Fine, I'll pretend you're serious and indulge you for a sec.
Are there better options for certain things, of course. I use Maya for animation and I lean toward Modo for modeling, but I still like max because it does a lot of things really well. It has gotten a lot of things right for a really long time and finally some other programs are finally starting to catch up and push ahead but it takes a combination of them to do what Max does out of the box.
Is it worthwhile to explain to users, why they haven't been burning up the releases with ground breaking updates? Yea probably, especially when they seem to be doing a lot of speculating.
If you think VR/AR/Wearable is going to revolutionize the entire industry over night and sweep out decades old tools and pipelines I think you're about as crazy as the "unlimited detail" guy that 5-6 years ago wanted to the entire industry to toss out polygons and invent new pipelines and tools around his voxel engine. We're still waiting for that revolution...
Don't get me wrong VR and voxels have their place, just like the niche Euclideon found in scanning and visualization (just not in the game industry). VR is not a flipswitch that nullifies all current industry practices. If you've worked with it, you know it's pretty impressive at first but nowhere near capable of taking over the current workload.
Whatever happened to the complete rebuild of Max they showed a few years ago? It was a screenshot of a nearly-blank UI prototype someone showed at a conference, and they said basically "stay tuned". Can't recall the name of it. I don't think it was the XBR/Excalibur thing.
That was mostly about switching the UI to QT which must have been a pretty big undertaking. Maya switched over in 2015-16 and is still going through changes and updates to the ancient and wonky dialogs. Max is finally switched over to QT now but it still has a lot of dialogs that need to be updated.
Instead of obliterating all of the buttons that everyone uses every day and pissing everyone off, they painfully recreated the placement of everything. The UI is now in on a system that is much more flexible and robust.
Mark Dygert said: If you think VR/AR/Wearable is going to revolutionize the entire industry over night and sweep out decades old tools and pipelines I think you're about as crazy as the "unlimited detail" guy that 5-6 years ago wanted to the entire industry to toss out polygons and invent new pipelines and tools around his voxel engine. We're still waiting for that revolution...
1. Not every company is coming from decades old pipelines. That's especially true for VR/AR companies. 2. VFX companies, that are also reaching for realtime and VR, are not interested in something that is limited only to Windows. Because you know, they got shitload of programs that runs on Linux, so they would still like to use their Linux pipelines to develop for VR too.
Entire industry is not represented by those couple old game companies that forgot to move on and are stuck on 3DS Max.
Mark Dygert said: ... I think you're about as crazy as the "unlimited detail" guy...
Entire industry is not represented by those couple old game companies that forgot to move on and are stuck on 3DS Max.
No, you're right, the entire industry is not represented by a couple of old companies that forgot to move on. It's represented by many companies of all ages, who pretty much all use 3DS Max to some extent. I'm not really sure if you're being serious or facetious.
Discussing autodesk products is going to get a strong angry response from Houdini users. If your only contact with Houdini users is from discussing other software i could see why you think we are angry.
If you want to see what the Houdini community is really like, go to odforce.
Well it's pretty much Autodesk products in games and VR, I know some places that use Modo as a supplement modeling package but it's still Max or Maya.
pretty much this. At the core there usually sits an Autodesk product. The only shops I knew of, which weren't brand new startups, and which were majority non-Max / non-Maya shops were the ones who used XSI. Which got bought too and then stuff moved to Maya or Max. I remember we were approached by some Japanese clients who wanted us to convert their existing art depots and animation libraries. If anything, this would have been the time for some other software to fill the gap, as suddenly, for some shops, their entire software core became obsolete. Much easier to make your entry here than chewing away from the outside at a shop with a grown software infrastructure.
The biggest reason companies don't switch away from max isn't because it is good. It isn't, it is an objectively bad piece of software. It's because of the retraining time of their staff and the existing knowledge-base in their company and talent pool they hire from. The last company I worked at could have switched to a competitor, saved literally $1million a year in licensing costs, and ended up using a generally better piece of software. But people don't want to think long-term.
The biggest reason companies don't switch away from max isn't because it is good. It isn't, it is an objectively bad piece of software. It's because of the retraining time of their staff and the existing knowledge-base in their company and talent pool they hire from. The last company I worked at could have switched to a competitor, saved literally $1million a year in licensing costs, and ended up using a generally better piece of software. But people don't want to think long-term.
Anytime I see "program X is objectively ________" I become skeptical. Its value depends on your needs.
Calling Max bad software for modeling would be delusional, but if you're extremely bootstrapped it might be bad relative to Blender. If you're an animator it might be bad relative to Maya. If your company has a pipeline built around another program then it might be bad for you. It's strange that you acknowledge retraining time and the existing knowledge base of the company as if those are non-factors, and then accuse them of not thinking long term. Perhaps they are the ones thinking more completely about their situation
Pretty much the only objective thing you can say about a software is the functions that it does and doesn't have
... It's because of the retraining time of their staff and the existing knowledge-base in their company and talent pool they hire from. The last company I worked at could have switched to a competitor, saved literally $1million a year in licensing costs, and ended up using a generally better piece of software. But people don't want to think long-term....
I just wanted to comment on the 'retraining' part. Not to derail, but this is unfortunately true with all software, most importantly in-house software. Destroys a lot of companies' ability to compete.
Does this have an impact on Max's development? I don't know. I think we're seeing more fixes and additions to Maya as of late because it was a lot farther behind in tool capabilities(not to mention all the basic modelling operation bugs) than 3DSMax was.
