The general quality of digital art software

Jay Evans

Is it just me, or will we complain for days about a Battlefield patch, or bugs in the latest EA game, or Microsoft online stuff breaking down. I’ve seem people argue till they are blue in the face, start online petitions, and generally act like they are owed so much more.

Yet more and more lately, products I use daily just seem to well… kinda suck. Maya, Max, Zbrush, Mudbox, Photoshop. Have all dumped me to the desktop at some point costing me hours of work. This is over years of work on many different PC setups. The thing is these products are THOUSANDS of dollars, and people seem to just deal with it. There’s always a work around, or something else you can use to get the job done.

I wish the industry was as tough on its tools as the public is on their products. Digital entertainment software is only a small % of Autodesk’s products, and sometimes I feel like it really shows. Innovation is coming fast and furious in this industry and I constantly feel like the tools are just barely keeping up.

Anyway just ranting, maybe I just had a particular crashy day. Anyone else think we should be expecting a lot more from our tools?

Jesse Moody

Yeah I've got to say I can agree with you here Jay. I mean this software is expensive as hell. I don't know how many times I have been working on something and then I delete an edge that max doesn't like and crash report. Open back up and shit runs slow as hell because somehow the file is partially corrupted and doesn't work right.

I hear people bitch about how a new copy of Madden comes out every year and EA should just release a new patch with updated rosters but isn't this the same thing Autodesk is doing to us? I mean Maya 8 and then a few months later Maya 8.5. WTF! I buy Max 8 and then Max 9 ships. Seriously. Why can't the products just be updated and when drastic changes are made ship a new product?

I would rather shell out 50-60 bucks a year for a new madden then I would for Max 10 this year or Max 11 next year. I mean seriously.

hawken

glad my mac is less crash happy now that cs3 suite is running. Well worth the upgrade, not crashed once.

Ghostscape

I had like 6-7 crashes in 2 days in my first week at my new job in Max. Then it was quiet until today.

I have no idea why the Chamfer Edge tool hates me so much, but it loves to randomly decide to kill max and the object I'm working on.

Thank god for autoback.

hawken

MAX is the queen of crashing.

maybe it's just max. Why do people even use it?

CheapAlert

because the companies use it duh !

Emil Mujanovic

I've found Maya to be more of an asshole when it comes to crashes and just having random nodes and old 'unclearable' history information attached to geometry compared to Max.
I'm going to be pretty vague (without breaking NDA) about the current environment I'm working on. But there's just one bit of geometry that I've had to reuse from an existing level that would always seem to crash Maya then corrupt my source file rendering it useless. I've done the whole export to a new file, deleting history, attaching to new objects and seperating and most of the tricks that generally get around these things. To no avail. I eventually had to re-build this section of mesh from scratch, saved my file. Came back the next morning... Mesh is gone! I've re-built it about 3 times and now I have a separate source file with that bit of mesh which I now import when it disappears to save me from re-building it again.

But I totally agree with these companies jerking their consumers around with high priced (and commonly buggy) software, then just releasing most of the bug fixes in a new version rather than a free downloadable update patch.

-caseyjones

AstroZombie

Well at least Maya has that nifty "autoback" feature ... oh, wait a minute ...

ElysiumGX

The progress of Max and Photoshop over the years has been disappointing. I've always expected something better. And they are the most expensive. I think the quality of products in the game industry have declined because of this. The tools aren't evolving enough to keep up with increasing development workloads. These two companies rely on piracy for new users who will eventually join a company with a pipeline built around the tools.

I've met too many people who think Max and Maya, now owned by the same company, are the only DCC Tools available to choose from. And many who would rather use Maya at work, but can't.

Eventually companies will implement tools that aren't built on old DOS standards.

Ryno

Yep. In a productions environment, stability should be one of the most important concerns, yet this seems to be the weakest point in many packages. I've had both Maya and Max crash and corrupt. This is not acceptable. I have never crashed Photoshop since going to three gigs of memory, but I crashed it many times when I had only one gig of memory.

I'd also really like to see more Direct X stability with all game development apps. Whatever graphics card I'm on, whatever machine I'm on, whatever DX app I'm running, a crash will eventually happen. Max, UnrealEd, whatever, they will all eventually crash at some point when Direct X seems to be involved. Why the hell does that happen when I'm running a cutting edge graphics card on a machine that has tons of RAM? This just annoys me to no end.

Richard Kain

This is exactly why I'm so enamored with open-source software. Unless I go out of my way to try to break it, those programs never crash on me. And I certainly never find hours worth of work dissapearing because of a wrong mouse click. Whenever I used Max, I often found it crashing during rendering. This was absolute hell for animations. The open-source programs I use, like Blender, never have that problem. Even extremely high-poly scenes don't crash the software during rendering.

Daz

I have a weird theory on why stability and quality is poor in commercial 3d apps. and its that the bulk of the purchases are made by studio admins buying large numbers of licenses. So there is little direct feedback from customer to software creator and subsequently very little consequence to the software companies for poor quality. I dont remember the last time I contacted Alias about a major showstopping bug. Usually I'll figure out a workaround. But if I was solo freelance under a tight deadline at home and I personally had paid for that software I think id be talking to them an awful lot more.

Dont forget how incredibly complex these programs are though. Its pretty unrealistic to expect them to literally be bug free. The problem is that as soon as a new graphical feature comes into widespread use (something like normal maps a few years ago being a good example) then 3d app. companies are under a lot of pressure to get that functionality implemented quickly, and they're working in ancient codebases full of legacy crap where its hard to add a new feature without breaking something else. The only way to improve that situation would be a core rewrite. Open source software developers just aren't under the same pressures.

