After visiting 8 customers in Korea, we flew to Australia and did a tour of Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. We met with Creative Assembly (Total War game series), 2K/Irrational Games (Biosphere game), Krome Studios (games), Liquid Animation (VFX), Twitch Studios (VFX), Ivolve Studios (Design/Vis), Illoura (VFX), Liquid Pixel (Design/Vis). These customers are doing amazing things with 3ds Max and I wish I could just showcase all their efforts.
I'm sorry it has taken so long to update, but when I fired up my laptop to do a presentation in Australia, somehow my "super intelligent" power supply decided that my laptop wanted to taste 220v directly instead of the 10v it should have received. This caused a big pop as the power cord blew out of the back of the laptop leaving a blackened metal post from the plug. Tendrils of oily, black smoke curled up from the back of the laptop and the table had scorch marks on it. That's really the right way to start a presentation. Needless to say, the laptop was toast. That was at the beginning of my Australia trip, so I was limited to BlackBerry for the rest of the time.
So, after almost a month, we've visited and talked with over 21 customers and have interviewed each group as to what isn't working and what they would like from 3ds Max/Autodesk. For the most part, customers are using older releases of 3ds Max because they get locked into a release for the duration of a project. For game companies, this can be upwards of 3 years, for VFX, they are more flexible and 6 months would be more typical, but they always have multiple projects running at once, so timing is still a challenge. Design/Vis firms have more flexibility and their decisions are often driven by customer data and plug-in availability.
It always a big challenge to decide when to move to the new release. Customers are asking us to do a lot more in helping them with these transitions and we know that it's in our own interest to do something about it. Our challenge is that it is really tough to do for many reasons (see my prior blog posting). But we need to see what might be possible in this area. Trust me, if it was easy, it would have been done long ago.
Stability is a priority for customers, but when you dig into what they mean by stability, it is often tangled up with trying to load massive data sets on 32b systems and running into memory limits or more issues around compatibility of data between releases. For many customers, the issue is not really about "crashes", but issues around using 3ds Max in complex environments that include third-party tools and data from other sources. We had to explain to every customer the vital importance of submitting CER reports when a crash occurs because that is our best weapon today for fixing these things. If you want a crash prioritized, the best thing you can do is flood our CER server with bugs from that crash. We have an absolute mandate to fix a large percentage of these, and the most statistically relevent ones are fixed first.
Another way of improving stability is for us to look at solutions to allowing customers to more easily manage memory and scene complexity. We think if customers had tools that allowed them to manage data more directly, then they could have a smaller memory footprint and stay away from their memory limits where things start getting shaky. Lots of good ideas and we're digesting the input as we speak. Unfortunately, most customers still do not use 64b, which is definitely more stable because of the memory issues. Unfortunately, they still struggle with getting all their tools over to 64b. The few VFX accounts that had made the move, were delighted by the increased efficiency and stability.
For features, customers want a lot of different things based on who you talk to. Game companies told us they really don't have much use for a Schematic Material Editor because they tend to do their material workflow elsewhere. VFX customers would love to have one. For now, 3ds Max customers should check out "nodejoe" and see if that is what they are looking for. We hear all the requests for this on the forums, so it will be interesting if nodejoe satisfies this need or not.
Every customer gave us feedback on our direction and the good news is that we scored well. We asked them to rate every element of our plan and to also score the overall perspective. We keep all this data in our db and then we check in with these charter customers to make sure that the evolution of our plans fits the needs of the specific customers we're talking to. We're doing this process with more customers than we ever have and more than any other product in Autodesk Media&Entertainment group. We are strongly committed to making sure our plans reflect what customers need and that our process is intimately tied to customer feedback. Maybe one day we'll be visiting you!
Back from the future
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Posted by Ken Pimentel on 03/31 at 02:38 PMOur use of the GPU has changed significantly with 3ds max 2008 and our occulustion culling technology. You might try turning it off to see if it is contributing to your problem.
I can’t talk in an open forum about future features. I can tell you we’ve recently talked to Blur, Digital Dimension, Iloura, Twitch Studios, SamG Animation and several other VFX houses. They’ve helped priortize the problems we research.
Plug-ins are our biggest strength and weakness. You’ve seen us take the best of the breed and integrate them into 3ds Max, and we formed the ACAP program with Turbo Squid to help create a more stable plug-in environment, so we’re doing what we can to help. It’s really amazing the richness of plug-ins for 3ds Max, there’s something new popping up all the time.
