3ds Max 2012 is here!

Start your downloads, the release is now available to Subscription customers. If you don't know where to start, try to figure out who your subscription administrator is as you'll need to know this to login. Physical copies will start shipping April 8th to those that are getting boxes.

Beta Survey

Every release we ask our beta users what they think of the release. Here’s what 180 of them told us:

Overall stability:

We fixed about 400 legacy bugs (bugs that existed in 2011 or before). This was higher than we’ve done in previous releases. 92% of people felt the stability was average or above. 41% thought the stability was better or much better than other releases. Only 6% thought it was worse than prior releases.

Viewport responsiveness and performance:

If you look at the community survey we did, this was the number one feature people wanted to see improvements. Luckily, the release delivers for most people. 87% felt it was average or above and 62% felt it was better than prior releases. 12% felt it was worse – which is interesting because this feature had the most positives and the most negatives. There are situations where Nitrous shows some issues on some hardware – we’re aware of these and we are very busy with continuing to fix issues as we discover them. Nitrous is getting a lot of attention from us and we know how important it is to get everything to work as expected.

 

General application performance:

With the new Nitrous multi-threading architecture, various things are now feeling a little more “snappy” and this shows in the survey results where 93% thought it was average or above and 59% thought it was better than previous releases.

Workflow of features you need to use

We scored 87% average or above, and 41% felt it was better than prior releases. I think we have a lot more to do here, and the new Community feedback site is going to help us a lot here. http://autodesk.uservoice.com/forums/76763-publicsmallannoyingthings

User interface ease of use

88% felt it was average or better and we scored 41% better than prior releases. This is another area we identified in our XBR roadmap that needs attention. If you missed it, here it is again: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/ken/xbr_webinar_results

Interoperability with the applications you need to work with

86% said it was average or above, 30% said it was better than prior releases. This scored the lowest improvement, which is a little odd in that we did a bunch of new “one step” workflows with Mudbox and MotionBuilder – but it just means that those weren’t the apps where customers wanted better interop. Our community survey suggests that it should be Adobe AE, Photoshop and Maya – which were generally the top responses.

XBR and U

So this was a big release for us in that we had to introduce a totally new viewport system, Nitrous or XBR:Graphics. This was one of the "untouchable" cores of 3ds Max and we've hopefully addressed a lot of performance issues while not breaking too much. Given the scale of what we did, it will be very promising if we emerge from this without and deep scratches. With this release, one of our biggest efforts is now mostly behind us, we've still got some big boulders to lift, but you should be able to see some direction what with MassFX and mRigids now in place too. We're not done by any means, but we might be able to say we're about half-way there. Maybe.