NYC User Group meeting report – Eddie Perlberg's and Gary Davis' talk
May 22, 2014 by CGP Staff
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A reader who attended yesterday’s NYC 3DS MAX UG meeting has generously made the effort to write a detailed account of the meeting and sent it to us to publish it for you all. Here is the report from Chaos23:
Note: it’s our duty to state that this is a personal account of the event and not official information from Autodesk or the organizers.
I thought I would write something quick while I still remembered some information. Others that were at the meeting last night should please fill in what other missing info there is, or correct me if I’m wrong.
I came to the meeting to see what kind of information our Max heads could divulge regarding the future of Max. I have to admit I did in fact leave more hopeful and positive in the changes that are finally being done with Max. I’ll have to be vague in certain spots because there’s probably things that I’m unsure can be said publicly. BUT from what I learned in this 3.5hr usergroup meeting, I will say like you’ve been hearing for a while – “they are listening” and are in fact ACTING.
THINGS I THINK I CAN SAY:
– Max is the 2nd most used app with some btw 14-17million monthly users according to CIP (customer involvement program) behind CAD. Maya wasn’t shown to crack the top 8 or 10.
– 3D Max management has been changed all the way down to the marketing department. Apparently the past marketing was giving credit to maya for jobs done in max. Could explain why would always have trouble finding out what Max was used on in the past. Glad those people are out!
– Improving development and releases so they are more polished and not the 1/2 baked things we’ve been given for a while now.
– Hired a bunch of new devs
– Improving coding behind the scenes. Even hired an architect manager to oversee, with his team, solely the coding in Max.
– XRef improvement. I think this can be said. Demo’d better capabilities, but we’ll see how reliable it will be as we all know who’ve used its major deficiencies currently. (No mention of better character rigging xref)
– Looking into multi-threading things …
– Other things that look great, but i probably should stop here 🙂
POINT OF CONTENTION:
– Eddie showed a graph showing 3 categories: Games, Film/TV, Digital Video (something arbitrary like that) and the names of people heading each category.
Max was put into the arbitrary column while the other 2 remained blank. An audience member asked what app(s) fell into the other 2 categories and he said Film/TV was maya and gaming maya LT. You could hear a collective groan to that response. He said he showed it this way because if he put Max under an arch/vis column people would be pissed, if he put max under a vfx column, people would be pissed so this was to please everyone. While I get that, it probably would have been better posed to show Max in all those columns then instead of creating some arbitrary column. He did say the managers of the other 2 divisions still give input into max from those categories. This led me to believe Max is still being created to serve as an all-in-one tool while Maya is trying to be pushed toward niche categories. The gaming side of it I find a bit odd to push maya LT now because didn’t they try that with Max years ago?
UKNOWN:
– BiFrost incorporation. Obviously he couldn’t say if it’ll be in max, but he posed the question, “how many max artists would really need liquids at some point?” I think he was surprised to see majority of the audience members raised their hands. Maybe that would help influence the decision. But then also I took it maybe it will eventually, but not yet since it’s still in a 1/2 ass state in Maya and there’s no reason to put it in Max until it’s further developed.
– Nvidia’s FLEX physx dev incorporation. Didn’t answer, but then I also felt this probably wouldn’t happen because it would require some sort of purchase, or licensing of Nvidia’s work? Unsure, but that’s too bad since we need our physx better developed and Nvidia has already taken that lead.
WHAT WE SUGGESTED TO SEE TOWARDS THE FUTURE:
– Better way of Max deployment instead of the annual release.
– Development for other OS’s ie. mac, but he seemed to push cloud usage instead so not having to rely on a specific OS. My problem with that is a slow internet, internet stops, or no internet all together. Also, I think not building for Mac use is another reason max has fallen behind in useage while maya and c4d has sped up.
– In general something big and unique to Max like when Pflow was introduced waaaaaay back in Max 5!! Innovate instead of just following the pack.
– EDUCATION: This was a BIG topic the last 15-20min of the night. This may go along with bad marketing. Could be just a general feeling, but seems Maya is pushed way more in schools. It’s becoming harder to find Max workers to staff, or freelance. Gary said they’ve evened the playing field by making all Autodesk products available to schools, but he missed the point that what the school heads want to push (like SVA’s head pushes maya mainly) won’t help us at all. They need to make Max a point of education for the next generation.
