I come from a background of using Imagine->Lightwave->Maya, and have been using Max for about two years now. One of my big gripes with max is the reliance on 3rd party tools to fix or work around fundimental issues with the program. Worse still, over time these 3rd party tools have become part of the base max package, leading to tons of duplicate interfaces and data structures. Edit Mesh, Edit Poly; Biped Bones, regular bones; The Work Bench, the curve editor; Skin, Physique. How many UV modifiers are there again?

It seems as if the default way to extend max is to add a completely seperate paralell structure and interface rather than to fix a fundimental issue. Want to add some data to a vertex? Make a modifier that keeps a parallel array of data in line with the vertex structure and give it it’s own UI. No, no, don’t just make the vertex format extensible like in other programs. That would be too easy.

This leads to hundreds of dead ends in the program. Oh, sure, you can use tangent curves on Biped objects - just not on ALL the biped objects. Oh, you want that tool to work with Edit Mesh and Edit Poly? Let me just code it twice - even though they both are nearly identical data sets. Silly scripter, you have to use different commands to get the position and rotation of a biped bone verses a regular bone.

Max is, quite frankly, a huge mess at this point. Many of the paradigms are outdated (smoothing groups? Can I not just have vertex normals and hard/soft edges please?), inflexible, and riddled with issues. On top of that, each upgrade breaks as much as it fixes. After the upgrade from max7 to max8, we lost several weeks converting all the animations, as new bugs were introduced into biped and it wouldn’t load the old files correctly. XRef’s? Useless for real game production work.

To be honest, I don’t expect this stuff to be fixed if backwards compatability of both data and workflow remains top priority. As a studio, we’re looking to figure out how to migrate off of 3ds Max, as we’re wanting to do more work in other apps (modo, zbrush, motion builder) each day, and the headaches of doing things in max don’t seem to be going away. They seem to be compounding instead.

As for the schematic view, it looks great. A lot like Maya’s, which was very handy.

I’d love to see a more unified look to the various aspects. I’d hoped that PFlow was going to be the beginning of something like that, rolled out to other aspects of Max, but then Oleg was let go and we just got Cloth, Hair and Dynamics from three different sources.

There’s Nucleus of course, but no news on whether that will make its way into Max - the fact that it is for Unlimited makes me think it may be a partial implementation if at all.

And then there’s the productivity booster… It used to be the case that the extensions were a good indicator of what might be coming in the next release.

To be honest it left me pretty cold, the chamfer tool was about as little as you could possibly have done with it - it didn’t even add smoothing groups. No preset sizes, bevel profiles, just number of segments.

Listing a change of a default value as a productivity boost seemed to be clutching at straws.

Lately I’ve been getting ‘subscription benefit emails’ which basically tell me that I can use legacy versions of Max, or run an extra copy at home (not really that relevant since I work from home)

It just gives me the impression of getting less for the subscription than previous releases (even if they tended to be bought-in tech), two of these involving Autodesk not having to actually write anything beyond an e-mail.

I’m seriously considering letting it lapse again, and skipping the upgrades. The only thing that keeps me current is that other people (not Autodesk) are writing exciting things for Max.

Backburner still doesn’t work 100% for me (repeated frames, phantom error messages), and I’m tempted to roll back to 8 or be forced to go with something like Deadline.

For me, the yearly update has been a failure.

- Steve

Thanks for the reply Ken.  I understand that legacy is an issue, but since scenes created in a current version of Max won’t open in a previous version of Max, then I’m not sure legacy is that much of a concern.  If we’re talking about introducing a new paradigm that’s markedly different than the current systems, then I say bring it on.  Each new release of Max introduced something new that the end users had to learn and adjust to.  With Max9 out now, you guys had to figure out how to move to a 64bit architecture, in the process dropping things that won’t work.  This is a trend you should continue with.  Strip away the things that don’t work anymore, and if an old scene file won’t load into the new system then at least allow some parts of that scene to load.  Right now its an all or nothing proposition.

As a side note, the current way of working in Max feels like ‘islands of functionality’.  Having a unified particle, cloth, dynamics, and modeling environment would ultimately simplify how people use Max, while also making it easier to extend Max in the future.  Thanks Ken for making yourself available to us.

I agree with what has been said and would like to point out one disadvantage to the current non-integrated node view.

With this plugin we now have 3 different node editors.  One for particles, one for hierarchy, and now one for materials.  Each is going to have their own set of quirks, limitations and, integration issues.  Why can’t we just get one standard node editor that works for all these things?  Similar to how trackview and the dopesheet work now?

-David

I agree… having to always rely on third party plugins to get the functionality you want in an app you own already is a problem. UI integration issues, recompile issues, slow performance; these are always a hindrance.