The conspiracy theorist in me believes there was pressure from studios who jumped aboard the Maya train for the animation aspect, and turned around and wanted it to do everything so they don't have to carry around a bunch of software licensing. The closer Maya gets to having all the same tools, it really turns into a comfortability debate among artists instead of which has the better tools. As for the studios, it becomes a money issue. Why pay for 3 different pieces of software when 1 can handle everything?
...Or maybe it's just a simple thing like Python is easier to implement in?
Time will tell.
Well it's pretty much Autodesk products in games and VR, I know some places that use Modo as a supplement modeling package but it's still Max or Maya.
After checking out Unreal Engine's early attempts at a VR interface... I like the idea in so far as the process at least respects stereoscopic concerns at the asset building stage ( or at least level design space ) instead of considering that VR space as an afterthought. It just seems unavoidable that we should have DCC tools for game development with a stronger concentration towards game development. A complete solution where programming DCC tools and Animation rigs were developed and perhaps even utilized by the final game logic ( if we could handle that much pure power under the hood at all stages of dev... my head would probably jelly explode ). It occured to me in the Unreal VR editor how badly I wished Epic would just cut the cord for me and extend the Editor to handle asset creation and Animation. With the addition of comprehensive DCC development access as well so I could code tools as effectively as I can in Maya? I would never look back to any DCC application that sometimes put compositing motion graphics, Motion Picture, Broadcast and CAD concerns before game development.
Are all Houdini advocates so angry? All 3d programs have their strengths and weaknesses, I really don't see what all the anger about Max is about.
What anger you are talking about? Houdini doesn't have anything common with this. I'm looking from perspective of companies that have to deal with more than just Windows based stuff. So Max is no go for them, no matter which way you look at it or how many game companies are using it.
No, you're right, the entire industry is not represented by a couple of old companies that forgot to move on. It's represented by many companies of all ages, who pretty much all use 3DS Max to some extent. I'm not really sure if you're being serious or facetious.
And what extend it is? I know about couple companies that use it only as a plugin, to transfer file they get from Arch companies. One Max for the whole company just to transfer data. Everything else happens elsewhere. Very pricey plugin.
I'm telling you once again guys. Max is dead not because people stopped using it, but because it will take years to make it usable again. To old code base that will take a lot of time to patch and move it to other operating systems. Before this will happen Maya will be there already. And it's already on other operating systems. There is no sane reason to pick 3dsmax this days. And the list of reasons is really long.
I'm sure that those of you who are stuck in Max based companies really
think that the world still needs Max and can't work without it, but
there are a lot of companies that are actually out of 3dsmax for a
decade or more, and they are not coming back anytime soon. And they really have good reasons for this.
And lastly, if a company have decades old pipeline I would try to get out
of it as fast as I can. Decades old means more than 10 years old. In
this fast changing industry using something that is more than 10 years
old is a dead wish. That's pre-2006. You kidding guys, right? Beside file formats I don't remember any company that didn't updated their pipeline in the last 5 years. I also don't remember any company that is using stuff made more 10 years ago, even custom stuff. Maybe some really old operating system scripts. Nothing for making graphic. Stuff that was done more than 10 years ago was replaced or updated gradually in last 5-10 years.
Just my experience: I only know companies (3D animation studios and game dev studios) using houdini for FX, if not houdini then most likely 3ds max. Anything else is divided up to whatever is needed, but it is gonna be Autodesk. 3ds Max for modelling, Maya for animation/rigging and very often Motionbuilder for mocap. (Although I think Rebellion uses 3DS max for both mocap and keyframe animations, for example)
But I really don't see how you can call 3DS max a bad piece of software, assets for multi-award winning games or other media were made in that software. Can it improve? Yes! Does it have problems that could have been solved for a while now? Sure! But a bad piece of software? Although to be fair, it's not because of the software, it's because of the artist behind it that the assets are awesome, but that's a different topic.
I'd like to know as well, it's a program that's less than 10 years old so even Blender and Modo are "old".
@Tidal Blast from what I've seen, Modo is really good at hard surface. I spent 60 days with it but I made the mistake of focusing on organic modeling and retopology soooo I stuck with Max. I was also struck by how much it felt like Lightwave; which it kind of is, so it's not really this revolutionary new program, I first used Lightwave almost 20 years ago. Modo is the awesome Poutine, Max is the whole meal but you have to put your own gravy on their french fries and it doesn't really taste the same. I'm American so the idea of gravy on french fries is totally alien.
@Mark Dygert Hey, lets test this Modo meal idea, how'd you like to switch over to Modo being your pimary animation tool?
I spent most of my career at studios that were stuck on really old versions of Max so I followed the whole meme of "Max only gets worse!" but I'm using 2016 at my current job and it's been great, it replaced 3D Coat as my retopology tool of choice. Right now Substance Painter and Zbrush are tied for the buggiest programs in my workflow.
While everyone in this thread brings up a great point from both sides of the argument, I can't help but look in the direction of people like you because of how many years of experience you have with these kinds of software packages.
@Mark Dygert Hey, lets test this Modo meal idea, how'd you like to switch over to Modo being your primary animation tool?
I actually keep an eye on their animation tools, they have made some pretty big strides in recent releases but not big enough that I would give up Maya or Max and they certainly couldn't have made Maya or Max redundant 10 years ago. So... I'm still wondering what package this guy is talking about.
There must be one tiny piece of the pipeline this guy touches and he found some niche software that he prefers and he must think that it does an amazing job for everyone else around him. It seems like he's a huge Houdini fan so I guess that mystery is probably solved.
45 min to model a potted plant but the procedural modeling is kind of neat, but gets convoluted really quick. At best it almost matches what Max and Maya do on a feature level but not in a practical way. At best you spend your time noodling sliders and messing with it's node based system that it gets pretty convoluted and slow.
