Is it just me or is Autodesk putting 3DS Max aside?
polycounter lvl 8
I know something like this probably appears all the time, but don't you feel like AD are kinda focusing on Maya more? I mean, Maya is even featured on the main page as a tool for game dev. Max is not mentioned anywhere on their site.
Of course it's not all about mentioning on the site (obviously, lol), but I don't even remember the last big update of Max. 2017 version is a piece of crap IMO.
Of course it's not all about mentioning on the site (obviously, lol), but I don't even remember the last big update of Max. 2017 version is a piece of crap IMO.
Replies
Remember when someone started a rumor in 2012 that Autodesk was planning to kill off 3DS Max? And yet here we are...
I dont want to sound like a jerk(because i am not), but i think Autodesk is aware that many customers are unhappy, and yet they(autodesk) continue releasing the product even if it is unfinished. They have the arrogance to LET THE CUSTOMERS WORK FOR THEM, FOR FREE, as the testers. How sick is that? selling a product that is not finished, waiting for the users to apply, to give them the bugs found, and then releasing the patch in order to fix the errors/bugs, proves what i have said above, it also proves what Balde113 said in his first post.
An unnecessary analogy for most of us(but i think necessary for pedro amorim), is similar to a company who sells cars, unfinished(untested) cars(with engine problems or steering system problems), expecting the customer to find those problems while driving the car, after he already bought the car, of course. It may sounds absurd but i believe it is a fair analogy.
Lets face it, the product is not finished, and they knew it, yet they have release it.....because money. It is a tradition, every 6 months they must release a "new" version of Max, no matter if its not....working properly.
No harm done, the users are working as testers, for free, but by the time the current version will be 100% repaired, the next new version will be released.
Max rules, Maya is for sissy animatorsWould Max become more heavily tied to arch viz in the future? That is a posibility, but I don't see it as a platform going away.
Even in a recent poll on polycount, there were 38% Max users and 33% Maya Users (of 342 votes). I could possibly see Autodesk advertising Maya as the goto tool for Games & Film in the future. But again that's only a relatively small slice of the cake.
Autodesk acquiring and shutting down Softimage may be better for the industry in the long run as it freed the Softimage developers to move into more productive development environments than Autodesk.
And as others have mentioned, it's still going strong in terms of Arch vis etc, and it is still used in lots of AAA game studios.
all you need to know is that 3ds max is maximum and the mayans died because they killed themselves.
But the focus for Maya targeting the games section seems to be pretty obvious: Maya LT , and finally they even got rid of any serious renderer license that can do batch rendering ( No Mental Ray in Maya 2017 ). And that statement by minus0 that Max 2017 would be a mess is pretty much his own opinion. Maybe it's Mental ray that's instable ( no wonder as AD wants to cut their ties with Nvidia any way) but claiming that Max 2017 is a mess is BS
As far as rumor goes there is a SP3 in the works which should iron out some of the left bugs ( you bet ther still be some ) but other than that it's a pretty great release ( the physical material alone is a great gift )
And that 3ds Max is fully supported by Autodesk ( as Maya is ) and will be over the next decade at least, is especially apparent as it sits in EACH of the three new Industry collections: ( AEC, Product Design and M&E collection), whereas Maya only sits in the M&E collection
Where I taught we used C4D because they had a special deal for schools, soon as AD made Max free for students I convinced the school to switch (which took all of 5 minutes) so I was turning out about 50 students per year who used Max. The private sector customers I instruct now that have used Maya find 3DSMax easier to use because they say everything is easier to find. I cant say. I am used to Max so I am not objective. Perhaps AD is pushing Maya because the customer base for Max is so large and it will appreciate the improvements made yearly without the aid of advertising, and they only seek to gain newer customers through Maya. So just more clients overall instead of a shift in software. Big companies also have to allocate resources but I have never had the impression that Max is standing still.
This crit seems to come up every now and then, I never understood it.
Autodesk doesn't just acquire and destroy. A lot of tech gets folded in when acquired?
Max going by the wayside is not the worst thing in the world.
As it might be time to again start something new from scratch. implementing a new architecture foundation that doesn't have that added onto over several years feeling.
I'd like to see Stingray "folded in" to a new paradigm or at least Maya to the point where it wasn't a competing Engine... But simply Maya's Realtime engine. Viewport 3.0!
Instead of art to engine... Art and engine?
