly scorched by the steam coming out of his ears : ). I too am happy to see a lot of names from Compuserve days up here.

IMHO Paul hit the nail on the head a few posts back. If customers will continue to buy/use a product regardless of whether you market it, then why spend time/money on marketing?

On the other hand, being in a position where I communicate with extremely passionate 3D artists on a daily basis, the very worst thing we can do to them is not communicate about what we’re doing (to address site issues, improve sales, etc.). If we say nothing, they assume the worst. And boy, do they get loud about it.

Putting out beta features and asking for feedback, public surveys where everyone can see the answers, and being accessible and listening, go a very long way, even if we can’t always implement all the features they want. When you have a bunch of passionate people who will happily test new features and answer surveys… some businesses aren’t so lucky. Yeah, they’re a loud bunch, but it’s a lot more constructive to harness that passion than to ignore them and do what *we* think is right, tell them to take it and hope they shut up (which I can tell you from past experience is not a successful approach : )

My biggest concern here is the disconnect between Autodesk marketing (which includes those who plan user events) and the users who are so interested in and connected to 3ds Max and its community. To assume that all us 3ds Max users would sit through that presentation and not be put off, or in some cases, downright angry… Either the planner didn’t realize this, or didn’t care.

I sincerely hope it’s the former, as that is much easier to fix, and much less alarming in terms of the future of 3ds Max. Perhaps that’s a better question to ask Autodesk: which one was it?

Michele Bousquet
TurboSquid

@Conrad: No, but you can’t just release it as free, you have to release it as open source. That can be problematic for companies that want to give away the service of the plugin, but don’t want to give away their libraries that made it.

@Ron
If you read the comments from chris where people asked if thinkbox would be interested in building a new 3d package. But those projects need serious funding and time.

Again I am in a big Ad dilemma. It first happened with Combustion and now Max. I’ve based my carrier and business using Max doing FX since 3ds R4. For me losing 3ds Max or switching is a major problem. These decisions Ad are making, which we have no say in are affecting our lives.

What should we do? Which software should we jump to. One of the reasons I switched from Combustion to Nuke was because it was not owned by Ad.

Imagine if we the users who are all paying subscription put our money into developing software that was for us. Make the users the share holders. That way the money and development would not get funnelled away. The Developers should be answerable to us. With out our money Ad would be somewhat weakened.
There has been so little change in Max since Ad bought Maya I have no idea what I am paying my subscription for. It’s only the threat of having to buy the program again if they do an indispensable update in the future that keeps me.
How many disgruntled Max users actually are there? Are we talking about Hundreds or Tens of Thousands? We should do a global census to see where we actually stand.

Developing software is way beyond what I know but there are on this forum people who do know.

I’d like to know your thoughts.

Haha, eat dust Autodesk users LOL…:D

i don’t think that autodesk has any intention to develop on 3dsmax
what they did in the last years was just to integrate 3d party plugins plus some good thing coming from the UserVoice project

in the release 14 they stopped to listen from the uservoice and they introduced almost nothing new or fixed just few issues

I think that people like me that has a regular license and pays the subscription every year deserves to have decisions power on the software development, autodesk have to listen what we want

The big problem i see with an external/bridged version of Naiad is that it most probably wont be able to communicate properly with the other tools in max (particle flow, cloth simulation, massfx, etc…).

It should be pretty obvious that unified physics is the way forward. Developing a physics engine that doesnt do this is kinda a step backwards.

“I feel I’ve “lost” Naiad although I suppose I can convince the people I work for to get Maya+Bifrost (whatever that will set them back…) even though it would have been lots easier to convince them to just buy Bifrost.. ”

Or you could go the RealFlow way, because I thought one of the points of all this was to show autodesk that in a time that there are always going to be alternatives, forcing a product down our throat can have, and should have consequences, I’m not sure playing into the hands of these kind of people is a good idea for the over flourishing of this industry.

“Augusto: I think that people like me that has a regular license and pays the subscription every year deserves to have decisions power on the software development, autodesk have to listen what we want ”

You have the same decision power as you do if you go to buy a Sony TV and decide that it doesn’t have the features that you want or it is over priced, you can purchase another brand. Other than that the money that you spend buys you the work that has already been done. Subscription just buys you the right to get part of what is coming early.