It was nice to be reminded (even though many of us Max users already know) that it generally takes more Maya artists to complete a job than Max artists … something like 3 or 4-to-1? We’re known as the good generalists that can bang out the job well while Maya artists generally specialize and that’s it. 2016 and beyond look is looking good, but hopefully too much damage hasn’t been done up to this point. And hopefully they make some Max presentation at Siggraph this year … There’s a facebook page for Max they suggested to join and give feedback and spread the word of max. And of course, join the Beta.
Anyone there last night feel free to add-on, or correct me where my memory has failed me 🙂
Editor’s note: if you enjoyed the report, please take a moment to thank Chaos23.
Note: it’s our duty to state that this is a personal account of the event and not official information from Autodesk or the organizers.
I thought I would write something quick while I still remembered some information. Others that were at the meeting last night should please fill in what other missing info there is, or correct me if I’m wrong.
I came to the meeting to see what kind of information our Max heads could divulge regarding the future of Max. I have to admit I did in fact leave more hopeful and positive in the changes that are finally being done with Max. I’ll have to be vague in certain spots because there’s probably things that I’m unsure can be said publicly. BUT from what I learned in this 3.5hr usergroup meeting, I will say like you’ve been hearing for a while – “they are listening” and are in fact ACTING.
THINGS I THINK I CAN SAY:
– Max is the 2nd most used app with some btw 14-17million monthly users according to CIP (customer involvement program) behind CAD. Maya wasn’t shown to crack the top 8 or 10.
– 3D Max management has been changed all the way down to the marketing department. Apparently the past marketing was giving credit to maya for jobs done in max. Could explain why would always have trouble finding out what Max was used on in the past. Glad those people are out!
– Improving development and releases so they are more polished and not the 1/2 baked things we’ve been given for a while now.
– Hired a bunch of new devs
– Improving coding behind the scenes. Even hired an architect manager to oversee, with his team, solely the coding in Max.
– XRef improvement. I think this can be said. Demo’d better capabilities, but we’ll see how reliable it will be as we all know who’ve used its major deficiencies currently. (No mention of better character rigging xref)
– Looking into multi-threading things …
– Other things that look great, but i probably should stop here 🙂
POINT OF CONTENTION:
– Eddie showed a graph showing 3 categories: Games, Film/TV, Digital Video (something arbitrary like that) and the names of people heading each category.
Max was put into the arbitrary column while the other 2 remained blank. An audience member asked what app(s) fell into the other 2 categories and he said Film/TV was maya and gaming maya LT. You could hear a collective groan to that response. He said he showed it this way because if he put Max under an arch/vis column people would be pissed, if he put max under a vfx column, people would be pissed so this was to please everyone. While I get that, it probably would have been better posed to show Max in all those columns then instead of creating some arbitrary column. He did say the managers of the other 2 divisions still give input into max from those categories. This led me to believe Max is still being created to serve as an all-in-one tool while Maya is trying to be pushed toward niche categories. The gaming side of it I find a bit odd to push maya LT now because didn’t they try that with Max years ago?
UKNOWN:
– BiFrost incorporation. Obviously he couldn’t say if it’ll be in max, but he posed the question, “how many max artists would really need liquids at some point?” I think he was surprised to see majority of the audience members raised their hands. Maybe that would help influence the decision. But then also I took it maybe it will eventually, but not yet since it’s still in a 1/2 ass state in Maya and there’s no reason to put it in Max until it’s further developed.
– Nvidia’s FLEX physx dev incorporation. Didn’t answer, but then I also felt this probably wouldn’t happen because it would require some sort of purchase, or licensing of Nvidia’s work? Unsure, but that’s too bad since we need our physx better developed and Nvidia has already taken that lead.
WHAT WE SUGGESTED TO SEE TOWARDS THE FUTURE:
– Better way of Max deployment instead of the annual release.
