Changes to Rendering in 3DS Max 2018

so nvidia will offer a free to use mental ray that’s similar capabilities to arnold free version..only F9 and f10 renders..at least i won’t throw all my work away from previous versions then – kudos to nvidia for bridging that gap.

“There is a lot of innovation happening in rendering at the moment and with more and more choices in terms of speed, price, quality and capability, so we are allowing customers to choose the renderer that works that best for them.”

What kind of BS is this? We always had the choice for what render engine we could use if Mental Ray didn’t work for us. But it was there, with net rendering capabilities. A complete package, any startup with a workstation and a couple render nodes could do some decent animations. Autodesk increased the price of the maintenance plan, while also reducing what is included with 3ds Max, when they own a product they could completely replace Mental Ray with, instead only giving us a single seat of Arnold to try with no net rendering capabilities out of the box. Why would any studio choose 3ds Max when it now REQUIRES them to purchase a render engine to do quality animations and effects? Scanline, Quicksilver and ART are pretty much useless unless you are doing dumbed down architectural or simple product renderings and animations.

Autodesk, you would have redeemed yourselves if you just replaced all of the capabilities that were in the past, included with Mental Ray, with Arnold. At least give us a couple licenses of Arnold for every license of Max we have. To buy enough Arnold licenses for 10 render nodes would run $12,200. That is an insane amount for any small effects shop, we could add more nodes with that kind of money. I guess I’ll never use Arnold.

I have been using Max+MR for years. I relied on it. We have even programmed plugins for this render engine. I can almost say i am a kind of expert in it (ok light-years behind Thorsten Hartmann, but i am trying to catch up :).

After spending last year using Maya+Arnold (not because i love Maya, but beacuse of educational purposes) i come to the following conclusion:

(+)
+ It is a very charming renderer, delivering excellent results
+ It is very easy to setup. Heck, it is a joy to work with it!
+ It is fast for previewing, and it can be in many cases a fast final renderer

(-)
– It is a “Demo”. You can render an image. A “Full Version” means you have no limitations.
– it tends to be sometimes unstable in VPR
– it gets slow and dirty if you do outdoor Rendering or ArchViz (the Vray is still the King for this purposes)

I like Max+MR because it was a full version software: i was able to throw an anim sequence of our medical vis or product turn-tables in my 20 nodes RenderFarm and collect the frames.

Now there is a trade to be done: I can lose MR full Version and instead of it get two nice looking Demo versions: MR and Arnold.
(or engage Vray from now on in really any production case)

This is a real dilema 🙁

Aside from what renderer to choose, one thing goes unnoticed for several years, unfortunately – lack of innovation in terms of how 3dsmax needs to improve as a renderer PLATFORM. We still have the same rendering concept we had 10 yeard ago, the shading workflow had only one major new feature – Slate – but we still lack so many things to help manage scenes with high material counts, a really usable library system, we have this totally outdated Activeshade workflow, a major lack of useful and advanced maps, universal materials and maps that would work with any renderer so we can exchange scenes easier, an in-viewport renderer that goes beyond simple rendering (interaction, wireframe overlay etc.), a 1990’s-era VFB, no live exposure (still need to rerender to see changes?!), no post production options (thankfully we 3rd party options)… Lots of stuff that needs some love. Over these years, resources were spent on and mostly tied to renderer integration – mental ray, iray ART, Arnold… which some of turned out to be a one-way road and wasn’t even Autodesk’s tech.
What should worry us here is that with Arnold, Autodesk becomes a competitor to all the 3rd party renderers. Now, what does this mean for their focus on future features? That’s the question we need to ask.
I hope they will spend more time on improving Max as a platform, not only improving aspects of rendering that will benefit Arnold exclusively.
At least we got BBM, but it shouldn’t stop here, really. There are so many places that need a major overhaul, and it’s telling that 3rd parties brought more innovation in a few years than Autodesk did in 15.

Yes, this is a downgrade in all it´s greatness, and I´m not sure this is legal even because unlimited network rendering was a feature that made us to acquire max in the first place, so now they are removing a feature, I´m not sure if this is legal even.

I hope some lawyer could look into this in USA, because in Europe is very hard and usually has no effect, we need someone in the USA to look into this.

Cheers.