As far as traditional animation, wow houdini is amazing... /sarcasm
What it was built to do, it does well but it wasn't built to replace 3dsmax or Maya.
^Haha @Mark Dygert To be fair, houdini is amazing for procedural stuff like VFX, but I agree, I can't see how houdini is "the modern way" for modelling etc.
45 min to model a potted plant but the procedural modeling is kind of neat, but gets convoluted really quick. At best it almost matches what Max and Maya do on a feature level but not in a practical way. At best you spend your time noodling sliders and messing with it's node based system that it gets pretty convoluted and slow.
As far as traditional animation, wow houdini is amazing... /sarcasm
What it was built to do, it does well but it wasn't built to replace 3dsmax or Maya.
4 year old video, but 45 min to model, texture and render a potted plant that is quick and easy to revise and expand on. It wasn't shown in the video(not the best procedural modeling techniques on display) but parameters can be bound to a viewport handle, allowing procedural models to be manipulated in the 3d viewport, and not just with sliders.
As far as 'traditional' animation it's more than capable: <a title="Link: https://vimeo.com/119736573" href="https://vimeo.com/119736573">Monstro</a><a title="Link: http://www.outside-movie.com/" href="http://www.outside-movie.com/">Outside</a>
Houdini is a complete pipeline, it can and does replace Max and Maya for some studios/individuals. It's not a workflow that appeals to everyone though, just as Max and Maya don't appeal to everyone.
As far as 'traditional' animation it's more than capable: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://vimeo.com/119736573">Monstro</a><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.outside-movie.com/">Outside</a>
Blender has the Big Buck Bunny and the Egyptians made the pyramids without modern technology but that doesn't mean that's the easiest or best way to do something.
Modo beats Houdini for animation features and Modo still loses to Maya and Max.
Sometimes it's best to use the software that has been around for a while, that has had a lot of iteration and development done to it. They managed to reinvented the wheel but it's made out of stone while everyone else has iterated on the design and is using modern synthetic rubber tires.
If I was creating a studio from scratch (as I have, twice now) I wouldn't build the modeling, rigging and animation pipelines around Houdini. Not only is it slower to use and has less features, it also has a much smaller user base which is a huge factor when hiring talent. That's not to say Houdini doesn't have a place, it does but it's not the end all be all like some people are claiming.
Sometimes it's best to use the software that has been around for a while, that has had a lot of iteration and development done to it. They managed to reinvented the wheel but it's made out of stone while everyone else has iterated on the design and is using modern synthetic rubber tires.
If we want to go full circle here, the reason this thread was brought up in the first place is the fact that Max has been around forever and has been iterated upon over and over throughout that time, yet in recent releases it feels a bit like the software itself has taken a step back, and therefore is not as good as previous releases. 'Good' is a very broad and vague term but I'm using it here to describe the performance and inclusion of features in both Max 2016 and 17 is (from what I gathered) shittier than previous releases.
If Houdini was really a 'stone wheel' when it came to animation it would not have been used for either of those shorts I linked, the people who made those films aren't clueless n00bs who've never used an autodesk product or worked in a production before.
It's far more capable an animator than most people realize or give it credit for, especially when you start getting into chops. It just doesn't behave like maya or max, that doesn't mean it's shit. Houdini is not new software, it just celebrated it's 20th anniversary, while it may not be as formally developed in character animation as Maya, the architecture of Houdini keeps these defeciences from being as crippling as they would in other packages.
That video you linked is pretty shit, lots of sloppy technique, not even a minute in and the author has an edit sop for something that should be handled with a parameter adjustment upstream, and it only gets worse from there. If this kinda stuff is what you have based your opinion of Houdini on I can see your point of view.
@Nodeway This forum has it's roots in game dev and is primarily a game dev forum. This $90 billion industry isn't just a few "old" studios. Windows is pretty much the defacto dev environment and either Max or Maya will have a big presence in most studios. I know a small number that use Houdini as plugin but it really hasn't caught on like fire; it seems like Sidefx has difficulty understanding and selling to the game industry. It's not like we don't adopt new tools, Substance Designer & Painter have been catching on extremely fast.
What I'd like to know is, what's going on with Mudbox? I was an early adopter and didn't want to pay the $400 to upgrade after Autodesk bought them. Checking it out recently it's extremely cheap but I never hear much talk about it.
'Good' is a very broad and vague term but I'm using it here to describe the performance and inclusion of features in both Max 2016 and 17 is (from what I gathered) shittier than previous releases.
Where do you get THAT info from. Performancewise Max 2016 and Max 2017 are top, with Max 2017 mesh performance skyrocketed . Featurewise those releases include a lot too, but still the impression that they pump a lot more resources into Maya might not be too wrong. Though the latter seems to have got some serious low blow with the Maya 2017 release not even including a batch rendering mode... ( might not be so important for game dev )
If we want to go full circle here, the reason this thread was brought up in the first place is the fact that Max has been around forever and has been iterated upon over and over throughout that time, yet in recent releases it feels a bit like the software itself has taken a step back, and therefore is not as good as previous releases. 'Good' is a very broad and vague term but I'm using it here to describe the performance and inclusion of features in both Max 2016 and 17 is (from what I gathered) shittier than previous releases.
I'm going to sound like a Max fanboi which is weird considering I use Maya more these days...
Ok... You gathered wrong info or haven't been paying attention. It sounds like you don't use max all that often so I can understand not knowing or not caring. If you have a list of specific features that we could talk about that you think regressed, that would be great, we can talk about those but just throwing out vague generalities without much info isn't productive, it's just your opinion.