Maya is allright but Max has a better UI and workflow.
But if AD is killing Max for VFX though, what can one do?

wow, it seems that everyone is here 🙂

Working with 3d studio since the early 90s, I must agree with most what had been said here. In the past years MAX has been more or less a dead horse.
When was the last time, you really were excited about a new feature that came with the next release and it helped you speeding up your work or added something new/great to it?!?

Since years that feeling only came from plugins and max was just the vessel to carry them.

Right now new releases are just bug-fixes, adding stuff autodesk bought (and therefore most of the users own anyways through plugins) and … what else… oh yes, from time to time a tiny minor new feature makes it in (e.g. egg-spline 😉 )

Each time autodek buys a new piece of software/plugin, you know right away it is the end of development. I cant remember anything that got seriously improved after bought by AD…

The problem is, after being married to MAX for such a long time, it´s tough to leave for another “bride”…

It´s a really frustrating situation…

I hesitated a LOT before posting here and I actually have a question rather than an opinion – do you guys think it is too late for Max? Really too late? I know the problem is not 3dsMax itself but the way AD handles it. I also realize that it is kinda ridiculous for a company to maintain two softwares to do the same things (XSI appears to have bitten the dust) but is this it? No amount of complaint or public dissatisfaction can change the (perceived) way AD treats 3dsMax? Not even 3dsMax being the best selling 3D app (so they say) can signal to them that this is a software worth investing in?

I don’t know. I really don’t want to be forced migrate to another software like this. If I decide to change views let it be because someone did something I find useful/essential and not because Autodesk decided to kill a pretty awesome piece of software everyone here have fun and make money using.

I think the most important implication of Shane Griffith’s brief post was not that it explains why Tom’s interesting plugins were ignored but that Shane was in fact “let go”. As I recall, Autodesk gutted the max team last summer for whatever reason… and didn’t they also just raise subscription prices within the last 6 months too?

The tiered subscription debacle with the Pflow tools also infuriated me last Fall (I was with you at the time on the Area, Steve G). AD basically slapped all their longtime loyal subscribers in the face with that one. As subscribers weren’t we supposed to get access to ALL new features when they were released?

Bugs aren’t getting fixed either. While I know Paul (good insightful posts, btw) is no fan of CAT… I use it here and there. It gained a massive bug with SP6 last November for Max 2013. (Don’t touch Solo or Display Layer Transform Gizmo, whatever you do). AD was notified and to this day they haven’t fixed it. It was fixed in 2014 thankfully but 2013 was never patched to my knowledge.

Biped has a small bug that I reported and which was acknowledged in May 2011. Still not fixed.

The old timers will remember Max’s built-in dynamics engine (pre-Havok). It never worked worth a damn. Every time you’d run a simulation it would internally collapse and everything would start falling through the floor.

That’s how Max as a whole feels to me now.

But my neighbor’s pool is coming along nicely.

I’ve just got to jump in here and defend the actual Max developers. I have no idea how big the team is, but I do know that the Shanghai(?) members of the team are really passionate about Max. A lot of the speed improvements on modifiers in 2014 were their effort, and the way it came across at the time, it sounded like it was done in their free time.

All of the problems we are talking about here stem from management, and I’m sure it must be pretty depressing for the devs to read such a backlash when they are trying to do the best they can with the time and money they are given.

It’s really great how this thread has taken off, I think it’s time for me to dig out my “Invalid Normal Array” T-shirt…

@Mitch — While I agree wholeheartedly with the ideals of your mass Max boycott, I don’t think it will work simply because the frustrated users are often not the decision makers. Even more importantly, many of us depend on Max and even small, incremental improvements are better than none. And like I previously mentioned — they didn’t bother to fix a major CAT bug in 2013 but it was okay in 2014.

Even with all the trash talking — I will say that skinned objects seem to be a lot more spritely in 2014. It’s about 8 years late — but Max, in this one respect anyway, is more responsive or maybe “less sluggish” is a better descriptor.

I think the only way AD will get threatened is if users have a truly viable alternative. The Maya buyout was the worst thing that could have happened to the industry. I do hope one of the existing competing packages can rise to Max’s level of comprehensiveness, flexibility and extensibility or perhaps a new package will emerge.

And finally, while Stefan’s defense of the egg spline is noted and appreciated, I just wish they would give have given us an egg primitive.