– Development for other OS’s ie. mac, but he seemed to push cloud usage instead so not having to rely on a specific OS. My problem with that is a slow internet, internet stops, or no internet all together. Also, I think not building for Mac use is another reason max has fallen behind in useage while maya and c4d has sped up.
– In general something big and unique to Max like when Pflow was introduced waaaaaay back in Max 5!! Innovate instead of just following the pack.
– EDUCATION: This was a BIG topic the last 15-20min of the night. This may go along with bad marketing. Could be just a general feeling, but seems Maya is pushed way more in schools. It’s becoming harder to find Max workers to staff, or freelance. Gary said they’ve evened the playing field by making all Autodesk products available to schools, but he missed the point that what the school heads want to push (like SVA’s head pushes maya mainly) won’t help us at all. They need to make Max a point of education for the next generation.
It was nice to be reminded (even though many of us Max users already know) that it generally takes more Maya artists to complete a job than Max artists … something like 3 or 4-to-1? We’re known as the good generalists that can bang out the job well while Maya artists generally specialize and that’s it. 2016 and beyond look is looking good, but hopefully too much damage hasn’t been done up to this point. And hopefully they make some Max presentation at Siggraph this year … There’s a facebook page for Max they suggested to join and give feedback and spread the word of max. And of course, join the Beta.
Anyone there last night feel free to add-on, or correct me where my memory has failed me 🙂
Editor’s note: if you enjoyed the report, please take a moment to thank Chaos23.
Maybe the stuff you felt you couldn’t reveal was what gave you the warm fuzzier.
For me the two key takeaways are:
1) Maya is the film tool and Max is..um… something
And
2) They are still actively refusing to believe Max users want fluids/liquids.
#2 means that as of this meeting, they weren’t working on it because they don’t accept that many want it… so I’m thinking so much for seeing it in the next version (ever?)… of course, if they move to a less frequent upgrade schedule it might… but then what is our $500 for?
The cloud thing? [Edited]… or maybe just look at the Creative Cloud news item on this page.
And yes… history repeats itself… maybe call the Maya games version gMaya?
Thanks Chaos23. Good to see things are moving along! I’m surprised they mentioned xref’s. This is definitely one of the needed overhauls.
Thank you so much Chaos23 … it was deep and in detail , I wish they could envelope it in those fields you mentioned …
I’m 3ds Max user since 2002
Thank you very much Chaos23, some very uplifting points and a few lesser uplifting things(if such thing exists), it’s not that uplifting that he didn’t put Max under those other categories, we all know how capable Max can be on all those categories, I fear this is the remnants of that gruesome marketing scheme towards Max so it’s still lurking in there, the notion that ‘we shouldn’t promote Max in areas that may somehow overlap with maya, or else it may hurt maya'(that’s how it looks at least).
Even though it may have just been on an impulse to ask, it’s not that uplifting that Eddie should still ask about Bifrost, I thought we had settled that, it again goes to show how terrified they(autodesk) are about the notion of Max having the same capabilities as ‘the other one’, though I agree that it would be a bad idea to implement a half baked one like the one in, the other one.
And as you pointed out correctly, in my opinion the lack of a mac version of Max isn’t helping that much and their lack of interest in the subject(as complex and hard to tackle a subject it may be) isn’t any better either, we all know that a ‘cloud based’ Max isn’t the same as an actual native Max running on other OS’s.(and as complex a subject as that may be, they are still a multi-billion dollar entity, they have no excuse for this in my opinion).
But in the end I’m happy that things are at least starting to change on fundamental levels, we’re counting on you Eddie and everyone else on the team… 🙂
PS: No talks of OpenSubdiv? or was that one of the secret ones? hope it was… 🙂
“Even hired an architect manager to oversee, with his team, solely the coding in Max”
Oh, wow. Cleaning up a 20 year old C++ code base. I hope Autodesk funds this poor soul’s therapy sessions. 🙂
I was also at the meeting and walked away feeling better about the future of Max but it also confirmed my belief that since Max is a software used in a wide variety of industries, its development will never be focused on any one of them exclusively like many people would like it to be.
I was also interested to hear that they are reviewing all the code to see what needs rewriting and what would benefit from multithreading. So in that respect Max should become faster as 20+ year old code is revamped and replaced by more modern methods.
