A better solution to 3DSMAX?
polycounter lvl 6
Is there any programs or anything on the horizon that do a better job than 3DSMAX?
I've been using max for about 4 years, 2 years professionally.
I also use many modern tools like Substance Designer, Adobe Suite and the Unity Game Engine. All these programs have really nice UX, run smoothly and use modern concepts such as instancing and procedural development.
Max is such a massive pain to use. Crashes constantly. There's always export issues. There is no concept of non-destructive skinning in max, rigging is a nightmare, bones always break. Max doesn't even have usable mirroring.
50% of my time in max is fighting the software.
I feel the only way to use max is buying expensive plugins that fix what a giant mess it is.
Is there any program out there that is as smooth as say substance designer, that can Model, UV, Skin, Rig and Animate?
I've been using max for about 4 years, 2 years professionally.
I also use many modern tools like Substance Designer, Adobe Suite and the Unity Game Engine. All these programs have really nice UX, run smoothly and use modern concepts such as instancing and procedural development.
Max is such a massive pain to use. Crashes constantly. There's always export issues. There is no concept of non-destructive skinning in max, rigging is a nightmare, bones always break. Max doesn't even have usable mirroring.
50% of my time in max is fighting the software.
I feel the only way to use max is buying expensive plugins that fix what a giant mess it is.
Is there any program out there that is as smooth as say substance designer, that can Model, UV, Skin, Rig and Animate?
Replies
Instancing and procedural dev? Have you learned about cloning options like Instancing vs. Referencing? Modifier stack is amazing if used properly.
Houdini is also worth a look, if proceduralism is your thing.
Well, there's also Lightwave but very few people seem to use it anymore, and Softimage/XSI but development on that stopped a few years ago.
Blender 2.8 also looks very cool but I assume the UI is still very confusing
Max is the software I hated from the first try, its this patchwork monstrosity where seemingly 100 unrelated people randomly added features left and right on a horrible outdated engine core being kept alive with duct tape somehow but has tons of features and very strong modeling
Maya seems like a noticeably less dated version of max but little experience with it
Cinema 4D which I use has far less of a game / UV / Bake focus, the uv tools are horrible, normal management sucks but it has some very powerful dynamic and non destructive effectors and animation tools + the new non destructive voxel volume builder. But its build on this perfectly modular and orderly german engineering foundation with the perfect modular UI and Its getting better every year, R20 really had some game changers but modeling in max is/was noticeably more efficient
After 5 years or so of stagnation it really feels like things are going foward and the differences are getting stronger
Alternatively there's also Houdini and Modo, the former I've found initially a bit 'techy' in that it's framework is primariliy procedural which was a task and a half getting my head around at first.
After one of the recent updates, max decided to crash after I open it every time. After going through support, I had to uninstall the Arnold renderer to even get max to start up without crashing.
I would switch to Blender if I didn't have to use max for work. Blender has it's own problems, but it least it's open and can be changed or customized if needed.
But there is a workflow that lets you update your mesh. You copy your mesh, make your changes, apply the skinwrap modifier and then transfer it to skin weights. Maya has a very similar workflow.
Do you have an example of how you imagine skinning being "non-destructive"?
You're more of an anthropologist trying to figure out the mind of the people who made it, rather than trying to apply modern thinking to something built in the past. Get in their head space, get to know why they did what they did and you'll have a much better time. Or... run off and make your own so it works exactly how you like. That's what the zBrush guys did, it worked well for them but honestly, learning it while expecting it to behave like 3dsmax or Maya is like taking a trip to an alien world and getting mad that they don't speak English.
I get it, learning can be frustrating, so I get that part of your post is a rant to vent but as someone who has been in this business for a really long time, and had to learn a lot of different pieces of software written by various groups with drastically different styles and goals, you should know this issue of how you learn new software isn't going to be with just 3dsmax, it goes a lot smoother if you have an open mind and don't project your lack of knowledge onto the software as if its responsible for your lack of knowledge.
3dsmax excels at modeling, splines and modifiers are amazingly flexible. Outside of Houdini it's the most procedural modeling app out there. So knocking it for not being procedural enough is kind of weird. What do you expect it to do?
Maya excels at rigging and animating but it's modeling tools aren't quite as robust as other apps. Still there are quite a few tools and workflows that it has that max doesn't that can make it an attractive modeling package. Plus if you want your studio to be a one package shop then it makes sense to go with Maya for animation and that might force your modelers to use it also.
Modo is really good at modeling and UV'ing, at least from a 1st time learning stand point. It blows hairy goat nipples at rigging and animating.
