Please quit messing with features that work fine to begin with. Thanks.

That was informative.

who are you kidding...max kicks butt!

maybe you just need to learn how to use it better

I agree with cogliati, Max is a very complicated program to use, and can be very painstaking to start learning. I remember when I first started using Max I’m like WHAT! A bunch of circles and rectangles, thats how I’m supposed to make art! But now I’ve spent about a month and a half learning it, it is a very good program, and I can’t get enough of it. I know how you feel, when i first started using it, I went in and out of trying to learn, i got the trial forgot about it, started using it again, then forgot about it, then started using it again -indefinentely, you just need to get really used to it, it is a VERY complex program.

-Austin: Using Maya 2009
My CGSociety Portfolio
IRC Nick: AustinZ

maya learning cureve is nothing compared to max’s premade settings…

Maya :D

Ive been using max for 8 years.  I work as a professional in the games industry. I know max QUITE well. I have seen completely bug free and intuitive tools goto complete junk… and vise versa, since I started using max. Each iteration slowly taking my life away, and now they bought Mudbox. I cant wait to see verts and polygons flying in all directions as my computer ignites into a burning beacon of lost hope and tears a hole in the fabric of bug fixing, creating a doorway to Autodesk’s QA department.

When he says polygons flying in all directions.. hes not even joking, does autodek even KNOW about the infinate edge bug?

Maya :D

Boomcha:
it would really help if you could tell the others ( like me ) WHAT exact problems you are refering too ?
this would let other people discuss it , oppose or agree etc.. the basic things an discussion forum is all about…
a public forum is more than a frust-dump station and if you have some frustration to dump, please tell us some details

so about what are you exactly talking ? there are people here (like me) who use max for more than 8 years....

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Heres a pile of details.

Lets start with unwrap. SEAMS EVERYWHERE, do they really think its necessary to have bright glowing borders all over my model of every color of the rainbow. Turning them off, at least the ones you actually can, wont stay off because max is utterly horrible at remembering the settings you save as your default. Even after you manage to get a nice selection of polygons, you go into the edit uvw mode and half the time it forgets what you had selected. Stitching edges and verts is also quite fun with max’s aforementioned user default settings bug. I usually have to manually stitch 100s of edges together without using my hotkeys because it likes to make me miserable, and forget my bias settings.  Luckily I have not seen the sticky vertex bug surface in 2008, where unfolding a rectangular object would result in a vert stuck a 0,0 in the unwrap editor.  Max’s saving grace is that it allows me the privilege of installing plugins that make Unwrap work as it should. When every professional I know HAS to have unwrap plugins to keep their heads from exploding, then its a sign they should put a little more thought into the default tools.

How bout some viewport bugs? Lets take something like a city scene or forest. It is almost like a game trying to select what you want in populated max files. Oh is that tree right in front of everything what you are trying to select? TOO BAD! I get to cycle through 9 or 10 things just to select what is right in front of me. I’m a perspective viewer. I remember distinctly zooming in as far as I wanted back in max 3 and 4 while in perspective view. Now it does this fancy obnoxious camera zoom falloff that prevents me from zooming any further. JUST LET ME ZOOM, as far as I want, not as far as you want, ME, MY FILE, MY PERSPECTIVE VIEW. I like what they did to snaps too, oh wait no I dont. Try aligning the pivot point of an object to a vertex. Wow could they have made it any more unintuitive. Randomly drag your mouse all over an object till a magic blue border surrounds it, why cant I just grab the pivot like I could in every max prior? Did they feel that was too easy? They also ditched the polygon counter, which was a handy tool for game development. Thanks. They also ditched shift clicking an object to clone it, why ever would they just up and decide to change that! Just leave it alone it works FINE.

Now with the advent of normal mapping along with programs like Mudbox and Zbrush. Max is being pushed to its limit, drowning under the weight of its unstable foundation of bile. This is where baby crashes are born, which grow up to be max bug reports. Once Autodesk sees a user bug report, they hold still so as not to be seen...THEY CANT SEE YOU IF YOU DONT MOVE.

Number one on my list of things I wish to set fire to is UNDO.  Leading the way of max forgetting things is UNDO. With mine even set to 100 undos I’m lucky if it remembers 10.  It is completely random too, you never know what you wont be able to undo. I wish I could undo Autodesk right in the face.

Thats enough. Though I dont really see how any amount of know-how or experience with max will fix any of that. These are bugs, not things I dont know to do. I can handle so many “Max has crashed, would you like to save a copy of this file” messages per day, before I wish they could be fired from artillery cannons into space. Informing alien races of our misunderstanding of technology, making us easy to conquer.

I feel you on the selecting nearest thing.
And the polygon counter. Yea you can press 7, and get the poly count, but not the tri count.
Also the shift+click thing, I used it all the time, but now I have to drag to get the clone option, forcing me to use ctrl+v instead.
Not THAT annoying, but it’s frustrating when you’re used to something else, and the new method doesn’t seam any better.

All the Unwrap stuff doesn’t bother me though. About the hotkeys, what bothers me THERE is more the Edit Poly vs. Editable Poly hotkey setup, making me do meshsmooth when I try to enter the material editor, and stuff like that.
Your snapping problem seams… weird to me :S I can’t seam to recreate that problem here..
Undo is also a problem yea, but I can’t remember the last time that was really a problem in my workflow :S
The falloff zooming thing also bothered me alot, untill I found out it “resets” when you press z ("zoom Extents Selected”?), so I got around that :)

BTW what Unwrap plugins are you talking about? I’d like to try them :) Are they just mere bugfixes or do they implement new features? Expensive?

I haven’t been using max for 8 years, only 5-6 I think.. Started with max 4 but didn’t know what the newest version was back then…

I guess my conclusion is that there are some VERY deep bugs that should REALLY be worked out! (You hear me AME QA department?! We’re quite a few unhappy users by now! That rework of the core, remember?!), but luckily for us, we, as humans, have the ability to conform our tools to our needs, but also have the ability to conform to our tools.
So most of the time we can still get by with a few bugs here and there, but we tend to get rightously pissed when it really just won’t work.
But… Do the alternatives really offer that much better a solution? I’m told almost daily that Maya is like a bug-free wondermachine compared to max, but I’m also told regurlarly that maya got some serious issues at least as bad as max’s. So, I guess bugdodging is just a part of the job, love it or, hate it, or get another job.
Personally I’m just gonna hang in there, and hope that there’s just SOME hole through to AME. If not, my boss/teacher will propably soon announce that we have to learn Softimage or something like that, so we can get rid of the bugfest.

From my own experience I recall that it’s indeed sometimes could be tricky in max to select something in “cluttered” scene.
But then I once recalled so many times and often heard people’s with experience tip to name all objects in your scene and wuala - using Select by Name (hot key H) gives no troubles selecting appropriate object
I myself learn max for a year and few weeks now and found that there are times when max has no fault that some feature or something doesn’t work or is shown correctly, quite often it is user who just forgot to check some box, click somewhere else and so on