I just about fell out of my chair when I saw they added a Maya navigational style. I'm looking forward to that more than anything. The current third-party script for Maya navigation is buggy and am forced to turn it off every time I want to shift+drag edges.
I think its great that they focused on small things but it looks like a service pack not a new version... Hope there is more to it. Any date ? Couldn't find anything in the blog post.
can we use realtime viewport shaders (xoliul, 3point, etc.) in nitrous with this release? or is this still something that nobody here will really care about upgrading to?
re: maya ui
I know we have some limits compared to Switcher, but we tried to integrate them more cleanly into the product. Some things were lost in doing this.
re: date
I don't think we announced, but generally think around mid-April
re: shaders
Nitrous still doesn't permit what you want, though we got closer to that goal. We know it is an issue, but we spent years getting our DX9 viewport perfected and you can't expect us to do it all at once. We know it is important.
re: maya
Should be announced too. Go to Adsk product center pages.
Hey overall I have 1 or 2 simple questions..I am still natively using 2010/2009 at home since when I switched to 2011, and 2012 I noticed alot of weird lag in the view ports. Also in 2012 the uv unwrap editor changed completely and had a bug (but later was patched and fixed to my understanding) but the viewport never quite felt the same with its default when modeling since by default it was set as realistic lighting and made showing edges when I was modeling etc kinda odd. I would change it to be flat shaded to make it feel more like the older max's but it still always looked a bit off to me. Anyway asside from the apples and oranges things, Is there a ability to keep the widgets (when I click extrude chamfer etc) on the right side menu like how they use to in older max versions, or are they still floating? And also is the new uv editor a bit more stable then before? I know it got a big overhall 2012 but I was hoping it was all fixed up in this newest version? Also how does it handle tri limits now? Is it stable with higher poly limits when importing in stuff from zbrush or mudbox? Just curious of that as well. Overall looking forward to toying with this stuff
. Anyway asside from the apples and oranges things, Is there a ability to keep the widgets (when I click extrude chamfer etc) on the right side menu like how they use to in older max versions, or are they still floating?
I second the new caddies. They suck. Want the old ones back.
we spent years getting our DX9 viewport perfected and you can't expect us to do it all at once. We know it is important.
This is a joke, right? I mean, Autodesk didn't say that, did they? The performance in DX9 is not great, nor is it's ability to display (correctly) realtime shaders. There's no support for custom tangents/binormals and a slew of other things. "perfected" - FAR from it.
I'm glad to see better UV tools coming and to have better performance in Nitrous (and more stability overall), but I never use Nitrous. It needs to have DX shader support for it to be any tangible use. It's okay for working on a highpoly mesh, but that's really about it.
re: shaders
Nitrous still doesn't permit what you want, though we got closer to that goal. We know it is an issue, but we spent years getting our DX9 viewport perfected and you can't expect us to do it all at once. We know it is important.
Huge disappointment! This is the number 1 problem with viewport graphics in Max at the moment. DX9 is very limited and bugged, but does allow custom shaders. If Nitrous doesn't allow custom shaders there is no way to get top level visual quality...
Ken, honestly i wouldn't mind working together with Autodesk to get at least one sort of shader integrated/working with 3DS Max.
I'm also curious about Viewport Canvas. There was an entry on the Uservoice about it that got picked up, and I wonder if any of that made it into 2013.
Alot of the features in Max 2013 seem to be 'preset' this and 'preset' that.
I don't mind quick access to routine stuff, and optimized setup's with extra candy (plus, it's kinda heads way from being finalized, so there is that) but so far, alot of the 'extra's' don't seem to be there that could be beneficial.
For example, since Nitrous is a no go on custom shaders, how about a nice shader inside Nitrous prefabed? Alot of the stuff currently in Max, even in Nitrous doesn't look right, especially Anisotropic-Lighting, so the visual Fidelity is extremely marred at this point.
Hell, why don't you guys allowed for users with custom shortcut switches to access the scene as they fit? It would be awesome if we could have two shortcuts, with one of them being DX9 and the other Nitrous instead of manually setting up stuff and restarting.
Caddies also are another issue, why not allow for legacy to be enabled if one desires? With all the fat that Max needs to lose, I don't think caddies are the one that requires that flaming passion of 'care' as many might think.
Hope we get to see more, because currently, alot of the stuff looks pretty...I don't want to say bad, but it doesn't look too hot.