In addition to that there was mention of possibly releasing more than one extension between new versions in order to get new tools into peoples hands faster.
I was present for the meeting as well. I just wanted to point out to everyone that the meeting was recorded. So at some point a recording of the nights event will surface.
Note: There was a point in the meeting where cameras had to be turned off due to the content that was shown.
Chaos23 and to all at the event,
Thank you for your hospitality.
I think in many ways you have captured the essence of the evening, but I want to clarify some of your comments.
First, we discussed why Maya may not show in the top ten list of monthly users and that the data is affected by many things including CIP participation, internet access and office policies. To be clear, this was NOT a display of popularity or industry usage, simply a snapshot of available data.
Second, with the division slide for Film, Games and Video solutions, I obviously did not make it clear that this was simply intended for organizational purposes and in no way reflects the focus or direction of 3ds Max. To repeat and to be PERFECTLY CLEAR, all of the divisions in M&E collaborate to deliver a complete 3ds Max.
Third, Bifrost. As I pointed out, I recognize a fluid solution to be important to numerous different kinds of 3ds Max user. From a Civil Engineer showing water flows in low lying areas or Architectural Designers designing water features to film and vfx work. I did not ask whether 3ds Max users need fluids but rather‘In its current state, does BiFrost represent that solution?’ I think it’s a fair question. BiFrost represents a considerable effort of integration. If it provides value, it’s worth that investment. Nividia’s Flex represents agreements with third party developers so there can be no comment.
Last, the mention of 3ds Max being faster than anything else was purely anecdotal. Of course, there are artists in other packages that can do work quickly. What I was trying to point out is that we are committed to bring you the types of tools to continue to make you successful in your efforts. I am sorry I didn’t make myself clearer.
To all the attendees of the event, again, thank you for your time and constructive comments. I hope you enjoyed a little peak at the inner workings and will share the enthusiasm they represent. As for the technology previews I shared, they were just that, technology prototypes and do not necessarily represent any future feature list.
Being that 3DAliens Glu3D has not updated since Max 2013, I wonder if that would be a good quick fluid solution Autodesk could purchase for Max. I never used Glu3D but I think Bifrost may have run them out of business.
They used to always release updates in between regular releases to give subscription people a reason to be on the sub.
They’ve mostly stopped doing that now.
@ Eddie, thank you for your explanation.
I really hope AD will realize how much they could gain in terms of new users/design shops if they would make Max more appealing for a design user base audience. Today C4D rules that slice of the market. What are the alternatives to C4D? None.
In my past 20 years I’ve tried almost every single 3d app, except for Maya (I don’t think I’ll ever try it). The only 3d package so far to me that closed the gap between a design standpoint and a production one, is 3ds Max even though is not there yet.
It is easy and fast enough to sketch quickly, but it’s still missing a couple of things in order to get there.
First off the interface. I don’t find that to be a big issue actually, but I can see that for a new user may just be scaring. It needs to be polished.
Second off, more design oriented tools. What that means is that right now, in order to create quite complex scenes for motion graphics needs, setups require quite a lot of time. The closese solution is ATK, but as the name implies that’s an animator tool kit meaning to get what you’re looking for you’ve to animate first. That’s where C4D excels: MoGraph makes the whole process so easy to setup, to try out, that users can in a matter of minutes literally try things, change their minds, tweak and so forth and at the end of the process able to deliver an idea. I really believe that Max could easily not only compete at the same level, but even do better. Vray integration is the best we can get on the market, animation is imho easier, particles are definitely better (Pflow rocks) and so forth.
Now, if we could only get some more design tools (and probably a MacOSX version), I bet Max would gather lot of more users in the motion graphics/design field.