@David Baker – You explained exactly was I was trying to say earlier that I was unable to put into better words.

@Tobbe
I’ve heard of that article and was searching around for it just a few weeks ago to no avail.
If you find it can you send me a link? conrad.dueck@opusvfx.com

Hope you’re doing well. Thanks for starting this post, btw. It’s been a great thread!

I think I remember that article.
If it’s the one you have on mind, it was about the annual release cycles, SDK breaks and how these affect internal development, 3rd party plugin developers and users and introduce new bugs which need to get fixed and need an additional level of maintenance etc. Ironically I’ve been thinking about this article yesterday but can’t find it, I think it was from an external developer… IF it’s the one you meant.

Googlefest… is this what you were after?

http://www.quadernii.com/2012/12/the-little-history-of-a-babel-tower-in-3ds-max-the-plugin-system-2/

and

http://www.quadernii.com/2013/01/the-babel-tower-part-2-holistic-stability-and-backwardforward-compatibility/

@Laszlo — with all due respect, Autodesk does owe us something… especially if we’re subscribers.

We’re paying the annual fee on the (apparently mistaken) assumption that it’s going towards Max development and that we’re going to see a substantially improved piece of software each year.

If they’re just going to give us a few knick knacks, baubles and Populate, then the subscription is a sham.

But yes without a doubt, AD definitely owes us something.

Even for those who are not subscribers, they are paying $3500 or (whatever it costs now) up front. They expect the software to be improved and supported in the future. No one spends that kind of money or invests time learning software that’s going to be left to die. Autodesk owes its customers plenty… and it’s failing on its obligations badly.

@MDavis – Fair point.

I guess the reason i ignored that is that in all honestly, i have not seen ANY value in subscription since its inception, other than a clever way to siphon a continuous stream of money from the customers, as opposed to random purchases throughout the year.

It was a way for management to reduce risk, and to not have to try harder year after year.

Previously, they would have to convince you to upgrade with fancy features and improvements, which also involved having a pricey discreet / autodesk reseller network throughout the world with a stake in the game.
With the subscriptions, they can not only “not give a damn” about each release – since you have already payed for it in advance – they can (and have at least in europe) also disassemble the pricey sales network.

So I think it is not just a sham, its a scam. You basically convince yourself that you are paying for future development, when in reality you are paying in advance for a product that you might have otherwise not even have decided to buy.

Also, its much harder to cancel than to “not buy” psychologically (just look at all the emotions here).

Just look at whats been happening with the suite licenses, the pflow tools debacle,.. its really all just schemes to get more of your money, with less actual engineering work (and thus, risk).

@Tom Hudson,

Your comment just sparked something inside of me, I think it might have been a glimmer of hope, I’m not used to that really when it comes to Max, It sounds great and my fingers have never been crossed harder, but there’s just another thing inside me telling me it’s autodesk we are talking about here so don’t get your hopes up, and while this will be the best thing that can happen to Max’s core and it’s overall functionality, what would happen to those few larger updates that usually involves acquiring and integrating external plugins and modules(things like the pflow upgrades), would that also still continue, if so then this can be the best thing that can happen to us all in long time, please keep communicating with them, and thanks a million for your efforts.

I added Tom’s proposal as a request to the 3ds max Feedback Area XD.

http://3dsmaxfeedback.autodesk.com/forums/80695-general-feature-requests/suggestions/4249552-tom-hudson-for-3dsmax-development-leadership

@Alex
This is a brilliant idea! Sounds like a GREAT Kickstarter project if there ever was one. I wonder what the possible legal complications would be in terms of non-compete clauses, patent infringements, etc.

P.S. Put in cool new features that these holdouts want to have, and Autodesk makes MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.

@Tom: I don’t think a direct copy of the modifier stack is necessary.

I would just ignore the modifier stack concept altogether, and implement a network of nodes & modifiers instead, as found in every other modern graphics app. The modifier stack was only ever patentable because it was a non-obvious transitional form between functional and object-oriented programming. A free-flowing network of nodes is the most obvious form for any kind of object-oriented app. It can still look like a stack if the user arranges it that way, but it’s not like it has to be a *thing* any more.

And with all due respect, I think the existing, established 3dsmax code base just needs to die and be forgotten. What Max *does* is fine, but what goes on under the hood is all wrong. Trying to fix it up would be like patching & untangling a pile of corroding copper wire & vacuum tubes, while everyone else is just laying fresh fibre.