Performance is better not worse It blows older versions of max, any version of Houdini, Maya and Modo out of the water when it comes to displaying massive amounts of polygons or point cloud data on the screen. There is no way older versions of max could push the same amount of polys now that it takes full advantage of modern GPUs.
I, and a lot of other people spend a lot of time retoping and baking high poly meshes in max. In the past to retop I had to crunch the high just to be able to work around it. Then I could bring in the actual high to bake.
The unwrap modifier which was notoriously slow with higher-ish poly meshes has been sped up, thanks to the GPU.
There are a handful of tool changes that add up to a lot:
The selection tools , shift-click drag paints selection.
The new Local Align pivot setting lets you locally operate on multiple sub-object selections, previously it was one local pivot for the entire group, which you can still do if you use local pivot.
Right click any tool, setting, slider or value to set it's new default to whatever you want.
Preview tiling
Double clicking an edge in the UV modifier finally behaves like edit poly and selects the whole edge.
You can set material ID's in the uv editor now, previously you had to leave unwrap to set it.
Selective tiling in the unwrap modifier.
Switching the UI to QT is a big deal It will make it easier to create UI's for scripts and plug-ins as well as give normal users better ways to customize and arrange Max.
The max creation graph It's a node based scripting system that allows you to make custom tools modifiers and utilities without having to dive into maxscript or the SDK. THIS IS HUGE! It dropped the barrier for creating those things, from super advanced programmer down to intermediate. If you don't like the layout of a tool, or only use a handful of actions across several tools and want them all in the same UI, no problem.
Geodesic Voxel skinning and heatmap skinning These save a lot of time. The default skin weights before where trash, complete garbage, most of the time. Now they're actually decent and give useable results with minimal tweaking.
The asset library is finally a thing This is great if you're kitbashing I can finally retire my old scripts that did this for me. I can finally stop maintaining and updating them each time 3dsmax comes out.
Scene explore This is finally to the point I retire one of my favorite 3rd party scripts, Outliner. It was not easy keeping this thing up to date and I'm glad scene explore can finally handle the job.
Bottom line, use whatever you want, whatever works best for your workflow. I'm not trying to convert anyone over to be a max user but I do think it's a bit disingenuous to bag on it and say things aren't changing when there are massive changes and improvements.
I know a small number that use Houdini as plugin but it really hasn't caught on like fire; it seems like Sidefx has difficulty understanding and selling to the game industry. It's not like we don't adopt new tools, Substance Designer & Painter have been catching on extremely fast.
What happened with Substance is really cool indeed. As great as Houdini can be, maybe it's just more difficult to find qualified people to use that software.
Substance didn't catch on right away. It wasn't really until 5.0 and pbr that it started getting widespread use. It was of course around for years before that, and a very capable of software, it just faced a ton of skepticism for being different. Fortunately Allegorithmic has good enough marketing to convince people to give their great tool a try. Film dropped photoshop years ago, now it's games turn!
Unlike Substance, Houdini already has an established user base and a solid place in the industry. They also don't have a lot going in the way of marketing, and what they do have is missing the mark for games. When they do show something done in Houdini that is of interest to game artists they don't show you how it was done and how the artist can do it themselves. Getting someone's attention and then disappointing them is not how you go about entering a new market.
Working game artists don't have a lot of time to try out stuff that is radically different than what they already have a working pipeline for. If SideFX wants to start making real headway in the games industry they need to copy Allegorithmic's approach.
I do mostly agree with you Dustin, but I think things can be a little less black/white depending on the needs or priorities of a studio, what the 3D artists are most experienced with, etc. 3D modeling is one of the biggest bottleneck on a game production and 3D artists can do the biggest amount of overtime, etc.
Do you feel that Id Software is an exception or a pioneer? Because I'm assuming that they are using Autodesk products for 3D animation and rigger while they use Modo for 3D modeling. A few other game studios also do this, but we could argue that those are smaller studios.
Just because they list Modo as a desire or plus doesn't mean they exclusively use Modo for modeling.
When it comes to modeling especially hard surface stuff I see most companies listing Max or Maya and some even list Modo because it doesn't matter too much to the pipeline what app the mesh is modeled in. For animation or anything more technical further down the pipeline you have to stick to a specific application, although Autodesk has been trying hard to make FBX more transferable between applications which opens things up a bit more.
No way will modo replace or even come close to Maya 17 for instance as the foundry insist on bloating rather than refining. The pure beauty of modo as modeler has been ignored for years and the old tools really suck in comparison to blender and maya and Luxology is dead in the water (the actual innovation behind modo). The new upgrade system is simply dangling the carrot in front of the new upcoming 3d artists who see modo as a competitor for max/maya/blender, the reality is a company who will keep you hanging on with fancy new features and eye candy that are not fluid and to put that in a game art workflow = frustration, so studios moving to modo in the future is never going to happen. The view port is just as shit as it was and got worse with the "advanced option", the base tools are dated and the foundry have zero interest in advancing the most basic of tools.
Give it a few years and no one from Luxology (the pioneers) will be at the foundry. The chances and opportunity's have been many from 601 but with the merger all the innovation flew out the window. It's a sad reality for long term modo users as many of us have simply stopped upgrading or have moved on to new software grounds along with one of the major founders, actions speak louder than words.
This is a bit more of a pessimistic outlook than most of us Modo users would take. I do not agree with the conclusions, or the extreme nature of it... but the sentiment can be somewhat understandable.
Unless you are in certain channels, communication is not very good between the user base and the Foundry. This causes frustration.
