I’m amazed, seriously… to see how many of us are experiencing crashes and bugs of all kind with Max 2010. I’ve started to hate my work lately as the creative part is so much affected by all the unexpected inconveniences of a 5000 Bucks softwares!!! ...i repeat, cause i think we kinda forget how expensive this tool is, 5000 Bucks of software that crashes when you “undo”?! and not an single efficient fix available? (and yes i’ve installed all the hotfixes available) It is for sure that i will not keep paying the subscription at this point, but i’m also considering other business possiblities, far far far away from Autodesk who seems to still manage to polish their image with the hard work of big studios which have in house all the resources probably to troubleshoot these issues on the fly, or possibly can afford a better tech support… but for the small peeeps, small studios, the freelancers… who cares, right? just an other bugger who’s barking in his tiny isolated corner. I’m simply amazed of how unreliable 3ds Max has become for small businesses. And tonight, i am disgusted of my work which seem to consist lately to permanently pray that my next click is not going to corrupt my project… and guess what… it did, does and will most certainely keep doing it until we all let Autodesk feel what it is to be on the frustrated side of the desk, maybe they’ll start caring and offering better, more reliable commercial release… instead of these permanent buggy beta that we pay such expensive price.

Time to wake up, buddies.

pe@ce,

A.

Adriano Zanetti
Owner@CraQue

Buggiest Max ever. It’s that simple

I have to admit 2010 is the buggiest version of max I’ve ever used. Random crashes with attatching meshes. Meshes that seem to jump when you select them. Broken lights in directx shaders (worked fine in 2009). Meshes vanishing then reappearing (this has been happeneing on 2 different machines. It’s been a good 3 months since a much needed service pack, I do hope Autodesk arnet holding out till 2011 to fix this broken software.

Adriano_Zanetti 08 January 2010 05:33 PM

I’m amazed, seriously… to see how many of us are experiencing crashes and bugs of all kind with Max 2010.

Not to downplay any of the problems you guys are experiencing, but IMHO forums generally lean towards the negative by their nature.  In other words, people that use 3ds Max everyday without issue generally don’t go to a forum to say “I worked all day without any crashes”, etc..

FWIW I can’t recall experiencing any of the issues outlined in the thread here.  Of course, I have my own crashes from time to time but a lot of the time I can track down my crashes to plugins or something odd I tried to do, etc.  That being said, if I do find an issue that I can replicate I log it as a defect at the Autodesk website...make sure you do the same because they look at those.  Oh, also make sure you’re submitting any crash reports from 3ds Max with as much detailed info as possible.  Autodesk looks at those as well to help fix issues.

Again, I’m in no way trying to downplay any of the problems anyone here has experienced. You guys are obviously seeing some issues and I hope they are resolved for you soon.  We all use 3ds Max differently and on different types of projects with different hardware configurations.  I have no doubt that all those variables lead to lots of areas for problems to hide.

Jeff Patton
My Website | mental ray materials & blog

Adriano I hope your efforts will result in better support for 3dsmax! Let’s hope pixelmonkey will not find this thread… :D

Well, Pixelmonkey didn’t make it here before me (is that a first?) but perhaps I’m worse than Pixelmonkey?

Anyway, of course you’re upset when you’re using a software program and it doesn’t behave the way you expect it to. Now, the good news is that there are a bunch of things that you control that could affect this behavior and you don’t need to wait for us to “fix” because the fix may not be in our software.

1) Easiest, submmit your CERs!!! I don’t know how many times I ask if a customer who’s complaining about stability and they have never bothered to submit a CER to us. I’m sorry, I don’t have much respect for people who complain but don’t want to press a button to help us fix the problem. Every CER counts because we use it to drive a statistical analysis that says what we’ll work on next. We review these weekly. BTW, we now have enough CER data for multiple releases to know if one release is “more stable” than another release. 3ds Max 2010 is as stable if not more stable than prior releases based on this measurement. Every release since we introduced CER has been generally an improved releaes because we are mandated to fix a large proportion of the CERs.

2) Get more RAM! Easily the most common problem with stability. If you’re not using 8Gb RAM and 64bit OS, then you’re going to run into memory limits. 2Gb is definitely not enough, 4Gb is barely enough. Those using 32b OS, need to use the /3Gb memory extension. Move to 64b - it is important. Also, too many people set their page file setting too low. 4Gb at least.

3) 3ds Max 2010 uses the video GPU resources more than ever - so it isn’t surprising to hear that things might look/work differently WRT 3ds Max 2009. We get blamed for problems that are actually in the video driver. Make sure you’re using a recent DX10 Game or Quadro board (preferably one certified by us on our web page where we list all the qualified hw) along with the most recent video driver. The fact that we’re trying to optimize for GPUs means that some GPUs/drivers may be more sensitive to our code. Think about it. If you use the minimum amount of GPU resources then it works everywhere and on anything - it just is slow. Instead, we’re trying to take full advantage of it and this exposes us to more GPU dependencies. This is going to be more true in the future, so you might have to be more careful in buying your GPU and listen to our recommendations more.

