The History of 3D Studio – Tom Hudson interview

– Why wasn’t Max developed as a cross-platform application? Was the idea considered? Why did it end up being tied to Windows?

Good question. In fact, as we were at the big decision point at the end of our Atari ST era, we were looking at going to the Mac because of its then-superior graphics capability over the PC. Gary had sent me a package with an Apple order form and a list of Apple computers and other hardware, and we were looking it over to see what we would need to start development!

Autodesk logo scene used for the launch of
3D Studio release 1 in 1990

Then the VGA card for the PC was announced and Gary could see that this was the way for us to go – By the time 3DS was shipping, he said, every PC sold would have a VGA card, which would give us a graphics solution with 256 colors. And he was right. There was also the ATVista graphics card for the PC, which we would be able to support for truecolor output (what I really wanted!)

Going with the PC gave us the potential for a HUGE market, which was important for a niche product like ours. It worked out well.

As for why we didn’t go for cross-platform, it didn’t occur to me much at the time, mostly because I was up to my eyeballs in work just getting the software working on the PC! It would have been nice to build the brand on the Mac as well, but we would have had to build a larger development team, and to tell you the truth, when it was just Dan and me coding, we were very efficient and almost never stepped on each other’s code. The more coders you get, you start running into a “too many cooks” effect and diminishing returns. I also don’t remember any discussion of this from Autodesk, interestingly, and that’s where I would have expected a push in this direction to come from.

– Why wasn’t Max’s Video Post module further developed?

I’m not sure other than the fact that at a certain point, you started to get other packages out there that were very good at compositing, and there wasn’t much user demand for it from us. I’m sure Gary would have pushed for it if users were asking for it.

In a way, Video Post is kind of a relic of the old way of doing things in a “batch” manner rather than an interactive way that is more possible now that we have faster processors. I still like it, though, because I wrote the darn thing and know how to use it, and usually when I need something done I need it now – Not days later, after figuring out how to do it in Combustion!

– Why did you decide to leave the Max team?

Whew. The bottom line, and most honest answer, is probably “burnout”.

In the early days of 3DS, Dan Silva and I were coding machines. I loved it – Code all day, play around with the software you wrote at night, see what you needed to create the cool stuff you wanted to do, make a list and do it again the next day. It was awesome to make the kind of images that were possible as our software got better and better. For me, the success of doing this kind of work was its own motivation.

There was only one problem with this scenario – With just Dan and me working on the software, when someone wanted a new feature we were the ones on the hook to write it. Then I came up with the IPAS plug-in feature and others were able to create the add-ons, theoretically giving me the time to do what I wanted, which was to make movies with the thing.

I say theoretically because as life goes on, there are other things that start competing for your free time. I got married and we took on an old house that needed a lot of work, and being a hands-on kind of guy, I started putting time into that as well, and my personal animation work got put on the back burner.

Racecar scene created by Jamie Clay, who produced many of the initial animations that Autodesk used to promote its software, and founded the company’s first internal team of digital artists

A big part of the problem for me was that 3DS was always just one or two features short of what I needed to create what I was envisioning, so I kept working on it, thinking that as soon as it had this feature or that feature, I’d be ready to do what I wanted with it.

In the meantime, I was still coding on it (at this point, 3DS Max) and in addition to the four Yost Group programmers, we had a number of Autodesk programmers working on it. Max is an extremely complex piece of software and there would be times where I’d have a bug show up on my list and I had no idea where it had come from. I’d be on a tight development schedule and would divert my time to locating a bug, and sometimes it would take days to track it down because of the complexity of the code. In one case, I remember a series of bugs that cropped up for all the Yost Group programmers and they were all due to some work one of the Autodesk guys had done to some critical code without checking with Rolf (who had designed a lot of the internal pipeline) first – It broke all sorts of things, and we had to scramble to fix it, all the while falling farther behind on the other work we had to do. It was a huge source of stress.

I think that for me, the thing about programming that makes me love it so much is taking nothing more than some simple instructions and building something really beautiful out of it, or a cartoon that people can laugh at, or whatever – At a certain point in the development of Max, some obstacles came up that took a lot of the fun out of it and built up some serious pressure on me that I didn’t need.

– What have you been up to since leaving the Max team?

In 2001, I ran for a seat on the city council in Port Washington, Wisconsin and won – I’ve been serving as an alderman (now Council President) since then.

Klanky talks – an image from a test for Tom Hudson’s upcoming short film “Armed and Dangerous”

I’m still working on Max plug-ins and little by little have been doing work on my Klanky the Robot animation. Trying to do this stuff by yourself is tricky – I have the majority of the first short complete but still need to do the audio and some funny Pixar-style “Outtakes”. I found out there’s a reason movies like “The Incredibles” have so many names in the credits!

In the past year, I got involved doing some incredibly fun development for the iPhone OS. I got a chance to work with a programmer I worked with back in the Atari days, who I had also hired to write the resource editor we needed for 3DSr1! It made me realize again just how much I love programming.

– When will we be able to see your Klanky shorts?

Well, I have a deadline for renewing the “Klanky the Robot” trademark that is coming up in May 2010, so I want to have the first short completed before then. I’ll probably make it available as a downloadable film on the iTunes App Store.