And *someone* is going to be writing something new, anyway, designed from the ground up for parallelism, precision and hassle-free extensibility, and totally free of Autodesk’s control. That might as well be someone who actually understands the best bits of Max – otherwise it’ll just end up like Blender: earnest but misguided fan-fiction.

Great thread and it would be great to see Max being developed as it was in the good old days –
I’d also like to add my small comment about AD as a whole company and how we decide to spend our hard earned cash with them and the consumer confidence they instil.
Paul Neale’s comments about Smoke were interesting and echoes my opinion – On the surface Smoke for us would be a great product – realtime editing and compositing all on one timeline. We’ve spent a day with a partner demoing the software last year and it looks good for us…..the only thing stopping me buying/trusting it is that it’s got Autodesk written on it – look at the history. Edit – killed off – Combustion -killed off – Composite/Toxik now free and undeveloped.

I’m hoping Smoke will be a bit different to those as it’s been around for a longtime previously but do I really want to trust 3k + cost of machine to a company that would see the product as such a small percentage of it’s income when there are other solutions that offer similar results……I’m still weighing up the risk……The slow development of Max over the past few years also compounds this feeling and so does reading this thread.
Autodesk do need to gain back some user confidence because ultimately and obviously it does affect our future purchasing.

@Alex: Glad to see you here! I also would like to see a new wave of 3d app(s) coming! But the question would be – which programmers have the time to start something as complex as this?

Since you have a good background in programming, what time&team would be necessary to implement some visionary and usable alternative? Just a rough number maybe to get a Kickstarter into perspective…

I would be glad to chancel my mostly useless subscription (still stuck on an older version anyway) and put this money into a new breed… with a decent mesh/particle pipeline it could be even possible to work in the new App and render in our old VRay 🙂

Agreed, again would be happy to put two to three grand towards a kick starter campaign to build the next Max as it should have been. Would be funny to see it named Shiva or Burn, or something fire based, one of the things I loved about Discreet.

@Paul:
While it’s true that Max has a really old core and architecture, it is’nt all rosy on the XSI side either. The internal architecture relies heavily on COM/OLE technology which they want to get rid of too as i read . This is an heritage from when Microsoft has owned Softime/XSI.
Needless to say that the internal design of Softimage is of course far better than Max’s hacky nature ( in it’s core) which did’nt improve over the year with changing developers of course

Please Stop complaining. Enough already.

If there are, and it’s possibly true, 1.000.000 Max users, and you don’t like what’s happening to Max… WALK.

Suck it up and relearn.

Buy Modo or Houdini, because if even 1/2 the user base does, with the revenue they get from YOU they will be able to make it what YOU want, and plugin developers WILL follow.

You consistently think Adesk have the authority and power, whereas actually YOU DO.

So either DO something, or accept Adesk decide your fate.

Because either way, this complaining ain’t going to change nothing.

Have a nice day 🙂

On the same note, taking over Max while it is still ultimately in control of Autodesk could easily result in Max being taken back 3 to 5 years down the road when some head honcho thinks that it should be under the control of ADSK and there is more money to be made other ways, like not developing it at all and just letting the user base fund some other piece of software.

Consider the idea of Frank and his team currently working in the games division. From what I know this division doesn’t make a product so it doesn’t directly fund itself. What they do is develop tech that will be put into other products. As we know from what has been stated this product first is Maya an we also know that Maya is being pushed hard at the game market and Max is not being pushed at all other then Viz, maybe.

So where is the money going from Max? To some cheap over seas labour? They are doing a good job with what they have but that can’t be the bulk of the money. To the few that are here? Doesn’t feel like enough considering Maya has three times the development team and Frank and his team have no direct revenue (If I’m right).

If you are thinking that I’m not to positive about anything in Max’s future at the moment you are very right. I have had that beaten out of me over the last number of years. I’d better get back to learning Modo.

Too true – Max has seen some great advancements in recent years and its mayas turn for a proper update. Turn by turn.

@Robert Seidel: It looks like these people have started from scratch creating seemingly very good technology: http://fabricengine.com/
Also not that Marc Petit (former Senior VP, Media & Entertainment at Autodesk) is heavily involved with that company. Interesting.