Modo is great for what it does very well, and some of the newer features have some implementation issues, rather they don't feel very well thought out workflow wise. Case in point, procedural modeling. I believe the Foundry is trying a strategy of rushing to implement a feature first, then polish or fix it later as part of another update. This means while the user can get access to these features, the experience might not be ideal. This also allows the Foundry to gather feedback on the features and how they are being used... so it makes sense from that point of view.
On the other hand, if they hold off on these big features until they are perfect, we might not see anything for awhile (if at all)... and there will be less incentive to upgrade. This will cause the Foundry to put more emphasis on the "low hanging fruit", the smaller things, than tackling any bigger projects. No matter what the user wont get the best out of it at first.
Understanding this, I think its fine to throw some criticism at them but at the same time take their point of view as well. Its up to them to figure out a better solution if its not working out. The alternatives, like Maya are good, but its not a perfect solution either. Every software has its weaknesses (and cons). What Maya has done is really impressive so far, but (at least in my case) its too early to throw in the towel. Modo development is still occurring, I just want them to put just as much effort in design/workflow as the technical achievements tied to developing those features.
If someone wants to switch to Blender or Maya, its also not a big deal because its not like Modo becomes inaccessible (unless you sell the license). If someone hops on over to Maya, great its a sub, drop it when Modo looks appealing enough or if you think development is back on track. Same with Blender (only its free, no sub). I don't think the situation is grim, rather the opposite. There is a lot to look forward to. If Modo devs cant get people to upgrade with what they are doing now, then naturally it will adjust itself to get those upgrades. By that very nature I am optimistic, its a matter of when not if imo.
Curious how game devs will react to the 10.2 update when it hits.
As for game studios, when Pete says "studios moving to modo in the future is never going to happen"... I do not think that is a sure thing yet. In fact I think the opposite is happening, slowly. It could go either way in the future, Modo will either sink or swim, but I think its too early to jump to any conclusion. It brings enough to the table that makes it a very competitive tool, even with a few recent fumbles. Also the price is right, no sub and upgrades are optional with no penalty for skipping.
All that said, I think we can all agree that Autodesk has been making it quite clear they want to push people into Maya, that it is their flagship they are pouring most of their R&D into. I wouldnt be surprised if their ultimate goal is to eventually cut Max development.
Regarding a company changing software just on a whim. For our small team where I work, for us to be down just one week's (40 hours) worth of work costs the company $20,000 in lost income and we're just a team of 4.
How long would it take to retool just our pipeline which is as about as simple as you can get? Then what about all of those assets we use on a daily basis that aren't available for the new software and the cost to convert gigabytes of models over, then re-material them?
What do you think it would cost for a larger studio to just drop Max/May and move over? You'd bankrupt yourself in no time. There better be some serious damn advantages to that new piece of software because you are going to take a financial punch to the dick during the transition phase.
I feel really bad because when I said 'performance', I really meant to say 'stability' in that other users and I, from what I've read, seem to experience much more crashing on newer releases than in comparison to older ones. You're absolutely right in everything you brought up, I was just talking stability. Sorry, I should have been more specific in my wording before your writing of that.
Regarding a company changing software just on a whim. For our small team where I work, for us to be down just one week's (40 hours) worth of work costs the company $20,000 in lost income and we're just a team of 4. What do you think it would cost for a larger studio to just drop Max/May and move over? You'd bankrupt yourself in no time. There better be some serious damn advantages to that new piece of software because you are going to take a financial punch to the dick during the transition phase.
I'd argue it would most likely start off as one or two artist with a seat in the alternative software, and it spreads from there. A bigger studio could then just buy more seats as the software starts fitting into the pipeline and other artist become aware of it. Not all time spent with different software is on the clock either.
As for the cost (loss in income), you could potentially weigh it against the cost of Autodesk subs per year. If the annual sub for say Maya is $1470... and you have 20 artist. That is over $29k per year. Lets pretend that studio eventually moves over to something like Modo at $1800 per seat. That is around $36k... with no forced subscription. So two years of Maya subs would be almost $60k for that team, yet without an upgrade on Modo they would only have paid $36k. If they did upgrade, then that total would go up to $46k. Every year this goes on, the gap between those numbers will increase. On top of that, you factor in any potential speed loss or gain from using the new software. So hypothetical, if Modo speeds up the process over all, then there is even more to gain.
That cost saving can add up to quite a bit over time. The risk vs reward element is there though, alternative software really has to dig itself in and prove that its better in addition to the total cost saving. I'm sure we agree its easier said than done.
You know what we need? Maxyaquixstanceshop! oh wait... Zmaxyaquixstanceshop ------------------------------ I am looking to get away from Autodesk to support competitive pricing and am hoping Modo is a winner.
Regarding a company changing software just on a whim. For our small team where I work, for us to be down just one week's (40 hours) worth of work costs the company $20,000 in lost income and we're just a team of 4.
How long would it take to retool just our pipeline which is as about as simple as you can get? Then what about all of those assets we use on a daily basis that aren't available for the new software and the cost to convert gigabytes of models over, then re-material them?
What do you think it would cost for a larger studio to just drop Max/May and move over? You'd bankrupt yourself in no time. There better be some serious damn advantages to that new piece of software because you are going to take a financial punch to the dick during the transition phase.
amen to that. We've been trying to wean people off of Photoshop/Quixel and switch them towards Painter. Mostly because we expect our clients to require more and more of Substance tool skills. We offer training, in-house and by Allegorithmic, we have wikis, self-help tutorials, on-demand support, etc. But it can be an uphill battle. It's not just lost productivity, but also happiness and motivation is at stake. Especially seniors hate being reduced to newbies again. Some also hate the learning curve and the slow progress when switching or adopting a new software. Others are quite happy, but they too all start out as beginners. And we're taking a soft-approach here, switching a few artists at a time. I have to totally agree here - just switching out a piece of software isn't necessarily something do on a whim.
it took 2 weeks to get used to the clicky workflow, get rid of the bad 3DS Max habits (hotkeys).
