3DS Max 2016 review
Introduction
[specs-box]This year Autodesk has released version 2016 of its 3D Swiss Army knife application. 19 years after its initial release in April 1996 (or 25 years, if you want to count all the way back to 3D Studio), the software is still going strong. Other 3D software, however, have grown in capabilities and popularity on the side, offering stronger competition. Be it motion graphics, Archviz, video games or VFX, 3DS Max is not alone.
Before the launch of 3DS Max 2016, Autodesk made sweeping changes to their business model and software line-up. They have retired Softimage, removed the option for customers to upgrade their software to new versions and announced a ‘rental-only’ business model. At the same time, the future of 3DS Max has been seen with uncertainty due to frequent changes to the product's management team, lack of marketing focus and a string of lacklustre releases, which left many user-voted requests unimplemented for years. Following increasing complaints from users, a new management team was appointed, headed by core Max users, and, notably enough, joined by the original developer of the 3D Studio software. These changes have significantly raised hopes for renewed development.
It is in this particular context that many will evaluate 3DS Max 2016 and its feature list. Announced as the “Biggest Max Ever”, this is the first full release backed by the newly formed development team. Has development rhythm gone back to a fast pace, bringing useful features and reassuring users that 3DS Max will continue to evolve, or is this another lacklustre release that pushes Max users to look elsewhere?
Let's find out.
First impressions
The 3DS Max 2016 experience begins with software installation and it’s at this point where many users will be first disappointed. Max has two main issues with its installation that have not been addressed in years; there are too many files being installed and there are very limited options for customisation.
Autodesk Material libraries, Mental Ray and over 40,000 ‘Populate’ data files are still mandatory installation components. There’s a lack of advanced installation and deployment options, and migration of previous user settings is a very manual process. At least the installation and activation process for the average user is smooth and simple.
Starting up the software for the first time gives the user the first notification that something has changed – the “Design” variant has smartly been retired and 3DS Max has been unified into a single offering once again. All functionality remains and the user is now prompted with a new classic/design dialog that lets them initialise 3DS Max with the settings they’re used to.
After choosing their preferred flavour of 3DS Max, users are then treated to a newly designed welcome screen showcasing the “templates” feature which will likely be glossed over and then closed - at least initially. Now, we are finally presented with the interface. No matter if you’re a Veteran or first-time user, the UI is going to disappoint. Compare the 18+ year old 3DS Max interface to Maya 2016’s sleek new Hi-DPI UI and Max’s classic win32 UI flickery cracks are really starting to show.
Viewport improvements
The initial standout improvement is definitely the new Viewport selection preview. Seemingly inspired by Unreal Editor 4, 3DS Max now makes object selection easy – giving visual previews of objects under the mouse cursor and objects that have been selected.
The Nitrous viewport has also received another yearly step-up in performance and visual fidelity, one of the most welcome features being viewport motion blur – a feature that appears to be omitted from the release notes and marketing.
Max Creation Graph
The most exciting feature Max has had in years and certainly the scene stealer of this release, Max Creation Graph (MCG) allows users to create their own modifiers, utilities and geometric objects with a node based interface similar to the Slate material editor. Users can easily export, share, install and maintain Maxtools made with the MCG system.
Softimage users will definitely be rolling their eyes as they try out MCG and read the scores of positive feedback from 3DS Max users. Yes, it is terrible that Autodesk has abandoned arguably their most modern DCC app, yes ICE is better than MCG, but no 3DS Max user will be complaining that a node based creation toolkit is being implemented. MCG is definitely not as good as ICE, particularly in MCG’s lack of speed and real-time feedback to changes in the graph, but for a v1.0 release, it is impressive.
Elara Systems has freely released 5 powerful MCG tools complete with video tutorials
Programming experience is definitely a huge plus when diving into MCG, however even the most non-technical user benefits from Max Creation Graph via the tonne of modifiers, utilities and tools that have been freely released in the past month alone. These tools are extremely easy to package & install and Max users have begun to oscillate around MCG. In the few weeks since launch, Autodesk has produced a number of free MCG training videos and released a sample pack containing 30 MCG tools and 80 compounds. The 3DS Max community has also created a number of fantastic tools, many are incredibly inventive, useful and released for free. With MCG, there is an excitement around 3DS Max that hasn’t been felt for a few years.
Alembic support
In this reviewer’s opinion, the breadth of support for the open-source Alembic format is one of the most exciting additions to an already impressive release. Autodesk first revealed their official Alembic implementation in 3DS Max 2015 extension 1, but the additional improvements for Max 2016 are nothing short of astounding. Two fantastic features have been added amongst a tonne of bug fixing and compatibility improvements.
First is the Playback graph. Users familiar with the 3DS Max point cache system’s playback graph will feel right at home. Playback graph allows you to retime, loop, reverse and offset the animation of an alembic cache. This offers extreme power and flexibility and opens the door to many procedural and collaborative workflows.
This video demonstrates how the Alembic Playback Graph can be used to instance animation across hundreds of objects
The video above shows how I recently used the Alembic playback graph to quickly create a river scene full of 200 animated animals – each animal instancing an Alembic animation cache. I was able to easily swap out geometry or animation while retaining each object’s animation offsets.