Dear all,

Im getting out of the closet as it seems there are a lot of old timer here expressing what I’ve been myself feeling for several years now.

I started to use 3dStudio on DOS 20 years ago, I remember the change to windows with the max release and its major workflow improvement.
Since then though, it feels the core program functionnalities have stalled. I read here that it was the plugins developpers that kept MAX ahead and I couldnt agree more. Im a heavy VRAY user since the first release, in both broadcast and archiviz fields, and its development has been all that MAX wasnt. For example I couldnt say it enough : MULTITHREADED BASIC SCENE OPERATIONS!!!
Everything is so slow on big scenes its a nightmare.
I read also here something very true: we stress about the software dev because we’ve been using it for such a long time, it is our expertise and part of how we earn our living and make a difference with others.
Unfortunately, money wise AD’s marketing seems its logical to keep max on the VIZ/GAME side of the industry, but for us it’s a major letdown, Im not keeping all my eggs on one basket and I want to be able to do it all with one soft.
So I heard that this company or these guys should be in charge of MAX dev, I have another idea:
Lets ask ChaosGroup to develop a 3D modelling package with Vray and their other plugs integrated to the core, it’s not such a funny idea, given how AD keeps the max dev. going.
Just a though, and sorry for my english.
Best,
Cyrille

I think Tom might be hurting himself with that deal… Just look at how messy things got in 3ds max over the years.

Imagine if Tom can get that deal done, then he’ll be the one who will get the blame if things dont go as espected. And theres a verry real chance this will happen since its pretty obvious the code has become one big messy pile of crap. Getting the existing code straight allone would take several years.

In my opinion, there are so many great and big names reading this discussion, there’s an opportunity for something beautifull to happen here.

Just get togetter and start a project on kickstarter. Its the power of the internet baby!

Sure there are the patents, but i agree that the modifier stack is kinda ‘old news’ compared to a node based workflow. Dont get me wrong, one of the big reasons i love max so much is that modifier stack, but imagine if it gets replaced something that is node-based… it would be so powerfull! You could integrate some houdini and ice-like stuff.

Love 3DS max, but we must face the fact that its starting to become outdated and now is the perfect opportunity to start someting new that has max’s spirit and filosophy as a base.

I wish i had the money and connections to do this, i wouldnt hesitate one milisecond.

Well, I really don’t have any illusions about this idea — I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of what the plans are for Max within Autodesk, so we’ll have to see how they respond to this idea. If they want to phase out Max, then their response (or lack thereof) will say that, and we’ll have to see where we go from there.

A huge part of this hinges on what the Max/Maya relationship really is within Autodesk, and if the potential revenue generation from a revitalized Max development effort would be seen as worth it. And all the various internal political factors within Autodesk and with their shareholders — Who knows?

Yes, the core code in Max is now 19 years old — we started work in 1994 — and it’s kind of amazing that it’s held up enough that it’s still in use. But despite its problems and limitations, it’s still working, and I guess we’re lucky that CPUs are getting so much faster because I think that tends to hide some of those architectural limitations!

As a purist, yes, I’d love to start from scratch, knowing what we know now, and rebuild a system that would overcome the old limitations. I’m reluctant to do so because, as I previously stated, that would be throwing away untold man-years of work, and every feature in there would have to be rebuilt — a massive effort that would take a long time.

When I weigh the factors on this, the users come first because they are the ones who will have to adapt to what happens. They’ve come to expect a certain feature set, a certain flexibility and a familiar workflow. I see a lot of frustration from them when features are half-baked or buggy (my personal experience pulling my ever-thinning hair out with CAT over multiple versions is an example). And a new app, while appealing in some ways, is really no different than pulling the plug on Max and telling them to go learn Maya, or Modo, or whatever — clobbering their productivity until they get up to speed on the other platform.

The bottom line is, I’d like to be able to get in there and fix the problems that are fixable and deliver more functionality so that peoples’ time and monetary investment in Max isn’t just thrown out.

Pipe dream? Maybe, maybe not.

@Tom: Sure, count me it! But then again, I think I would first find an Unicorn in my backyard before Autodesk would go for it 🙂

“DAngle: now that there’s finally a tiny glimmer of potential real change is visible on the horizon”

Sorry, don’t see it, you must have far better binoculars then I do. Mine have become scratched and worn out from staring at that horizon for many many years.