Well, this clears up my debate I was having with buying either Max or Maya before I graduate. Hopefully I can purchase Max 2013 before I graduate with my discount.
I believe we invited Xoliul into the beta. If not, our mistake for sure. We intended to, but someone obviously dropped the ball. The problem is simply it is complex to support just any old shader in Nitrous. It isn't the same system and it isn't as open as our DX9 driver. We know it is a requirement to support more flexibility with Nitrous and we did try to open it up more, but it still isn't what is required. So yes, Xoliul, we'll work with you.
re: UV tools
That was a mistake to list. In 2013, we did not get time to address the issues. This is also a priority to look at now that the release is off to manufacturing.
I hope that things like not working Relax Conform brush or closing loop between 2 edges (it usually selects one more random edge...) will work. I love max but each time you throw new feature there is usually something that spoils the fun ;p Oh and its really cool from your side to keep in touch with community. Good to know how it works on your end.
Pros: Maya style navigation
Not because it's better but because its the default for so many apps.
Customizable Workspaces
This could be handy. I often jump between animation and modeling and have a bunch of jerry-rigged scripts to handle this transition, hopefully this will help.
GPoly
If it speeds up my specific workflows, awesome. But approaching this with skepticism...
QuickTime Support for 64bit
Hey, cool! Finally...
Skin Modifier Improvements
These are nice, but so much more needs to be done, hopefully this is ground work for things to come.
Cons: "Unfortunately, you cant use 2012 plug-ins with 3ds Max 2013."
Bummer this means by the time 2014 rolls around the plug-ins I depend on will finally get around to updating.
Mental ray Renderer
Something tells me this still calculates the edge padding incorrectly when using Render to Texture. I don't even care that it never gets the background color of a normal map correct as long as it gets the edge padding right. (Yep the BG color is set to the right shade of blue in RTT, yet we get white... awesome MR)
How is that even acceptable?
Overall
It seems like a release that I could skip and not miss much of. I'm not even really sure its worth going through the headache of installing and trying to update plug-ins, install scripts and customize the UI?
Mark, I've been learning with Maya at school for the past 2 years, but many studios use Max. I have the option to buy the Autodesk suite with either Max or Maya. In your opinion which would be more beneficial to buy?
Quicktime is a must for animation review meetings, since it can frame by frame and loop better than other formats. Since we've started using 64-bit we've had to render uncompressed AVIs, load in quicktime pro, and re-export.
I'll take full advantage of Human IK support with CAT too. I'm interested how the Curve Editor affects viewport performance.
Do I still need to deselect all my objects to get a decent frame rate in the viewport?
How will gPoly affect an art pipeline? Will you need to delete the Skin Mod and covert it back to an editable poly to update the mesh?
When do subscription users get to download this puppy?
Please tell me you fixed some of the godawful bugs in the UVW editor that weren't in pre-2012 versions (freeform to scale tool stick bug, scale tool change snap-back bug, corrupt UVW channel crash issue on editor open, horrible UV copy-paste behavior, extremely frequent crash from rectangularize UV island tool...).
I wouldn't mind a fix for the fact that the NON-OPTIONAL center snap target defaults to snapping to 3 axes, which means that unless you want the entire selection snapped to the background axis (never), you have to constantly lock and unlock your selection just to snap-drag stuff around.
Also, please, for the love of Flying Spaghetti Monster, un-bury the vertex-to-vertex snap functionality in the UV editor. I actually found it once and wept tears of joy, but it's so well hidden that I've forgotten where it is and am now once again forsaken.
re: maya mode
don't have the details, sorry. We based it off Switcher, but we did not do 100% of Switcher because we were focused on integrating it as much as possible.
re: bugs
Don't have a list handy. 400 were fixed, I hope yours was.
Snap to grid doesn't function quite the same way. What I ran across was a way to highlight a desired vertex within a UV island, even while using the freeform scale / move tool and in face selection mode, and have that vertex snap the whole island to other UV verts. It was buried in some unused commands in the quad menu, I need to look for it again.
i think the thing that... i dunno, not worries, it doesn't worry me, but certainly strikes me as a bit odd is that there are people out there ON THEIR OWN, who're programming 3d apps all by themselves, making really good strides!
there's even one here on polycount. it might not have all the bells and whistles of 3ds max, but since its inception to where it's at right now you could argue it's made far more progress in far shorter a time period than anything autodesk has come out with.
so that begs the question: why?
why can an unfunded solo project make more progress than a multi-million dollar product? why can a small project like that take the time to listen to artists, and impliment the things they want, to make their workflow better or faster... while autodesk can't?
why is it that people like xoliul can (in their spare time) whip up a viewport shader for games artists that's far better than anything autodesk have made?
is it REALLY that hard for you to communicate with people like epic, or crytek, and get some form of unified tangent basis going for normalmaps? or to make your render to texture tools as quick and efficient as something like xNormal? surely it's in YOUR best interests to do stuff like that... no?