...What? Surely I'm misunderstanding your point here. I'll let you elaborate before I go on a rant on the long terms health effect of the 'clicky workflow'.
Replies
Fine, I'll pretend you're serious and indulge you for a sec.
Are there better options for certain things, of course. I use Maya for animation and I lean toward Modo for modeling, but I still like max because it does a lot of things really well. It has gotten a lot of things right for a really long time and finally some other programs are finally starting to catch up and push ahead but it takes a combination of them to do what Max does out of the box.
Is it worthwhile to explain to users, why they haven't been burning up the releases with ground breaking updates? Yea probably, especially when they seem to be doing a lot of speculating.
If you think VR/AR/Wearable is going to revolutionize the entire industry over night and sweep out decades old tools and pipelines I think you're about as crazy as the "unlimited detail" guy that 5-6 years ago wanted to the entire industry to toss out polygons and invent new pipelines and tools around his voxel engine. We're still waiting for that revolution...
Don't get me wrong VR and voxels have their place, just like the niche Euclideon found in scanning and visualization (just not in the game industry). VR is not a flipswitch that nullifies all current industry practices. If you've worked with it, you know it's pretty impressive at first but nowhere near capable of taking over the current workload.
Instead of obliterating all of the buttons that everyone uses every day and pissing everyone off, they painfully recreated the placement of everything. The UI is now in on a system that is much more flexible and robust.
2. VFX companies, that are also reaching for realtime and VR, are not interested in something that is limited only to Windows. Because you know, they got shitload of programs that runs on Linux, so they would still like to use their Linux pipelines to develop for VR too.
Entire industry is not represented by those couple old game companies that forgot to move on and are stuck on 3DS Max.
If you want to see what the Houdini community is really like, go to odforce.
I'd love to see an explanation for this one, as that's a pretty bold statement.
Calling Max bad software for modeling would be delusional, but if you're extremely bootstrapped it might be bad relative to Blender. If you're an animator it might be bad relative to Maya. If your company has a pipeline built around another program then it might be bad for you. It's strange that you acknowledge retraining time and the existing knowledge base of the company as if those are non-factors, and then accuse them of not thinking long term. Perhaps they are the ones thinking more completely about their situation
Pretty much the only objective thing you can say about a software is the functions that it does and doesn't have
Does this have an impact on Max's development? I don't know. I think we're seeing more fixes and additions to Maya as of late because it was a lot farther behind in tool capabilities(not to mention all the basic modelling operation bugs) than 3DSMax was. The conspiracy theorist in me believes there was pressure from studios who jumped aboard the Maya train for the animation aspect, and turned around and wanted it to do everything so they don't have to carry around a bunch of software licensing. The closer Maya gets to having all the same tools, it really turns into a comfortability debate among artists instead of which has the better tools. As for the studios, it becomes a money issue. Why pay for 3 different pieces of software when 1 can handle everything?
...Or maybe it's just a simple thing like Python is easier to implement in?
Time will tell.
I like the idea in so far as the process at least respects stereoscopic concerns at the asset building stage ( or at least level design space ) instead of considering that VR space as an afterthought.
It just seems unavoidable that we should have DCC tools for game development with a stronger concentration towards game development. A complete solution where programming DCC tools and Animation rigs were developed and perhaps even utilized by the final game logic ( if we could handle that much pure power under the hood at all stages of dev... my head would probably jelly explode ).
It occured to me in the Unreal VR editor how badly I wished Epic would just cut the cord for me and extend the Editor to handle asset creation and Animation.
With the addition of comprehensive DCC development access as well so I could code tools as effectively as I can in Maya? I would never look back to any DCC application that sometimes put compositing motion graphics, Motion Picture, Broadcast and CAD concerns before game development.
I'm looking from perspective of companies that have to deal with more than just Windows based stuff. So Max is no go for them, no matter which way you look at it or how many game companies are using it.
And what extend it is? I know about couple companies that use it only as a plugin, to transfer file they get from Arch companies. One Max for the whole company just to transfer data. Everything else happens elsewhere. Very pricey plugin.
I'm telling you once again guys. Max is dead not because people stopped using it, but because it will take years to make it usable again. To old code base that will take a lot of time to patch and move it to other operating systems. Before this will happen Maya will be there already. And it's already on other operating systems. There is no sane reason to pick 3dsmax this days. And the list of reasons is really long.
I'm sure that those of you who are stuck in Max based companies really think that the world still needs Max and can't work without it, but there are a lot of companies that are actually out of 3dsmax for a decade or more, and they are not coming back anytime soon. And they really have good reasons for this.
And lastly, if a company have decades old pipeline I would try to get out of it as fast as I can. Decades old means more than 10 years old. In this fast changing industry using something that is more than 10 years old is a dead wish. That's pre-2006. You kidding guys, right?
Beside file formats I don't remember any company that didn't updated their pipeline in the last 5 years. I also don't remember any company that is using stuff made more 10 years ago, even custom stuff. Maybe some really old operating system scripts. Nothing for making graphic. Stuff that was done more than 10 years ago was replaced or updated gradually in last 5-10 years.
http://polycount.com/discussion/171752/what-is-your-main-3d-software-for-game-art-at-work/p1
But I really don't see how you can call 3DS max a bad piece of software, assets for multi-award winning games or other media were made in that software. Can it improve? Yes! Does it have problems that could have been solved for a while now? Sure! But a bad piece of software?