Posted by berthunt on 03/31 at 10:41 AMIn spite of my periodic complaints, I think max is great. As far as the dissapearing meshes, I had the same graphics card and was loading the same files in 3ds max 9 and my graphics card was displaying them just fine. In the area someone suggested changing the settings that max uses for the graphics card and that doesn’t work either.
While I have your ear, There is one general question that an answer to would ease a greater concern. Is Autodesk going to continue giving max features that would be useful for rendered animation ( as opposed to realtime for games ). Umm, in other words features for animation like Blizzard or Blur might create?
I realize part of max’s strength is in it’s plugins to add features. But when it comes to plugins, Over the years I have lost a fair amount of money purchasing them and time learning them with development on a lot of them stopping and not being updated as max is, as well as time to update fies that were heavily dependent on now dead plugins. The main point is, plugins can not be counted on as permanent features. I’ve learned the hard way to stick with the max core feature set. So that’s a long way of explaining why I would be concerned about the direction of max development.
I’ve long been a strong supporter of max and overall have been very happy with it - in the larger context of max development over time, my complaints here are very small.
Posted by Ken Pimentel on 03/31 at 09:34 AMSorry you’re having trouble with 2008, and it certainly could be our problem, but realize that third-party plug-ins can also have a big impact on 3ds Max. The fact that partners can build things as powerful as “nodejoe” means that we allow them low-level access to 3ds Max. So stability issues in nodejoe or any other plug-in can affect how stable 3ds Max appears. Our CER data allows us to see if it is a third-party causing the problem or not. If it is a 3rd party, then we can contact them and work with them to fix the issue.
As to dissapearing meshes, that sounds like a video driver issue. 3ds Max leverages your GPU more than any other Professional animation product out there. If your GPU/driver is not up to the task, you’ll run into either degraded viewports, performance issues or lack of features. For example, if your board only supports Shader Model 2, then you are missing features in your viewport with 2008. Get a DX10 hw board that supports Shader Model 4 and you’ll be all set for leveraging the future of 3ds Max. We’ve focused on GPU above CPU because the GPU trends were more aggressive than the CPU. As things swing back to CPU, we’ll be ready there too…
Posted by berthunt on 03/30 at 11:17 AMI have found 2008 to be a lot less stable than max 9. It crashes a lot more often. I’ll start letting all the cer reports through. I had been only letting a small percentage through, figuring getting redundant reports wouldn’t be useful.
Another thing that 2008 gave me was dissapearing meshes. Particularly in smooth+highlights with no wireframe over the top. There are also a number of files that load fine in 3ds max 9, but crash max 2008.
I really didn’t get anything positive for the problems I have to put up with in 2008. Based on the way it was billed, I was hoping for faster and more stable. When I think of faster I don’t think about rotating around a billion identical cubes in the viewport. I was actually thinking there would be more multithreaded processes. Like cloth and hair simulation. I was not thinking object picker that takes a second or so longer to pop up.
If I had know what I know now I would have stayed with max 9 and let max 2008 get old and moldy on my hard drive while waiting for max 2009 or 2010.
NodeJoe by the way is awesome. I was using it all the time in beta. It had multithreaded mental ray preview rendering so it made things a lot faster for me. That was another thing I lost moving to 2008. I would buy NodeJoe, but at 289 euro plus 14 percent tax, and the dollar not worth the paper it’s printed on, it puts Node Joe at a costly 500 dollars or more.
Frankly, when it comes to node editing, you want something more general. The whole point of node editing is that you have nodes of information that you can hook up to other nodes of information in unique and interesting ways. So you might hook up a
shader color node to an animated objects x translation data. Or something as simple as attaching the translation data of one object to another ( linking ). Then having function nodes like an averager or a noise node that you can attach to an object or the bump slot on a shader, or a particle emitter - or all three at the same time.
Importantly though, you want to be able to see what you are doing.
Posted by joshpurple on 03/25 at 01:42 PMThanks Ken!
Laptop toast, it’s even better if you pour coffee all over it! 
(Sorry to hear ‘bout that, I feel your pain!).
Nodejoe, good stuff. I would dig getting Windows XP 64 bit, but currently I’m doing the bit by bit upgrade (get the new hard drive, get the new video card, etc. ) and attempting to hold my breath for Windows 7 64 bit. Vista just seems to much like the Windows Millennium Edition deal. Deserved or not, Vista has received a bad reputation & if Microsoft is ending all XP editions within a year… I’ll painfully keep pushing my old system using the 3 gig switch. Rumors have been out that Windows 7 64 bit will be released earlier than 2010 (late 2009). < hope 3ds Max 2010 will be ready to rock with Windows 7 64bit, ha, ha, ha! & I mean no insult by that. I’m just infected with Spring >
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