The second key feature added to Alembic is the Performance Mode and frankly, it has to be seen to be believed. The easiest comparison is After Effect’s RAM Preview; select an alembic cache in your scene, activate performance mode and a green progress bar will begin to fill the 3DS Max timeline as frames are loaded into the video card's memory. The video card will then be utilized for playback of the cache and insane frame rates can be achieved.
An overview of the new Alembic Performance Mode and how it handles large geometry caches
A crucial lack of finer cache controls lets this feature down a bit and it’s not quite practical with extremely large files, but the video above demonstrates Performance mode playing back a 106GB RealFlow sim at 20 frames per second on modest hardware, which is very impressive.
An example of how Alembic Performance mode can be used in production
The 3DS Max team’s support of the Alembic specification is robust, however they’ve also added support for 3DS Max-specific “material IDs”. Alembic’s been tested in production by many talented members of the 3DS Max beta team over the course of development and while some data such as arbitrary channels currently have limited support, it’s a fantastic addition to every 3DS Max user’s toolkit regardless of your discipline. Time spent investigating Alembic and how it can be utilised in your pipeline is time well spent!
Xref “Renovations”
Alembic is complemented by some much appreciated improvements to 3DS Max’s flawed referencing system. It’s laughable that in this day and age, a core feature such as asset referencing has been so finicky, difficult and unreliable. 3DS Max already offers a range of limited options for file referencing including file links, Containers, XREF Object and XREF scene and users unfortunately have to spend valuable production time researching the limitations of each of these before committing to them for a project.
Thankfully, some serious improvements have been made to the XREF object system in this release. There are now fantastic options for referencing objects, controllers, modifiers and materials into scenes and Autodesk claim that rigged characters can now be correctly referenced into scenes. Yes, this is possible but updating the rig of a referenced character without losing local animation is still very cumbersome.
XREF in 3DS Max still pales in comparison to Maya’s solid referencing system but it’s worth noting that 3DS Max 2016 is a non-SDK breaking release - the developers were very limited in the changes they could make to the XREF system. With this in mind, it’s impressive what has been done and one can only hope that 3DS Max 2017 can deliver on what the team have started. The goal of allowing a very non-destructive workflow has –mostly – been delivered. Though this is the way it should be and the way other DCC apps have operated for years.
The bottom line - XREF-improvements in 3DS Max 2016 are great but they unfortunately do still require a R&D investment on behalf of your team before committing to these new features in production.
Workflow improvements
A host of new and updated features have been implemented in addition to the fantastic MCG and Alembic support. Many “small annoying things” have also been addressed.
This video highlights 3 of the many workflow improvements in 3DS Max 2016
The legacy layer manager was retired in 3DS Max 2015, replaced by a revamped Scene Explorer. Sadly, it should have been called the ‘Scene Destroyer’ as it was simply not ready for production, missing key functionality and contained some colossal scene-destroying bugs. I’m very happy to report that the scene explorer has seen continued development in Max 2016. It is now at the level it should have been like when it was first released. Double-click a layer to select all of its children. Locating and managing objects is effortless and it is full of customization. It’s still not perfect, crucially, it’s hard to identify the state of sub-layers and layer overrides do not propagate to sub-layers correctly. Perhaps we’ll be waiting for Max 2017 for that, but simply put, working with the scene explorer in Max 2016 is a joy.
The new “Physical” camera aims to replace the dated ‘standard’ camera with a customisable modern camera. This is actually based on Chaos Group’s fantastic V-Ray Physical Camera, though welcomed improvements have been made to its viewport representations and to the UI. V-Ray users will now find that the VRayPhysicalCamera is no longer available via the ‘create’ panel – Chaos Group want the new 3DS Max Physical camera to supersede it, too. Sadly, there is still no way to set render resolution, overscans and safe frames on a per-camera basis, a popular user request which would be a fantastic workflow addition.
Max 2015 Extension 1 improvements
Features first added for subscription customers in 3DS Max 2015 Extension 1 have been further improved upon. The 3DS Max camera sequencer has received a number of usability improvements making it easy to setup a multi-shot sequence using a NLE-style timeline. The implementation of Opensubdiv has also been improved, most noticeable is the addition of adaptive subdivision. As the camera becomes closer to an object, the surface will subdivide and add detail to the areas that need it. This works like a dream in the viewport though I have not been able to get this feature to work with a 3rd party renderer in my tests.
Dual Quaternion skinning was added to the Skin Modifier and remains unchanged since Extension 1. Sadly this has been the only character animation improvement in this release. And developer Raylight SRL have offered a very inexpensive DQ Skinning plugin for years, making the omission of any other character animation tools all the more noticeable.
Scene I/O
"Autodesk Translation Framework" has now been incorporated into 3DS Max, vastly improving support for popular CAD formats
Aside from the additional work on the .abc format, 3DS Max 2016 has seen some extensive improvements to its interchange formats. This is great news if you use 3DS Max with a lot of CAD Formats. The main addition is the implementation of the Autodesk Translation Framework from the Autocad family of products. Open the import dialog and you will see many new “ATF” importers for popular CAD and geometry formats. While working on a promo for the new 2015 Toyota Camry I used the ATF IGES importer to import the various parts of the car and was literally able to drop a car paint material on the geometry and instantly render without artifacts. There are some issues with the ATF but as a whole, it provides a quicker import process with better options.
