Show and Tell at Autodesk University!

Social Media:

Posted by bill n on Dec 02, 2009 at 12:31 PM

Crashing because you run out of RAM sounds very much like a code-based problem. Written correctly, an application should page out memory when it runs out, not crash. I'm with you on the 'everyone should buy more RAM' issue - in my office I insist on everyone having a minimum of 8GB and and we've been running 64-bit since the day it was available, but you can't blame low RAM on everything. I can't remember one single memory-related crash from Photoshop in the last 10 years, even when I have many times more memory-sucking images open than my machine has hardware resources for, Photoshop just deals with it all by paging. Used with fast hard drives it's never really an issue. The reality is Max does crash quite a bit, regardless of hardware, keeping it patched and how up to date my Quadro drivers are, and this is what we want your engineers to look at. I save incrementally in Max about every 15 minutes or so (hard drive space is also cheap), whereas in Photoshop I only bother if I'm about to make a fundamental change to the image I'm working on. Going back to Photoshop, when was the last time they released a Service Pack for any version? Never. I know because I've been using it since version 2. It's only ever minor point fixes that don't fix much at all. This is the sort of stability and quality that we want from Max, and with the correct testing it's totally achievable, it just never seems to happen. By the way sorry to sound like I'm always bashing Max, I'm only writing this because I care about the software. Most of the time Max is terrific fun to use!

Posted by Ken Pimentel on Nov 27, 2009 at 03:05 PM

I'm not blaming plug-ins as I believe, like you, they are one of the major contributors to our success. I'm simply stating the fact that some of the instability has been traced to some plug-ins and customers think it is 3ds Max crashing when it is the plug-in. This is a fact, not an opinion. I'd guess this cause a minority of the crashes and that most of the stability issues come from running in a RAM-starved environment and flaky video drivers/hw.

Posted by mahi on Nov 27, 2009 at 10:36 AM

"2) You probably use third-party plug-ins with 3ds Max that have their own issues - but you don't realize that they are causing the crash" I"m sorry, I have to comment on this. Ken it is comments like this that make me crazy! Of course we are using 3rd party plug-ins with Max. How else do you think people can get any work done. It just makes no sense to have someone from Autodesk put blame on third-party plug-ins, even if they do cause issues. It is your strong selling point of 3ds max in the first place. (I would put blame on it running in Windows OS as well then). Here is a link to a plug-in I'm sure many people will be using since Audtodesk will just not update Max for the modern day 3d artist. www.ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/max/zookeeper/ This brings me to something that has been bugging me about your response to me in this thread. "3ds Max = Entertainment, primarily Games and VFX, where anything is possible and SDK important 3ds Max Design = Design/Vis, commonality with CAD interfaces and data is important, analytical tools (like Exposure for daylight analysis)" I just don"t believe this anymore. To make Max useful in Entertainment and VFX pipelines, one needs to have plug-ins. Here are a few. Sure some may not need all, or any of these, but they sure as hell help. 1- Particle flow box tools 2- Fume FX 3 - PWrapper 4 - Zookeeper 5 - krakatoa So I'm sorry to be a pest all the time, but at some point there has to be something done.

Posted by Ken Pimentel on Nov 23, 2009 at 08:42 AM

Stability is a complex subject. I've visited many customers who complain about stability only to learn that they are using a 32b version of 3ds Max on a PC with 2Gb of RAM. Yes, this will always be unstable and there is nothing that we can do about it. Spend the and get 4Gb of RAM!!! If you have stability problems, the first step is for you to run the 64b version of 3ds Max and get yourself a minimum of 4Gb - preferably 8Gb. Customers that do that are overjoyed by the improvement in stability and the enhanced workflow that additional RAM gives you. We gather a lot of statistics about bugs/errors and I can say that 3ds Max 2010 is better (though not dramatically) than all prior versions. Why do some of you see things differently? 1) Because you're probably using a video board that isn't in our qualified list of supported hw; 2) You probably use third-party plug-ins with 3ds Max that have their own issues - but you don't realize that they are causing the crash; 3) you have some workflow that indeed depends on something that is error-prone in 3ds Max (a bug); 4) the memory issues I mentioned above are affecting you. 3ds Max 2010 fixed over 350 legacy bugs, so we definitely invested in quality and stability and we have no plans to stop doing that. Yes, we need to do more as our stability could be better. But you also have to realize that we're producing some of the most complex software around with many dependencies on the GPU and CPU that other software does not have. For example, other than Mudbox, there are no Autodesk products that come close to 3ds Max to leveraging the GPU like we do. This is only going to be more true in the future, not less.

Posted by bill n on Nov 23, 2009 at 05:23 AM

Ken, something else you may want to discuss with your developers is the general level of bugs in the software. Sorry if it sounds like your users are always moaning and banging on about it, but there always seems to be a disproportionate level of bugs in Max as compared to other Autodesk 3D software. A simple look at the first 5 pages of the 2010 forums and you will see that over and over again people are complaining about crashes, things not working and instabilities. From a personal level I must say I feel Max2010 (even with the service pack) is the most buggy release in recent memory. Is there any chance that with the next release your programmers could thoroughly iron out as many bugs as possible before releasing the software please? Our IT department here always says 'never install a new version of Windows until the first service pack', and It's getting to the stage that it's the same with Max, which is a pretty dumb way of approaching any piece of software. These days the incredible number of features that Max has makes me wish that for the next version, rather than piling on even more, how about making the existing features work flawlessly and sort out the interface? For me that would make it the best version of Max in history