Just my 2 c.
so…ptex, open subdiv, fluids, a better built in render engine, CAT advancements, Biped advancements, a more integrated previewer ‘viewport’, fur and hair advancements, simpler to set up IBL with drag n drop presets straight into the viewport like Modo. a PRO material library ready to go… preset lighting scenes for product based projects..just drop in your model..hit f9…sculpting and painting advancements…add connections to kinect pro, new controllers like ps4 and xbox360 and leap motion…ADD ability for older icon pack from max 8 as is hate and detest the fugly nonsense we have in 2015…i delete the icons and replace with max 2009 icons..GIVE us the option back please.
re max 2016 i’d like to see a gpu render engine added (no not mental ray/iray) something like octane, cycles* (*cycles is coming to rhino btw)
that actually gives you a rendered VIEWPORT.
the active shade option previewer in mental ray max 2015 is clunky , slow and kills the shader balls in the material editor…horrible!
feels rushed and put together with sticky tape and used chewing gum.
lots to do and DELIVER in april 2015
does max really have between 15- 17 million monthly users !
i find this a staggering (ly large) number
can someone break this down a bit? or confirm that was what was said
ie students etc etc
jc
@Eddy
I think it’s fair enough not to jump right into Bifrost if you’re not completely happy with it.
But that scares me – Autodesk have just made this huge acquisition that looks like it could define fluid sims for the next generation, releasing the Real Flow stranglehold – yet the PM of one of the most popular users of that software doesn’t have faith in it.
I would have thought that there would be lots of conversations going on behind closed doors about how Bifrost is the future – it’s what Autodesk are pushing across all their tools.
So that’s a little worrying. That the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
Bifrost could be made to be ubiquitous – but looking at Mental Ray – you’d think that at one point MR would dominate the market – it’s supposed to be free, built in to what were the 3 big 3D packages and yet somehow they lost to a package that is largely comparable and yet costs hundreds or thousands more depending on studio size.
These new nVidia particle tools look great – and if they were unified perfectly with MassFX etc. and represented the growth of a more mature particle system for Max, then that would be great too – but then it’s not even in Autodesk’s hands – and I don’t think anyone is really happy with the slack Mental Ray integration.
My dream solution would be integrating Vray and Phoenix FD as part of Max… I’d love to know if that discussion has taken place.
@mynewcat. –your last sentence: if that was done Max would be complete for me.
James, the monthly users number you are referring to, I believe was technically a monthly “uses” number. You know when you launch max after first installing it and you get a dialog box that comes up saying “would you like to take part in our customer participation program to help improve the product….blah blah..blah?” if a user says yes to that (which means users can opt out of it), then everytime you launch max on your machine it calls back to mama Autodesk and says Max has been launched.
The 15- 17 million number being talked about is how many times Max was launched, worldwide, in a given month. So depending on how you want to interpret that it could be really optimistic, like 17 mil separate users launched max once that month, or if you wanna take a moderate stance one scenario could be that in a given month of 4 5-day work weeks(20 days) 17mil / 20 = 850,000 separate users each launched max once every work day.
Or you could take a really pessimistic interpretation and assume that 850,000 / 4 = 212,500 individual users launched max 4 times every work day (from not keeping it launched all through the day, or crashes , or machine reboots or whatever.
I think everyone should take that as it is, just a very rough gauge as to the amount of “usage” of the package. This same thinking would go for ALL the monthly usage numbers for ALL the Autodesk software packages that were included in that little peek at the data. I think the main thing to take away was that of the list of 10 or so packages with the highest usage numbers, 3ds max and even 3ds max design (with 3+ mil) were the only M&E packages on that list, holding there own with all the AEC packages like AutoCad (at the top of course) and revit, etc. Also I think the guys shared this, not to fuel any “us vs them” debates between Max and any other package, but rather to give the Max users a bit of optimism.
Does that help?
@mynewcat
If those were integrated, I might mess around with it. But I would still prefer Fume and RealFlow. Phoenix for me seems lacking in control still. However, if they somehow integrated the nvidia gpu technology they showed this year – more Aiken to Plume. I would seriously consider this as my number one because of speed.
About the Nvidia fluids, I’m pretty sure you’d need an incredibly powerful GPU for them to be remotely usable in the viewport, besides I’m pretty sure that even then they probably wouldn’t be passable in terms of the quality for actual production work, I’m not necessarily opposing the idea, I’d Love to see them implemented alongside MassFX, but not as an alternative to something like Bifrost or even Phoenix.