Although to be fair, it's not because of the software, it's because of the artist behind it that the assets are awesome, but that's a different topic.
@Tidal Blast from what I've seen, Modo is really good at hard surface. I spent 60 days with it but I made the mistake of focusing on organic modeling and retopology soooo I stuck with Max. I was also struck by how much it felt like Lightwave; which it kind of is, so it's not really this revolutionary new program, I first used Lightwave almost 20 years ago. Modo is the awesome Poutine, Max is the whole meal but you have to put your own gravy on their french fries and it doesn't really taste the same. I'm American so the idea of gravy on french fries is totally alien.
@Mark Dygert Hey, lets test this Modo meal idea, how'd you like to switch over to Modo being your pimary animation tool?
I spent most of my career at studios that were stuck on really old versions of Max so I followed the whole meme of "Max only gets worse!" but I'm using 2016 at my current job and it's been great, it replaced 3D Coat as my retopology tool of choice. Right now Substance Painter and Zbrush are tied for the buggiest programs in my workflow.
Here's a new software package that seems to be doing some cool new things in the world of modeling >:)
Quantify this statement.
There must be one tiny piece of the pipeline this guy touches and he found some niche software that he prefers and he must think that it does an amazing job for everyone else around him. It seems like he's a huge Houdini fan so I guess that mystery is probably solved.
45 min to model a potted plant but the procedural modeling is kind of neat, but gets convoluted really quick. At best it almost matches what Max and Maya do on a feature level but not in a practical way. At best you spend your time noodling sliders and messing with it's node based system that it gets pretty convoluted and slow.
As far as traditional animation, wow houdini is amazing... /sarcasm
What it was built to do, it does well but it wasn't built to replace 3dsmax or Maya.
@Mark Dygert To be fair, houdini is amazing for procedural stuff like VFX, but I agree, I can't see how houdini is "the modern way" for modelling etc.
As far as 'traditional' animation it's more than capable:
<a title="Link: https://vimeo.com/119736573" href="https://vimeo.com/119736573">Monstro</a><a title="Link: http://www.outside-movie.com/" href="http://www.outside-movie.com/">Outside</a>Houdini is a complete pipeline, it can and does replace Max and Maya for some studios/individuals. It's not a workflow that appeals to everyone though, just as Max and Maya don't appeal to everyone.
Modo beats Houdini for animation features and Modo still loses to Maya and Max.
Sometimes it's best to use the software that has been around for a while, that has had a lot of iteration and development done to it. They managed to reinvented the wheel but it's made out of stone while everyone else has iterated on the design and is using modern synthetic rubber tires.
If I was creating a studio from scratch (as I have, twice now) I wouldn't build the modeling, rigging and animation pipelines around Houdini. Not only is it slower to use and has less features, it also has a much smaller user base which is a huge factor when hiring talent. That's not to say Houdini doesn't have a place, it does but it's not the end all be all like some people are claiming.
It's far more capable an animator than most people realize or give it credit for, especially when you start getting into chops. It just doesn't behave like maya or max, that doesn't mean it's shit. Houdini is not new software, it just celebrated it's 20th anniversary, while it may not be as formally developed in character animation as Maya, the architecture of Houdini keeps these defeciences from being as crippling as they would in other packages.
That video you linked is pretty shit, lots of sloppy technique, not even a minute in and the author has an edit sop for something that should be handled with a parameter adjustment upstream, and it only gets worse from there. If this kinda stuff is what you have based your opinion of Houdini on I can see your point of view.
seeing as max hasn't had a UI refresh since it debut 20 years ago....
What I'd like to know is, what's going on with Mudbox? I was an early adopter and didn't want to pay the $400 to upgrade after Autodesk bought them. Checking it out recently it's extremely cheap but I never hear much talk about it.
Ok...
You gathered wrong info or haven't been paying attention. It sounds like you don't use max all that often so I can understand not knowing or not caring. If you have a list of specific features that we could talk about that you think regressed, that would be great, we can talk about those but just throwing out vague generalities without much info isn't productive, it's just your opinion.
Performance is better not worse
It blows older versions of max, any version of Houdini, Maya and Modo out of the water when it comes to displaying massive amounts of polygons or point cloud data on the screen. There is no way older versions of max could push the same amount of polys now that it takes full advantage of modern GPUs.
3256 objects 9,000,000 polys
3dsmax 2014: 6-10fps
3dsmax 2016: 20-30fps
3dsmax 2017: 80-130fps
I, and a lot of other people spend a lot of time retoping and baking high poly meshes in max. In the past to retop I had to crunch the high just to be able to work around it. Then I could bring in the actual high to bake.
The unwrap modifier which was notoriously slow with higher-ish poly meshes has been sped up, thanks to the GPU.
There are a handful of tool changes that add up to a lot:
Switching the UI to QT is a big deal
It will make it easier to create UI's for scripts and plug-ins as well as give normal users better ways to customize and arrange Max.
The max creation graph
It's a node based scripting system that allows you to make custom tools modifiers and utilities without having to dive into maxscript or the SDK. THIS IS HUGE! It dropped the barrier for creating those things, from super advanced programmer down to intermediate. If you don't like the layout of a tool, or only use a handful of actions across several tools and want them all in the same UI, no problem.
Geodesic Voxel skinning and heatmap skinning
These save a lot of time. The default skin weights before where trash, complete garbage, most of the time. Now they're actually decent and give useable results with minimal tweaking.
The asset library is finally a thing
This is great if you're kitbashing I can finally retire my old scripts that did this for me. I can finally stop maintaining and updating them each time 3dsmax comes out.