Blender has made a lot of progress but it still has a lot of growing left to do. The major advantage is it's price point, if you're going to apply for jobs with only experience in blender then it's going to be a long hard road.
Houdini is very good for procedural content, it is amazing at that type of workflow but falls apart for rigging and animation at least for characters, particles and simulations it's pretty good.|
But honestly I don't think you've worked with max long enough to actually make a fair evaluation of it. Most of your gripes seem to be based on not enough info on how it works, I can't really fault the software for that, maybe the documentation, but then again F1 in max is really useful unlike other apps.
Keep at it, it gets easier, try to keep an open mind and realize it takes time to soak it all up. They are really big and complex apps that have a lot of moving parts so it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of trial and error before it feels like second nature.
To be fair that's precisely why Blender is such an amazingly powerful modeling app - vertex weighting in it is 100% non-destructive/non-linear as everything is stored in a very straightforward object data lists, and vertex order for weights (and even blend shapes) is maintained even after deleting and/or merging parts of a model. That does make skinning a fluid process which can be started and iterated on at any time during modeling. For instance you can have a fully skinweighted character, delete its head or a limb, merge in other parts ... and you would only need to reskin these new parts (or even better, transfer weights from source) - everything else will be maintained and good to go. Or you can bring a skin weighted arm from another model altogether, and the only thing needed is to rename the weight lists of the donor model to that of the new model. That's it.
I know this sounds alien since no other program out there allows for such a workflow and I couldn't quite believe it when I first saw it. But I can confirm that it works and flawlessly so. This alone is a huge point in favor of the program, especially for small teams or individuals who can't afford having a TA re-weight characters constantly. It's pretty incredible.
(BTW for those curious : it does so by simply storing weights as named lists inside the model itself. For instance, verts weighted to "L_forearm" will be part of a "L_forearm" list. In practice this allows the program to maintain weights even if vert order is being modified - thus allowing for any deleting/merging without screwups).
As said this also works for skinweights, vertex color data, and so on.
Thats an outdated info. Maya devs did a lot of progress last two years in the modeling area.
Maya is almost there but still has some issues in regard to modeling. The tools are there, but the user experience is not. A couple issues I have are-
- The construction history- It makes modeling operations slow(esp with large models) and you have to delete history every 5 minutes or everything will slow to a crawl. You can turn history off, but most interactive modeling functions will no longer work. What a terrible way to work. There should be a proper way to work without history.
- Extracting or combing meshes- Puts the resulting meshes under a group, so you after modeling for a while, the outliner will look like a mess and you have to manually delete all history and ungroup everything.
Overall, I like Maya. For all the talk about mult-object editing in Blender, Maya has had that since the beginning. And 3ds max still doesn't have it because max is terrible.I think the "nondestructive skinning" could get messy if you use it too liberally, so you probably still need to be mindful and not convolute the skin lists, too much. It looks like there are ways to clean it up and keep it organized if it does get messy, so that's awesome. A huge win for Blender, there is so much dancing done in 3dsmax and Maya to get around those issues, it can really open up the iteration time and speed up a lot of work, if that bottle neck is gone. Thanks for the info!
Maya has probably the next most flexible skinning workflow, with it's ability to copy weights and "transfer geo edits to blendshapes" which has been great for facial animation. Need a loop a help define an eyelid or a shape around the lips? No problem add it, transfer it, done. It sounds like blender might not have an issue with this. 3dsmax has a very narrow path you can go down to salvage work but it's not that flexible and it eats up a bunch of time, scripting helps speed it up, but then learning scripting and taking the time to write it is another time sink all by itself.
Maya and Max have asymmetrical blendshape workflows but they could be improved. I'll have to hunt around and see if blender has similar asymmetrical workflows for shape keys, so far I've only found tutorials on mirroring and symmetrical workflows, but I haven't looked too deeply, it probably does and I just haven't found it.
jRocket I agree, I do like multi-object editing in Maya, I haven't found a way to do that in Blender, but one probably exists. Sadly to find it I have to listen to someone prattle on for 30min about what a polygon is... The closest 3dsmax has is to select multiple objects and apply a modifier like edit poly or UVWunwrap, which creates a modifier instance on each object, allowing you to edit them at the same time. But then a lot of things stop working correctly like "Normalize shells" fails to resize shells in UVW editor, relax goes haywire, object pivots and symmetry don't work correctly and the modifier stack can get unstable if you leave a bunch of those instanced modifiers laying around. Because its modifier based it means you usually have to collapse the stack which in some cases could cause a problem if you have a particular stack you don't want to collapse. Skin, Morphs, procedural modifiers ect...