Speaking of which, I for one wouldn’t completely oppose the idea of Phoenix instead of Bifrost, I mean it’s very tightly integrated in Max, it’s very flexible, fast and user friendly, and it does both liquid and fire, of course then again there’s the whole issue of why didn’t they just use Bifrost (Eddie’s reasoning appears to be it’s going to be a tough integration process(which begs the question: didn’t they claim they’ve designed it to be as product agnostic and as easily plug-able as possible?) ), but that aside, with the moderate familiarity that I have with it I can still call it a great Fluids integration for Max(Tobbe would probably want my head right about now), about VRay, don’t even fantasize about that, but yeah if that happened, well I guess a few minds would blow up, mine’s included.
Kim, I doubt that ADSK doesn’t know that breakdown. After all, they can just look at the serial numbers to figure it out. Whether they’d ever publicly release those numbers, that I doubt.
You don’t need a incredibly powerful Gpu for nvidia flex… And saying the flex fluids wouldn’t be passable in terms of quality isn’t true at all. If you haven’t seen what ILM is doing with GPU simulations , go watch that and then tell me the quality isn’t there… You think phoenix liquid sims are passable??? No offense to chaos group but not only is simulating fluids in phoenix ungodly slow but it doesn’t even look like fluid… The same goes for Glu3d except that the solver is even worse. I’m not advocating flex unless its properly integrated. Other wise i would tell Max team to not bother… But it’s fast and scales up well. That’s why Naiad blew up so fast! Because it was so fast to sim and didn’t chock out at a certain particle count. You could access and not only read but also write on a per particle/voxel level. What magma flow,stoke,bifrost,box3,realflow,fumefx(effectors) do, what Houdini does as a entire main package without any plugins. Without this we will always be limited in what we can do. Sometimes these tools are good enough to get the job done,, but If The max team truly wants to take max to the next level we don’t need anymore closed systems that don’t talk to each other. We don’t need anything slow either.
I kinda wanted to stop reading after the whole “You think phoenix liquid sims are passable???” with the emphasis on the question marks, no offense to you, but what I’ve seen so far is pretty passable, in this case I suggest you taking a look at their results in their YT channel(also take a look at Strob’s tests with it) and as for your kind suggestion of comparing ILM’s fluid systems with nvidia flux, well I’m just bewildered to say the least, my point wasn’t really the fact that it’s using GPU’s for calculation, but the fact that it needs to be adle to run in “realtime”, which means there needs to be compromises for quality, VRay RT can use GPU for rendering, don’t tell me you can’t see the difference between that and the Nitrous quality(not suggesting it’s not good though), that being said my main preference would still be Bifrost, it’s just that I won’t think it’s the end of the world if they went with Phoenix(clu3d? yeah not so much, that would be the end for me)…
Yes thanks that’s a very full answer- makes sense
I just wanted to correct myself for misspelling Nvidia’s Flex, “Flux” from FXGear is an entirely different subject, and a true example of scalable GPU accelerated fluids system.
Back to my last point, I still can’t see how one could consider the quality of a system made to run on realtime game engines passable for serious production work.
That being said I do agree with your second point about Bifrost probably being a potentially less closed system than other alternatives, and these kinds of things are why I still prefer to see Bifrost being implemented in Max than any other alternative.
@Maziar
Where does it say that it NEEDS to be able to run in realtime? That’s not the case what so ever. The emphasis of Running realtime is just for an example ie video games. Imagine how much more you can compute if you take it from realtime to lets say let it computer 1 frame per minute? How many particles are we talking then? Enough to get a great mesh out of it? Of COURSE. That would be a lot of bang for your buck…
I’ll have to check out this YT channel…
P.S. Even Maya’s got its motion graphic tools!
https://vimeo.com/95525742
Wish there was something like that for Max.
@Marco:
It`s called ATK:
http://animatorstoolkit.com/
I think we all realize that at the end of the day MAX’s fate will be no different from Softimage’s. At some point Ad will realize that they can bring the Archviz crowd into Maya and have one solution for all. It is only a question of when.
Thanks for the write-up chaos23 🙂
Bifrost is something most disciplines can use as long as it is usable, fluids are everywhere. we’ll just have to see what the future says.
Thanks chaos23, and thanks Eddie for chiming in.