Scene explore
This is finally to the point I retire one of my favorite 3rd party scripts, Outliner. It was not easy keeping this thing up to date and I'm glad scene explore can finally handle the job.
Bottom line, use whatever you want, whatever works best for your workflow. I'm not trying to convert anyone over to be a max user but I do think it's a bit disingenuous to bag on it and say things aren't changing when there are massive changes and improvements.
Unlike Substance, Houdini already has an established user base and a solid place in the industry. They also don't have a lot going in the way of marketing, and what they do have is missing the mark for games. When they do show something done in Houdini that is of interest to game artists they don't show you how it was done and how the artist can do it themselves. Getting someone's attention and then disappointing them is not how you go about entering a new market.
Working game artists don't have a lot of time to try out stuff that is radically different than what they already have a working pipeline for. If SideFX wants to start making real headway in the games industry they need to copy Allegorithmic's approach.
When it comes to modeling especially hard surface stuff I see most companies listing Max or Maya and some even list Modo because it doesn't matter too much to the pipeline what app the mesh is modeled in. For animation or anything more technical further down the pipeline you have to stick to a specific application, although Autodesk has been trying hard to make FBX more transferable between applications which opens things up a bit more.
Give it a few years and no one from Luxology (the pioneers) will be at the foundry. The chances and opportunity's have been many from 601 but with the merger all the innovation flew out the window. It's a sad reality for long term modo users as many of us have simply stopped upgrading or have moved on to new software grounds along with one of the major founders, actions speak louder than words.
This is a bit more of a pessimistic outlook than most of us Modo users would take. I do not agree with the conclusions, or the extreme nature of it... but the sentiment can be somewhat understandable.
Unless you are in certain channels, communication is not very good between the user base and the Foundry. This causes frustration.
Modo is great for what it does very well, and some of the newer features have some implementation issues, rather they don't feel very well thought out workflow wise. Case in point, procedural modeling.
I believe the Foundry is trying a strategy of rushing to implement a feature first, then polish or fix it later as part of another update. This means while the user can get access to these features, the experience might not be ideal. This also allows the Foundry to gather feedback on the features and how they are being used... so it makes sense from that point of view.
On the other hand, if they hold off on these big features until they are perfect, we might not see anything for awhile (if at all)... and there will be less incentive to upgrade. This will cause the Foundry to put more emphasis on the "low hanging fruit", the smaller things, than tackling any bigger projects. No matter what the user wont get the best out of it at first.
Understanding this, I think its fine to throw some criticism at them but at the same time take their point of view as well. Its up to them to figure out a better solution if its not working out. The alternatives, like Maya are good, but its not a perfect solution either. Every software has its weaknesses (and cons). What Maya has done is really impressive so far, but (at least in my case) its too early to throw in the towel. Modo development is still occurring, I just want them to put just as much effort in design/workflow as the technical achievements tied to developing those features.
If someone wants to switch to Blender or Maya, its also not a big deal because its not like Modo becomes inaccessible (unless you sell the license). If someone hops on over to Maya, great its a sub, drop it when Modo looks appealing enough or if you think development is back on track. Same with Blender (only its free, no sub).
I don't think the situation is grim, rather the opposite. There is a lot to look forward to. If Modo devs cant get people to upgrade with what they are doing now, then naturally it will adjust itself to get those upgrades. By that very nature I am optimistic, its a matter of when not if imo.
Curious how game devs will react to the 10.2 update when it hits.
As for game studios, when Pete says "studios moving to modo in the future is never going to happen"... I do not think that is a sure thing yet. In fact I think the opposite is happening, slowly. It could go either way in the future, Modo will either sink or swim, but I think its too early to jump to any conclusion. It brings enough to the table that makes it a very competitive tool, even with a few recent fumbles. Also the price is right, no sub and upgrades are optional with no penalty for skipping.
All that said, I think we can all agree that Autodesk has been making it quite clear they want to push people into Maya, that it is their flagship they are pouring most of their R&D into. I wouldnt be surprised if their ultimate goal is to eventually cut Max development.
How long would it take to retool just our pipeline which is as about as simple as you can get? Then what about all of those assets we use on a daily basis that aren't available for the new software and the cost to convert gigabytes of models over, then re-material them?
What do you think it would cost for a larger studio to just drop Max/May and move over? You'd bankrupt yourself in no time. There better be some serious damn advantages to that new piece of software because you are going to take a financial punch to the dick during the transition phase.
As for the cost (loss in income), you could potentially weigh it against the cost of Autodesk subs per year. If the annual sub for say Maya is $1470... and you have 20 artist. That is over $29k per year. Lets pretend that studio eventually moves over to something like Modo at $1800 per seat. That is around $36k... with no forced subscription. So two years of Maya subs would be almost $60k for that team, yet without an upgrade on Modo they would only have paid $36k. If they did upgrade, then that total would go up to $46k. Every year this goes on, the gap between those numbers will increase. On top of that, you factor in any potential speed loss or gain from using the new software. So hypothetical, if Modo speeds up the process over all, then there is even more to gain.
That cost saving can add up to quite a bit over time. The risk vs reward element is there though, alternative software really has to dig itself in and prove that its better in addition to the total cost saving. I'm sure we agree its easier said than done.
Maxyaquixstanceshop!
oh wait...
Zmaxyaquixstanceshop
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I am looking to get away from Autodesk to support competitive pricing and am hoping Modo is a winner.
...What? Surely I'm misunderstanding your point here. I'll let you elaborate before I go on a rant on the long terms health effect of the 'clicky workflow'.