3DS Max also now natively imports SolidWorks files (SolidWorks no longer needs to be installed or running on your system to import SolidWorks files), supports Sketchup 2015 and has a much improved integration with Autodesk Revit. The latest FBX 2016 has been included with Max, which has far improved interoperability of ShaderFX shaders between 3DS Max and Maya.
Shading and rendering
Instantly noticeable to existing users is the redesigned Render Settings Dialog with the ‘Render’ button controversially moved to the very top of the main window. For those that are constantly switching between renderers, the new drop-down menus will be handy, but many will agree that the render button is best kept at the bottom where it was and certainly doesn’t require as much screen real estate! There have been a few developments for both the Iray and Mental Ray implementations in 3DS Max. Most significantly in Mental Ray is the light Importance Sampling (LIS), which should allow for faster renderings of scenes, though in practice I have found little improvement on render time or image quality.
3DS Max 2016 also includes Autodesk 360 cloud rendering, allowing still images and sequences to be submitted to Autodesk’s cloud rendering infrastructure. Payments are made via cloud credits. I don’t see this as practical for many users that rely on 3rd party plugins & renderers or those who render multi-element sequences requiring 100s of megabytes of data per frame. I am also unsure how this would be any better than the dedicated render farms that have a few years head start.
ShaderFX has continued to be developed with expanded node patterns and improvements to the node browser and there is a new “Stingray” Shader for Autodesk’s upcoming Realtime graphics engine. We will have to wait and see how this ties into Stingray. The release is rounded out with a few extra features such as Multitouch 3D navigation support and many tweaks and bug fixes that are all very welcome.
There have been no improvements to Particle Flow, which aside from some small bug fixes and a revamped UI, has failed to see any serious development for many releases. In fact, many viewport and workflow glitches remain after 4 releases. No dynamics, fluids or meshing tools have been added to Max either. FX artists will be disappointed, though they will benefit from the other areas the development team have chosen to focus on this round. What is important though, as a signal of development trend, is that the 3DS Max 2016 release notes show us that the developers have tried to address the majority of the top requests on 3DS Max User Voice.
Conclusion
3DS Max 2016 sends a clear message to its vast and varied userbase that the future of the 3D industry’s ‘Swiss Army Knife’ is in great hands. The newly re-formed development team has stretched all resources to deliver the first release in years that truly tries to cater for as many of the diverse usergroup as possible. If 3DS Max 2016 contained only MCG and Alembic, this would be a ‘good’ release in the vein of 3DS Max 2011-2015. Instead, these 2 great features are accompanied by a laundry list of additions, enhancements and fixes that will put a smile on even the most jaded 3DS Max user’s face.
The new Physical Camera co-developed with Chaos Group improves upon the VRayPhysicalCamera with a new UI and viewport display of focus planes
The real losers with this release are Character Animators and FX Artists. Dual Quaternion skinning is a token addition arriving 4 years too late and no work has been done to the crippled 3DS Max ‘MassFX’ dynamics system, despite 3 years of advancements to PhysX on NVidia’s side. 3DS Max has no true fluid, pyro or gas solver despite continued advances to Bifrost in Maya. Meshing compound objects are outdated and volume and particle rendering options are sorely missing. Finally, it must be said the UI is just too outdated with no support for hi-DPI displays and constant flickering, user experience design and customisation issues. That said, it’s understandable that these features have been neglected this cycle as the features that did ‘make the cut’ really do benefit every 3DS Max user, no matter what your discipline.
Is it production-ready? Far more so than previous 3DS Max initial releases. MCG alone makes the time and cost investment in deploying 3DS Max 2016 worthwhile. Technically minded users will love MCG and non-technical artists will gawp at the plethora of powerful MCG objects, modifiers and tools that are being released daily. There are just a few ‘new’ bugs introduced with this release and hopefully they will be squashed in the first service pack.
As the owner of a perpetual license with active subscription, I happily give 3DS Max 2016 a 4.0/5. 3DS max 2016 is certainly a release worthy of a subscription renewal. But is this release really worth the outright cost of investment for legacy and new users alike? Since 3DS Max is used across so many industries in studios large, small and tiny, you must answer this question yourself but pricing options - a crucial element of a customer’s purchasing decision - are hindered by Autodesk’s highly inflexible licensing options. If you’re a ‘legacy’ 3DS Max owner, Autodesk has removed the ability for you to upgrade and soon you will only be able to rent the software. If I was evaluating this software with this in mind I would remove .5 marks from the final score. The current perpetual license and rental costs are simply not in sync with the features on offer and 3DS Max has no scaled pricing options like Houdini Indie, Cinema 4D Prime and Maya LT.
For me, 3DS Max 2016 is worthy of the title “Biggest Max Ever” and I recommend it. I’m impressed with the work the development team has done and sit happy knowing the future of 3DS Max is in such capable hands.