TurboTriSmooth for 3ds Max

Yup, super, they took maya retopo and put it in max, one year later. Wow.

True…maya had the retopo modifier atleast a year before us, yet everyone wants to pretend they are surprised. no animation tools for how long now. or even any unique tools that we can boast of. now, we almost need plugins and scripts for every damn thing.

anuser – You’re speculating. I’ve been a software developer since before Max was released and have a very good concept of the amount of effort and manpower that goes into it.

JokerMartini – I have no quarrel with the development team as individuals. Rather, I question the lack of resources provided them by Autodesk, as well as overall product vision and development practices and priorities. No doubt much of which is dictate by corporate interests. Product managers come and go, teams get laid off. All the schemes to milk money from existing customers. Maintenance and yearly releases were supposed to be for our benefit. Subscription now, and all the extortive business practices. Watch what happens if you don’t renew your maintenance more than a few weeks ahead of the due date. That was really eye opening for me. I also listened to an hour long call where an Autodesk agent tried to talk my boss into converting our perpetual licenses to subscription. It was gross. The amount of half truths, omissions and nonsense put forth in an attempt to get the sale.

Shipping beta software as release, and counting on paying customers to perform QA. Max QA is grossly understaffed. There is a 100% reproducible crash bug in the most up to date version of 2016 and it’s not some totally esoteric feature. The bug reporting system, or lack thereof more accurately, is absurd and has been for years. Reported bugs fall into a black hole. The ticket submission requires users to input the same system information over and over, despite Autodesk having a complete user account system. Things that get re-written in Max almost never work as well as what came before. I can list numerous examples of this. The “new and improved” select by name is still awful. That modal window now opens in the top left corner, whereas the old one opened in the middle of the screen because whomever created the original understood that it’s asinine to display a modal control anywhere else. Reported this at least 4 times. It’s so slow also compared to the original, non-script version. Try doing a wildcard name search on a scene with more than a hundred objects. It becomes laughably slow. The default viewport shadowmap looked awful for over 5 years. The default resolution was set to 512, and there was no way to change it other than through maxscript every single time you loaded the program. UI caddies are terrible and utterly useless fluff. Intern level stuff. At least they stopped updating the icons every other year. MCG, while impressive in theory, was implemented in such a way that no one wants to bother to use it. Died on the vine just like the impressive-at-the-time viewport updates circa 2008. Max is now trying to catch up to EEVEE. Here’s some viewport bloom. I’m terrified to try out the new render to texture. The old one was bad, but at least I knew its quirks. The maxscript documentation for RTT was completely lacking and a mystery, but I cringe at the thought of trying to implement the new one.

If you’re so knowledgeable about the Max dev. team, and I’m so far off, tell us how many full time programmers are working on Max. I stand by my statement that based on the yearly updates, 5 programmers could get it done if they were of the caliber of the folks I work with, or Marius. Everything Max does now is playing catch up with other apps, scripts or plugins. Copying Marius’ quad chamfer plugin, and never getting parts of it right even after tinkering with it for five years now. The round shade feature still doesn’t set explicit normals(though I think there’s some new modifier that maybe works in conjunction). Max used to be the innovators. Blender development is running circles around Max. Can’t buy up and neuter the competition this time, Autodesk. I don’t even use Blender, but I donate monthly to the development fund because I believe it’s the best way to improve Max, via market competition. Dollars are seemingly the only thing that motivates Autodesk.