And if youre literally losing work from crashes etc, you really need to have learnt the save often and multiple versions lesson by now.

*edit* Pauls post below is a really good point too. I'm not on a defend Maya tip at all here, but it simply never crashes for me. Neither does Photoshop. But I KNOW that both apps are problematic for others. Something about my setup or the bulk of the kind of work I do just doesn't cause it problems and unfortunately the nature of pc development is that thats just the luck of the draw.

MoP

I can't remember Photoshop ever crashing on me.
Max crashes more than it should.
Maya crashes more than it should.
Lightwave doesn't crash that much, but I don't exactly push it to any sort of limits so it's not surprising... if I was just tweaking UVs all day in Max or Maya I don't think it'd be a problem.
Max's Autoback is a lifesaver. I've generally found out quite quickly whatever I've done that's causing Max to crash though, and is easier to avoid in future, although still this doesn't address the fact that it is far more likely to crash when doing particular actions.

Something to bear in mind especially with PC software is that it has to work on every possible combination of hardware and software, and given the amount of different windows versions, motherboards and processors, graphics card types and speeds, different amounts of RAM and drive space, all sorts of custom setups and drivers, I'm amazed any PC software manages to run at all!

Jay Evans

Another thing that bugs me is the speed of innovation. When comparing it to the games industry especially. Just as a example Crytec.. reasonably small company, can build a complete engine full of innovation in about 2 years. Now Autodesk starting with an already reasonably stable base. Took years to even implement normal mapping tools. I needed those 4 years ago.

Where is our kick ass real time shader support.?
-A real unified file format?
-3d painting in Photoshop?
-Maya.. seriously WTF is up with the lack of modeling tools?

Anyway I could go on and on, and I’m not digging on any specific app. It’s the tools as a whole. I think part is it as well is that as artists, we are rarely the ones paying cash for the tools. Basically I’d like artists to start wanting more. I want thousands of dollars worth of quality tools. I don’t want to have to be an expert internet script hunter just to make my apps do what they should do out of the box.

Lee3dee

Maya has never crashed for me, Max used to crash alot when I was working with 1 million tris exported from autocad back in version 6. usually I have photoshop, Maya, Max and Ue3 open and the all work together pretty well.

System configurations are different so the software is designed to probably work on most peoples systems. Unfortunately they crash more for others

Daz

Why would you compare the creation of a 3d engine to a 3d application? I don't think Cryengine took 2 years from scratch. It was built upon their existing already solid engine. Autodesk had a reasonably stable base? I don't think so. I think it was a base of years of legacy code. You're comparing apples to oranges here.

Why would Adobe implement 3d painting if nobody had ever asked them for it?

Jay Evans

agreed, I stand corrected. It really is an unfair comparison. I'm just trying to say there seems to be far more innovation and new tools coming out of the developers.

adobe.. well I'm askign them:P I guess I'm asking them to go ahead and make cool tools that I don't even know I need yet. I wish the tools were pushing the developers instead of reacting to our needs.

but I guess it all comes down to business. A captive market.. not much competition. Why inovate if you don't really have to.

CrazyButcher

had extremely expensive CAD software crash on me (which is an industry with probably the most 3d experience and history/market), and so on. I am with Mop about the "wow it runs at all" and envy console developers for that. Legacy stuff is really a problem, I mean basically you can still get a max1, or even 3ds dos file to work in latest max, which is quite something. Game engine/tools do not need to provide this sort of backwards compatibility at all, how many engines have new file-formats with every version, how many tools are changed to fit the needs of the current project... 3dsmax as maya are giant platforms you can do lots of stuff on, adding innovation to them is mostly just buying up scripts/plugins or hacking in features from other software. As long as they sell their licenses and provide enough stability comparing to the warthog it is, it will work out for them, and safe them from an "all new 3dsmax". The problem with the other new tools such as modo & co, is that exactly they lack the kind of completeness max offers, which is also their benefit as they can easier push certain areas. But once they will grow and grow, I suspect them to run in the same issues... Open-source is no better here, looking at Blenders source, there is a lot of stuff hardcoded, which will mean lots of rewriting (if happens) to make it work with newer stuff,too.

Mark Dygert

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Well at least Maya has that nifty "autoback" feature ... oh, wait a minute ...

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Autoback is all well and good until your scene takes 2min to save. All of a sudden its not so cool. Oh and it depends on what you where trying to do while it was autosaving if max is going to crash right afterward, wee good times. Can't they make the autoback feature wait till you are done doing something and "remind" you to save as well as having the option to force a save.

I also blame many a max crash on 3rd party software. How many plug-ins are you running from "CRAZY Bob's House of PLUGZ!!11" sure some of them are stable but most are "use at your own risk, could cause your system to start smoking, don't blame me!" At that point the question is how can they make sure that every hack ass that thinks he knows MaxScript, will write a stable plug-in/script?

At what point do we stop blaming the air plane designer when WE hot glue an extra set of wings that face the wrong way?

I find that mostly new users hit the web/script sites before checking the help files. I don't see it in an easy to access button and rolling my face on the keyboard didn't bring it up so it must not be there, I bet someone wrote a script... Oh and they did, in 97 before it was tested, refined and integrated, and subsequently buried.