The construction history is a bit cumbersome to work with In Maya and at times you need to delete it to keep things running smooth, like you said, thankfully Maya has "delete non-deformer" history. Max kind of leaves you hanging with the only option being copy, collapse, skinwrap, covert. I'm not sure what Blender has for history clearing options or if it's even an issue. I haven't run into an issue but then I have been modeling fairly simple stuff.
Working with pivots in maya is a huge pain in the ass and is buggy as hell. 3dsmax, Modo and Blender have good ways of working with pivots, Maya really needs to get its act together on this front but something tells me that will explode the animation tools.
The groups and transforms issues in Maya are a total chore to manage, but you can exploit that when rigging to pull off some awesome stuff fairly easily, if they screw with that, it could get really messy and much harder to rig in Maya.
oglu The modeling toolkit in Maya is a nice step but it is still pretty terrible and needs a lot more work. It brings it up to about 75% of Max and it still lags behind Modo and in a lot of ways Blender too. I hope they keep working on it, but given Autodesks ADHD and short dev sprints I don't know if they will or not. I can't base my opinion on future features that aren't implemented yet. Retopo in Maya is a big drag because of the viewports inability to handle a large number of verts. Which is a shame, it has some great tools for that sort of thing. The interactive modeling features they included are decent but their performance is often an issue. Don't get me started on Maya's viewport and Opacity sorting, or the stupid viewport camera clipping, they are also very annoying and not an issue in any other app.
You are right about the multi-object editing in max. I had forgotten that they added that.
I doubt Maya would give you fewer problems than Max.
Modo has awesome modeling, but is practically useless for rigging/animating.
Houdini is what I'd consider to be the Substance Designer of 3D work. The company behind it are amazing with similar policies and pricing structures to Allegorithmic, it's mostly procedural, awesome interface.
It would almost check all the boxes you've described, except that the direct modeling is terrible. You'd need to use a secondary app to handle that if you went with Houdini. I personally use ZBrush+Houdini these days for all my modeling, which I've been told is a common workflow for Houdini modelers.
Houdini can technically handle any direct modeling needs, but it's extremely slow and unwieldy for that. Development on that front has been fairly poor as well, since no one really uses it for that.
Houdini proceduralism is good for environments. You can even model out stuff in ZBrush and then spread it around procedurally in Houdini.
Not meaning to derail though.
I have to jump to maya's defense a little about a few things I saw mentioned though.
1. editing pivots in maya 2018 is lightning fast and intuitive. press d and click whatever component you want. Can be used with snapping hotkeys too.
2. viewport sluggishness during dense-mesh retopo : I truly believe I solved this problem a little while back. It's not so much the density of the hi-poly mesh that slows things down, it's how big the lo you are building gets. If you divide your new lo quad-draw mesh into separate meshes every so often, the viewport stays fast even if the hi-poly is in the millions. But still, it is good practice to decimate the hi as much as possible and convert it to an allembic cache. All of this sounds like a lot of workaround but its like, a few seconds of clicking and you're good to go.
3. stability -- I haven't been using maya for so many years like others here, but it never crashes on me unless I've done something totally crazy to deserve it. I''ve worked with some pretty hefty scenes with lots of skeletons and nightmare outliners. I can't imagine something heavier than that unless you were building an entire game level in one maya scene.
But whatever program you use, the best one is going to be the one in which the typical workflows are so intuitive to you that you can disable all UI on screen and work purely by hotkey/marking menu. Maybe some other application has a tool or workflow which makes a few common task a bit quicker, but so what? You can play that game forever. The important thing is that you enjoy your work, so that you will always do it well and forever.
The interface looks awful. A giant grid of buttons would not be easy to manage and sort through quickly.
Most of the tools seem to have questionable value to me, and don't appear to solve the things that make modeling slow in Houdini.
It still leaves you with a mountain of nodes to organize.
It's a third-party plugin, so continued support is unreliable.
Ive stepped over to Blender 3D but not through dissatisfaction with Max. Ive managed to crash Blender a handful of times but it was due to weird key combinations or other craziness on my part. The advantage of Blender is you download a naked version and include or activate addons as you need them. Unlike Max it doesnt try to satisfy everyone from the get go, so startup is lightning fast. I think Maya has a similar approach.
The amount of info available on Blender is stunning and it has a helpful and dynamic user base. To get up to speed with it quickly you need an internet connection, but that is true of all other alternatives.
I was always really careful with the stack, compared to some coworkers who went fancy with it. Theoretically cool possibilities but a fast way to crash and burn in Max in my experience.