I decided to invite a bunch of the "old gang" to post on the blog their early experiences with 3ds Max in celebration of its 10th year. Here's the first of these from Beau Perschall of Turbo Squid fame who not only survived the DOS days but also Katrina. Beau's a well known advocate for 3ds Max and long time partner.
ken

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Boy, where to begin.

Having come from the dark ages of the DOS era (R2 to be specific), I remember the initial transition to 3D Studio Max v1 as being a major evolution and challenge for me. Things you could do in DOS quickly seemed WAY more complicated in this new Windows NT based application. I was lucky and was invited by Autodesk and the Yost Group along with a bunch of other resellers and users to go through the first formal training on Max v.1 for 3 days at the San Rafael offices, which were sweet (I remember dogs roaming the halls and the beer bust that Friday). I remember that Gary Yost and Dan Silva came in during the training and asked what we all liked and disliked about this radically new platform. To a man, I think we all said we loved the interactivity and new integrated interface (as opposed to the 5 modules in the DOS product), but no one seemed able to wrap their brains around the new Material Editor which we all found to be completely confusing. I think some users are STILL looking for something else...

At the official launch of R1 at Siggraph that summer in Los Angeles, I vividly remember both Phil Miller and Gary Yost were so pumped about the software - someone had modeled the LA Convention center out of cylinders and boxes for one of the main stage demos and Gary was just thrilled that you could move through it interactively. It was such a novel thing back then on a PC. Of course, you needed a special video hardware acceleration card to make it really work, but it was a killer demo and Autodesk was the talk of that show because of this revolutionary PC software in a land of SGI giants like Alias/Wavefront and Softimage.

It was also the start of a whole new plug-in generation as well, and tools like Character Studio, Sand Blaster, Scalpel MAX, Bones Pro and Image Master were some of the first "pre-historic" tools to emerge out of this wide-open architecture. I remember having a LOT of fun while these tools were being developed, and every day I felt like a kid in a candy store - getting to see something new when I went to work. Definitely what I would consider the beginning of the "golden age" for plug-ins.

A few other random neural patterns still remain:
- Too many 3-1/4" floppies were required to install Windows NT 3.5 so we could run R1 (ugghh)
- Windows NT 3.51 required new hardware and more memory (64MB if I recall - damn) to be bought
- CompuServe was the main “beta” site
- The Purple / Yellow / Green Hedra icons (which I never "got")
- No fancy splash screen for R1 at startup - the UI just appeared
- The funky daisy covered box that R1 shipped in
- The birth of Kinetix to launch the product.
- The Snow and Spray Particle systems you could see and adjust IN THE VIEWPORTS (unlike the older AXP IPAS routines from DOS) were SO cool
- Character Studio was introduced as the first official Kinetix commercial plug-in and was a HUGE hit on the "eye-candy" meter with users.
- Seeing what guys like Tim Miller, Dave Stinnett, Aaron Powell, Alan Inglesias, Jon Bell, Martin Foster, Mike Spaw and a ton of other artists did with this very early tool right out of the box just blew me away (at the time - I'm sure none of them would admit to any of that early work now ).

I'm sure there's more in my brain somewhere, but it's all a blur at this stage. I'm just happy I've been around the entire time and been able to see the product evolve so much over the past 10 years. And I'm looking forward to the next 10... I just hope I can keep up.

-=Beau