I think it’s time to abandon the sinking ship. I started with Max but had to drop it 3 years ago when I realized it’s still the same application with no innovation.

I switched to Houdini and never looked back. Despite having a very small userbase and money, look how much innovation Side Effects brought in 12.5:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2445&Itemid=66

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini12.5/news/12_5/

And these are just features. If you look at the bug fixes, they are FREE and daily. They never turned me away when I asked for a fix, and a lot of the time got the fix within the same week.

I am not allowed to talk about the upcoming features in H13, but some of them are pretty earth shattering in FX, much more than OpenVDB integration in 12.5, which was also a world-first.

Instead of hoping Autodesk to change, why not give these guys a chance and see how much they value your input.

For example rigging is an area that needs to be improved. And Side Effects programmers said they welcome all input in this area if they want it addressed. So if you are a rigging maestro, what are you waiting for? We already have the best curve editor on the planet, true story 🙂

In short, if you want to see change, look at Houdini because it is the change.

huge thread, and a great read too.
I started with 3dsmax 2.5 …this sounds like an alcoholic’s anonymous meeting! back in 1999.

3dsmax was and is a great app, i love it’s general workflow, over the years i’ve added lightwave and recently modo as i’ve seen the writing on the wall from autodesk with it’s moving to push suites rather than apps and first pff killing combustion, then pulling the dev team out of softimage and moving them to maya…Maya is hte app Autodesk want’s to push.

I’m still on subscription so have 3dsMax 2014 but usually run 3dsmax 2008 or 2009 as they are just more responsive and their U.i isn’t a mess.
I like modo’s renderer so added 601 last year and recently upgraded 701, Modo is not perfect, i wish it had a modifier stack for example!
I also keep my eye on Blender…this DOES have a modifier stack for some things but it’s not 3dsmax, not yet anyhow!

i recently got the demo of cinema4d and that really does feel like 3dsmax for some stuff such as modifiers..
As you can see i’ve been looking around for alternatives because of the poor releases of 3dsmax in the last 5 years.

the Area forum is dead, i can post there and nobody replies for days…the old weboard was a hive of activity, you guys remember the take 5 forum?…good old days!

If maya is the future path that Autodesk wants all it’s users to migrate to then they need to offer that as an option on the next years subscription…to offer a switch from 3dsmax to maya at no cost just continue the subscription but change the download form 3dsmax 2015 to maya2015.

other than that Maxon could do well to offer a BIG discount to pull 3dsmax users over to Cinema4d Studio..if the offer was serious from Maxon and they wanted people to really migrate and STAY aboard the cinema4D app going forward i’d take a long hard look and probably jump.

I’m rambling abit but this feels like an old friend slowly dying.

Then maybe a staggered approach between the arcviz/gaming community and the vfx (well, make the divisions between markets yourself…), with a one-release delay might really become viable, for autodesk, the devs, and the assorted communities.

Vfx, while a very small market comparatively, is very comfortable with the new and imperfect, being subject to it from within the own RnD/TD departments every day.
Not a community with a tendency to fret, rather one with a tendency towards constructiveness.
I’d say something like a selective beta (words do mean precise things, after all), lasting as long as it needed, would bring huge benefits to all the parties involved.
I am currently participating in the VRay 3.0 closed beta, and the way Chaos is picking up anything, from user suggestions (and complaints!) to pointers to whitepapers and talks, and making it testable within days is nothing short of exciting.
And since it’s public by now, the plans are quite far fetching, nothing that given the current state of rendering would be required by the engine’s shortcomings in themselves.
It’s a true quest for betterment in and of itself which is very much out of tune with what’s being discussed here as being the main issue.

All this to say it IS doable, and the courage to muster wouldn’t even be that much, given the financial security a product like max commands anyway.

The details required to make it a reality, as of my perception of things, would cost Autodesk infinitely less than the benefits of having a Laszlo, Paul, Bobo, Tom, to mention a few, and some of the ThinkBox clever lads (Ian, Conrad, Darcy, Ryan, Mike, for the love of chripes!) to spend some quality time brainstorming on code bases for the sake of it.

A’ight, i must be really drunk.
Yet a man can hope.

– Good English communication skills, and ability to present SUCCINTLY to senior staff members

no.
go.

