Our guest blogger will talk about something revolutionary going on that 3ds Max is intimately involved in and definitely unique in supporting. This will give you a much better perspective on what is going on with something we consider both innovative and revolutionary. Expect his post later this week.

I've just got back from visiting some customers in the New York area with Shane Griffith and the dev. team. This was part of our validation effort on our research projects. We spent about 3+ hours at each customer site learning what their problems were and then having them evaluate and score our research efforts. We'll visit roughly 30 customers this way to collect feedback and to prioritize our research. We'll also do shorter validations with groups of customers at GDC, AIA, SIGGRAPH and AU.

It was very exciting to see the reaction to customers of our ideas. I've been doing this process since I first got involved with 3ds Max a few years back, and I can tell you I've never seen such positive reactions. Maybe they were just being nice, but we did instruct them not to be "nice" at the beginning of the meeting! We mostly visited Games, Civil and AEC customers in this set of meetings. We'll fill out all our markets with the rest of the customers over the next several weeks and months. Results could change as we talk to more customers, but with 6 done, we're looking very strong.