Where connections and set driven keyand attributes and the DCC development logic could drive real time development logic for prototyping as content creation was building or powerful enough to be compiled as a realtime interactive for publication.
Most likely that much power under the hood integrated completely would probably have to come from a ground up overhaul?
But as far as I know Autodesk still has bragging rights to a pretty large brain trust to make it happen?
If not...
I wish one of the competing Engines would do the same in reverse? DCC content development in engine development married as it were?
Would make for some powerful ease in rigging and deformation as realtime interactive ideas!
And I think revolutionary?
i've been told that autodesk also expressed this intent more or less publicly: to keep max for archivz, design, etc and focus maya on entertainment and that they did so several years ago at developer events, around the 2010 releases. their selection of features ever since seems to back up this divide - to me anyway.
which also explains why max is losing ground in games, you don't need much of a pipeline to model and export static content - and animation and dynamics are maya's domain more than ever. so the choice for studio-wide app seems pretty straightforward.
Polyboost (Graphite), Character Studio, Mental Ray.
Think about it this way: If Max gobbled up and integrated:
- HeadUs UV Layout
- Knald
- Bodypaint
- Hairfarm
- Popcorn Time
It would be even harder for people to give up.
Max is in this unfortunate position where they have to support too much legacy crap, and they probably shouldn't add to the bloat. But the bloating is what always made Max indispensable.
But you know how these conversations tend to go.
On the topic of Max going away...
I'm guessing they'll make a new program, before they think of getting rid of max or Maya. They probably don't want to risk losing the market-share that is Max. So, unless they could replace is adequately, it seems unlikely.
They would risk losing a quite large portions of their customers to modo, blender, cinema 4d, etc.
Softimage died because autodesk never wanted softimage, the software
They wanted the engineers behind it
so they just bought the entire company and took the engineers.
3ds max was from the start designed to be autodesk's flagship entertainment program
so.. yeah
No worries man
I still wouldn't use it over blender or modo though.
The engineers left. Fabric is all ex-Softimage, others went to SideFX. Autodesk just wanted to kill Softimage, it wasn't about acquiring anything other than a smaller marketplace and giving people fewer choices of where to spend their money.
So i'm not sure they really want to do that. With this in mind, i don't see much of a difference if they kill any of them in a year, or in 10 years.
If I'm counting right, the 3dsmax team went through three project managers in 3 years and lost some of their senior developers that had been around for a longtime. With as... "cobbled together" as max's features are, they are where probably the only ones that could actually understand how max is put together and how it can move forward.
They have replaced those developers so they are willing to reinvest and rebuild but, the knowledge they lost is probably not coming back easily. I don't think the new people are quite up to speed and it's going to take some time. But still, if there was a time to kill it, that was probably it.
There hasn't really been anything specifically for game development (only thing was the game exporter in 2017) which is why people on this forum might feel the development has slowed but i can't see it disappearing anytime soon.
You have to understand the Dev team are a great bunch of people and want to do and are capable of doing all kinds of awesomeness but they are restricted in various ways by Autodesk.
With the compressed development cycle, to meet the demands of Autodesk's subscription model and yearly releases, it tends to lead them to focus on small, incremental progress that can be a marketing point in "what's new".
So they focus a lot of effort on things that they could get done in small sprints instead of focusing on larger issues or changes and then release those big shifts, whenever they're done. That's not to say they aren't working on big things and not overhauling long neglected backend stuff, they are. But those things can't all be done in a compressed dev cycle and they have to lay out enough breadcrumbs to keep people interested enough to keep up their subscriptions, so it ends up splitting their focus and slowing development even more and staffing issues don't make that process any smoother.
They still seem pretty focused on entertainment but like I said earlier they've been rocked by staffing issues and a focus on upgrading backend, behind the scenes functionality. The general consensus is that unless max has a stable platform to work from and a strong base to build on top of, it's pretty useless to attempt to duct-tape on new features.
It's amazing how people will find any excuse to justify to themself that Autodesk didn't fucked up completely 3ds max and that's the reason why they can't make it good app anymore. And they will even pay for it. It's like watching Windows 8 fanboys all over again.
You can spend another 10 years fooling yourself that it will change for better, or start using programs that actually make your life simpler and give faster results. Don't try to tell me that in the age of VR/AR/Wearable we will be still forced to use shitty, half-backed program. If so, then hey, why don't we go back to using hammer and chisel instead?
Max is dead. Not because people stopped using it, but because it will take years to bring it source code to today's standards and make it actually good application again.
<rant end>