Epic thread !
Almost all griefs, frustrations, critics, but also satisfactions I have with 3ds max since version 1 have been expressed here.
In these times of revolutions it looks like the time has come for max users spring ! Whatever will emerge from this I will be part of it and help as much as I can.

Tom, i gave you my voices, but in return you have to promise me:

– once you get a job in AD, you won’t switch in few weeks to Games&Bullshit department, or start writing in blog: “Hi guys, i just wanted to tell show you the latest screenshots from BIP, CAT and Populate port to Maya 2015…”.

😉

Te article some people are looking for, is it this one?
http://blog.duber.cz/3ds-max/autodesk-cannot-write-good-software

@Sam

You’re not addressing one of the main concerns with the “new app” concept.
Many people and companies have a vast amount of projects built inside 3dsmax, in 3dsmax scenes. Using plugins that are made for 3dsmax. What I mean is that it’s not just the hassle of learning new software that prevents people from changing their pipelines.

Will you get Chaos Group, Cebas, Thinkbox and literally hundreds of one-man-operation developers. to port all their existing plug-ins to a new app?

Will your new app be able to read in .max files from years of existing projects?

These are the kind of issues that really prevent people from switching 3d platforms, not just that the interface looks different.

Damn… late to the party. Guess I have some catching up to do. #theregoesThursday

I don´t think the problem with switching to another 3d software is the
compatibility. Of course it requires some work, but it´s managable.
The problem is the time required to learn a new package where
usually each follows completely different structures and workflows.
I´m into max now for something like 15 years.
I am currently looking into Modo, Houdini and C4D.
They are all great and sometimes absolutely impressive compared
to max.
But honestly to get myself to the same level I can calculate several
years learning this new package.
that´s why users are screaming and complaining. they wouldn´t do
that if you could just easily switch to another tool.
So why starting from scratch ? First of all to get away from Autodesk.
But also in my opinion there is no real way to rescue max in its
current state. It´s like Jocelyn Wildenstein. Not even the best plastic
surgeon can save her. Not to forget when starting from scratch
you would get a modern, multithreaded, performant application that
mimics the workflow of 3dsmax.

But, hey as I said, it´s just a wild idea in good company 😉

Writing a new app from scratch without pre existing technologies is probably a 5-10 year project (and thats probably underestimating it). The complexity is enormous. By the time you catch up to todays expected maturity, the competitition is 5-10 years ahead of you.

While i agree that there are core problems in max, it is guarrantueed that any new rewrite would also have ‘core’ issues that only surface when the program is mature enough to be pushed to its limits, years after its design phase.

Softimage was a market leader when they decided to do a core rewrite. Look at them now.

The costs are being vastly underestimated as well. Imagine funding just a couple of developers for 5 years. Thats millions of dollars, how much would you need to charge and how many licenses would you then need to sell of this unused, untested, feature poor application to break even?

That is not to say that specialized new applications do not have a chance of breaking in (look at zbrush, modo, katana etc). But a generic, swiss army knife? Probably not…

I also think a non-zombie-max would be great! Blender is still too cluttered and nerdy (not in a good way), Modo and C4D are powerful, but they wouldn’t fix the gap. Houdini is too complex (Maya as well)… so we need a fast swiss-army knife, which is flexible, but not to complicated…

For years I was thinking of switching to XSI which would have been such a balanced candidate, but, you know… maybe we get frustrated Max and XSI people to join 🙂

I know this is very hypothetical, but when I look at the market I don’t feel “home” anywhere… and 3D Coat shows, that a small team can set up a decent application (at least on some levels).

The moment Tom (or anyone else) steps in as the new Max PM, they will have a boss to answer to. I think most people forget that a PM does not get to do what he/she wants with the product. Where the product is supposed to go comes from Corporate Strategy. The PM’s job is to get the product there as efficiently as possible. In this case, no matter what the PM’s intentions are, they will have to march along (if they intend to keep their job, that is).

As for writing a “new max”, I’ll just add to what Laszlo said. This would be a HUGE undertaking. For me, it’d make more sense to start seeing some feature/workflow requests to Maxon or The Foundry to have them incorporated to their products. I bet these companies would be willing to consider some of the to get some users to switch. Once there is enough momentum, you’ll see 3rd party developers follow suit (nothing would excite me more than to see Thinkbox products for Modo).