But I won’t be crying like a little girl with tears of joy until I hear that Autodesk has removed all boundaries on Max R & D and allowed it to compete with Maya for VFX/entertainment.
To me, this is the big Zen koan of 3ds Max development: How can Max be allowed to compete with Maya in VFX/entertainment without encroaching on Maya’s territory?
One way is to make Max’s advances in this area lag behind Maya by a few years.
ergo: Maya gets bifrost – Max does too but 2 -3 years later; Maya gets voxel/heat map/ dual quaternion skinning – Max does too, but 2 -3 years later; Maya gets open subdivs – Max does too but 2 – 3 years later; Maya gets alembic caching and import/export – Max does too but… you get the picture.
Tim
@ Meli,
I’m sorry to disagree, is not.
MASH is C4D MoGraph like, ATK is for animators. If you know MoGraph you know what I’m talking about.
@Tim Chang : I guess that’s the major concern. If Maya is the Golden Son and everything good will go to it first, then why use 3ds Max and be always 1/2 years behind?
@MauricioPC
Of course your questions are rhetorical but I will answer them anyway 🙂
1. You stick with Max because you prefer modifier stacks and maxscript over construction histories and MEL. (These are pretty much my reasons).
2. The standard Autodesk spiel (albeit unnofficial) that the marketing department has had to subsist on while upper management procrastinated over Max’s future goes something like this: (in differentiating between Max and Maya in the M & E product line…)
“Max is the Swiss Army Knife of 3D apps and as such its users should not expect the kind of cutting-edge vfx/entertainment technology one would find in a specialist package (i.e. Max is not that kind of software).”
My first comment is that this Swiss Army Knife metaphor is getting rather old. It’s something we used to say in the 90’s when defending our favourite but humble DOS/Win-NT 3D software against the SGI-based titans that cost you a house mortgage. Cut to present day, and we no longer see Max as the little guy going up against the big boys – Max IS one of the big boys.
Part of that metaphor was a reference to the vast array of plugins available from 3rd party developers. The Swiss Army Knife is really a toolbox in which the tools (i.e. plugins) are customisable according to the user’s needs. But if we acknowledge this then we must also acknowledge that out of the box, Max-vfx/entertainment is incomplete when compared to other 3D software operating in the same market (most notably Maya).
So if Max-vfx/entertainment is destined for blunt-edge technology and incomplete at that, why does it cost as much as Maya? It must be because we get all that arch/viz stuff as well. But is this a benefit or a hindrance? Especially when there’s 3ds Max-design – isn’t that supposed to be the arch/design package?
Which leads me to ask, what exactly IS my annual subscription fee funding in terms of R & D?
One way of classifying Max R & D activity is by market sector:
1. Stuff that benefits arch/viz.
2. Stuff that benefits vfx/entertainment.
3. STUFF THAT BENEFITS BOTH.
Note that 3rd option. Is there a product manager on the face of the planet who can, when allocating the coming year’s R & D resources, resist the temptation of the two’fer?
By prioritising option 3, we’ve seen yearly updates that emphasised workflow and infrastructure developments. That means lots of UI stuff; things like layer manager/scene explorer, caddies, graphite ribbon, scene states/state sets, etc. alot of which we can argue the merits of; but let’s be fair, there’s also been Nitrous, viewport speed boosts and poly-count performance, which we’ve all welcomed. So don’t get me wrong, I too have appreciated alot of this effort.
But 2nd priority has gone to arch/viz, and vfx/entertainment has sunk to the bottom of the heap. Why? Because:
A) Autodesk doesn’t want Max to compete in Maya’s sandbox, and
B) the future of 3ds Max-vfx/entertainment is unclear, whereas the future of 3ds Max-design is well-defined and assured; so why spend money where it could be eventually wasted?
So far I’ve been disappointed but OK that some of my subscription dollars went towards civil view, direct connect, revit link and populate (is there anyone who thinks that populate is anything other than a viz tool?), because that’s the penalty of “Swiss Army Knife” software. But after a few years this vfx/entertainment-Swiss Army Knife is gradually being revealed for what it really is: hobbled software.
3ds Max 2016 needs to prove differently.
Tim