As far as GUI look, shouldn’t this be a simple thing? Just keep the interface as it is now but provide a look an feel setting from the preferences. containing:

1. Standard: Max as it looks now.

2. Max 2010: Nicer toolbars, dropdown boxes and buttons.

A new look for me doesn’t mean everything animated, bubbly and colorful. Just round the corners of dropdown lists a little. Make the toolbars look a little better (perhaps a discreet grey shader behind the buttons). The max GUI could look much nicer with just small things.

You guys who call yourself max lovers, have you yet looked beyond your soup bowl and tried different apps? XSI, Modo, whatever?
Believe it or not, the grass IS greener on the other side!
Go see what XSI 7 will bring, where an ingenious developer team put up something new and visionary, and now look at what autodesk riveted at max with the last update. Also, compare the prices!

There’s a LOT in max on the good side, and I worked long enough with it to know (1.0). Many nice ideas have been implemented, and many bugs have been fixed.
But darn, so many things still do not fit together the way the could and should, or are almost unusable!
I blame the devteam/Autodesk for weak software design, sloppiness, sluggishness, shortsightedness, anxiousness, ignorance, greed…

Funny how you can get the job done with max nonetheless. Somehow! And that’s the point. You always have to dodge 1000 little obstacles and edges and spikes and flaws until you finally get somewhere. Max is a giant patchwork. Like Frankenstein’s monster as a 3d app. Somewhat powerful, but ugly as sin.

For me, it’s not much joy any more to work with it. If I had not to edit or import old files from time to time, I would have ditched it for good.

I say burn down max at last, and maya with it (blasphemy!), and let something new arise from the ashes!

It is the exact same at my company. we are 10 employees all using max 2008 (we upgraded to 2009 but it crashed and was so buggy we had to revert) It just does not make sense why a company goes out to buy over 20 thousand dollars worth of software and then finds that it’s not very well designed and released. Yes they try adding new features as they go on but why not just fix bugs instead???? It runs out of memory every single time.

We are all working with nvidias 8800’s, quad cores and 4 GB of ram and yet it crashes while editing geometry of 200,000 polys max!!! Max 8 could run that many and not crash..........

hmmm that was worth the money

I used to use Cinema 4D before being employed and had no problems working with meshes of almost a milion polys without crashing.
I am not saying “Everyone go out and buy Cinema” I am just asking why the reason a program used and trusted by so many from almost the dawn of 3D is so buggy and unreliable!!

I, and unfortunately all of my colleagues, will have to keep using MAX as it is “industry standard” but if I had one day in which I could not get frustrated because i collapse a stack and everything crashes then that would be amazing.

there are alot of us that use 2009 and don’t have problems. i my self wok with scenes daily with an average of 2-3 million polys plus from 100 to sometimes 10,000 proxies (idon’t want to even think how many polys that is at render time), i make some fairly complicated materials (i love the new composite map), and do massive renders, 10k on average, use reactor sometimes, for my own persoanl stuff i’ve imported 8 million poly sculpts from zbrush/mudbox and crunched them down using the new pro optimizer. all this without a single crash since service pack 1, and i think only 2 crashes before that.

i can’t speak for bugs to do with rigging and particles because i never use them, but if your 2009 is crashing all the time then theres something else wrong.

i still hate the point of this thread, people want max to end......[censored]? if you don’t like it, then don’t use it, its no reason to end a piece of software that works for alot of people and is used daily. “will have to keep using MAX as it is “industry standard”, you don’t have to use max, autodesk haven’t got a gun to your head saying you must use our software, if the problem is that bad get people at work to start trainning in another software and make the switch. start using blender on the side or something, its free. Also autodesk have a return policy, return max and buy something else.

YOU KNOW WHAT"S ANNOYING!!!!! PEOPLE DONT READ!!!!!

Most of the people that wrote a thread are complaining about Max being buggy not to stop making it!!!!!!!!

Why don’t you people read!?? Just stop releasing buggy patches do it properly and release your $4000 software free of at least half of the 2000 bugs.
bloody hell

relax guy

You relax

!!!!!!!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

jcjworks

Is this your customized UI? Looks like you changed the icons and is using an customized windows XP shell too.

lol what the heck is that