4) Third-parties cause complexities that affect us. The people with the most instability also use the most plug-ins. The people that use “clean” installs of 3ds Max report the fewest problems. You should see if a third-party might be contributing to the instability. It defintely happens as we can see in our CER report which plug-in is causing us problems - and trust me, they do cause problems.

Yes, there are bugs in everyone’s software. I think every release there is somebody on a forum somewhere that says that this particular release is the “worst ever”. It probably is for that person, but what did they change in addition to 3ds Max? Perhaps the old plug-in they were using has been recompiled for the new version of 3ds Max - but it introduced a problem.

We’re not ignoring these issues, we’re very serious about addressing them. 3ds Max 2010 stability is measured by CER and customer calls to support. For the amount of people using 3ds Max, we are seeing a decrease in both measurements per the populaiton of seats in use. So, we’re not seeing any trend that suggests the release has an issue.

Finally, too often people complain about stability but they don’t even identify which release they are using (version, 32v64, SP?, HF?, etc.) nor do they communicate their system hw/sw config. If you’re going to complain about stability, start by giving us some information to help you fix things. Otherwise, you’re just complaining for the sake of complaining. Which might make you feel better, but doesn’t help anybody.

Director, Visual Communication Solutions
Autodesk

cirifischio 11 January 2010 02:39 PM

Adriano I hope your efforts will result in better support for 3dsmax! Let’s hope pixelmonkey will not find this thread… :D

Not exactly sure what that means, but I am here now. Oh and btw its PiXeL_MoNKeY.

Adriano_Zanetti 08 January 2010 12:57 PM

ALso i did not mention this, but today i’ve just had enough of the frame buffer of Max 2010! What the hell is going on with the Frame buffer… everytime it’s open, my cursor blincks and the whole interface becomes slow and flickery?? Am i dreaming it, or is it just messed up for you guys?

This sounds like display driver, and/or some problems with Aero being enabled/disabled for some reason. What OS and display drivers are you running? Are you overclocking or anything like that which can put your video card in an unstable state? Those are the things that I can think of for causing UI flashing.

As others have said, I have had my problems but not to the degree you are having. As Jeff and Ken outlined I log my bugs with Autodesk with reproducible steps or files. Also, send in your CERs, as they will tell the developers exactly what is causing the issue. Make sure to enter a valid e-mail address, in case they have a solution for you. If you simply report that Max crashed or the UI flashed, then they can’t reproduce it easily. The longer it takes them to reproduce an issue the longer it will take for them to track down the cause and suggest or deliver a solution.

-Eric

Eric Craft
“The Evil Monkey hiding in your closet.”

I’m sorry to be a downer, but this is how it is:

First, Max crashes and acts in unexpected manner far too often. Most times it wont crash in an orderly fashion so no CER is popped up. Other times, it would act weirdly, but would still not crash or give you a choice of CER.

Second, I filled up so many CERs that after 50th I stopped bothering. Don’t think that all is well, I just gave up filling them up.

Third, one particular issue of UI appearing only under mouse cursor is present and known to me and ALL Max users I know of, since introduction of Vista. Max 9 was the first version of Max I experienced it on.  How to replicate it?

1) Start Max 2) create a sphere or any other object 3) right click in Max - viola its still here- 4 years, 4 Maxes and 2 Operation Systems later. I uploaded a picture describing the problem with disappearing UI.

And as a unexpected bonus to my rant, after clicking big red X in the right corner of the Max window, Max gave me this pleasant surprise. I clicked wait for program to respond, and after couple of seconds I forcefully shut it down, choosing close the program. No CER was presented afterwards.

p.s. I have core 2 quad @ 3ghz, 4gb ram, ati 4850 with 9.12 drivers (december 2009), windows 7 ultimate 64bit with all updates, Max 2010 64bit with all hot fixes and services available today.

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

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Well, there are 4 computers at my Academy and 12 at university that I work at. I personaly used multiple machines since Max 9/vista initially came out, in both quadro/geforce/ati radeon graphic cards. One thing is constant vista/7 = max user UI graphical glitch [along with (if dx10 capability=true, GPU speed= 10%) along with many other problems, I’m just not willing to repeat].

I have yet to see one max that works correctly. I would love to see a video of a user using (any) Max in a way i described above (meaning vista/7 with dx10 capable graphic card) that DOESNT experience this error.

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

Have to agree we still use max here but have added Softimage to our pipeline as it is without the fastest application out there… we wait in patience for XBR and hope it rocks. Max is just way to bloated. It still blows my mind how long it takes just for the interface to load on to my screen. Then the jerky responses the crashes on undo it does slowly wear you down… I feel for you I really do and hope in the end it all gets resolved. Good luck.