It looks like a good release overall. The video on Small Annoying Things from about a month or two ago showed the most useful improvements to me. Maya style navigation will make a lot of people happy too.
Ken: About the customizable workspace, are there any videos of this, is the ui fully drag/drop now then? And has there been any improvements to subdivision surface performance? Between Turbo Smooth, Mesh Smooth, and Subdivision Surface, TS is the only one that has got any optimization in years.
I didn't want to rant because a) it's kinda pointless since I'm talking to deaf ears, and b) because everyone is already showing signs of disappointment but I feel the need to vent. Here's an open letter to Autodesk.
I think it's quite obvious that as each year passes, Autodesk's yearly updates become less exciting and more of an annoyance. Silly little things get added, big things get broken, performance either fails to improve or improve so marginally it's not even worth it yet every year we see this marketing BS about how 'X amount of people say this year is X percent faster than last year'... The whole requirement to include that fact tells me there's a problem. Ok so we got some viewport performance upgrades last year, but the ribbon is still crawling and it still takes an age to fire up Max from a cold start.
So my big question is this; why even release every year? Because its tradition? Because its 'what you do'? Or is it because you're scared? Scared to commit to shipping an actual improvement, scared to commit to actually listening, fixing problems, developing new features that people want and making sure your target market are happy.
This culture of regular releases baffles me. It's like ZBrush and their ridiculous constant 'let's release an incremental update every time we think of something cool' rather than just waiting, putting it together and then shipping.
Imagine if car companies did the same; 'oh we found a way to increase the brightness of your headlights, but your mp/g is still awful and the battery still sucks - introducing the BMW 3.55r3'.
It's quite obvious that Max is squarely offered at the games industry, so why are so many people in this thread disappointed. You've added a bunch of such minor tweaks and barely useful new features that it just seems like a waste of time. You've even broken some things like pre-2013 scripts.
Just take time out, figure out what people really want, take a couple years and make it happen. The only people who genuinely want yearly updates are Autodesk themselves. The company is just becoming a set of cogs that 'keep running' for no other reason than to keep up tradition despite the many cries for improvement.
As Gir says, small time zero budget indie devs are catching up fast and if Autodesk continue to put out such negligible updates then they'll be overtaken. The difference is not budget, or time, the difference is that these people listen, then they ship. Autodesk only does the latter, and barely.
These 3rd party devs and scripts are around because of the very existence of Autodesks shortcomings and I think relying on your subscribers and market position to crap out yearly upgrades that are increasingly minor and increasingly disappointing is a foolish and naive way of working.
So, Autodesk, listen, build and then ship...in that order. We'll wait.
Teejay: They release each year because of their subscription model. Also, this new release was almost 100% user driven. Check out the UserVoice pages AD put up last year, basically everything that's in this release was based on suggestions made by the users there. If you don't like something, or want something, then vote on it.
And complaining about the endless free ZBrush upgrades because they're "incremental"? You must be smoking the good shit.
I would really like all the selection modes from XSI in 3DS Max, they were really good and easy to access and quick to use. Autodesk already own both programs.
Teejay: They release each year because of their subscription model. Also, this new release was almost 100% user driven. Check out the UserVoice pages AD put up last year, basically everything that's in this release was based on suggestions made by the users there. If you don't like something, or want something, then vote on it.
I know it's user driven, but not to the extent it should be. Almost every person on this thread has mentioned something that is missing. It's clear that Max is targeted at the games industry. Maya is a staple of the animation world, be that film or game or TV, but Max is quite obviously a staple of the games industry. Sure it's important in Arch-Viz, but with BIM taking a stronger hold each year and Revit becoming more widely used, I think games will remain the focus from here on. So why then, do so many people in this thread, people who work in the games industry find things to complain about.
I've filled out surveys, I've answered their questionnaires and some things still get left out. Of course you could say 'they can't do everything in one release', but that's my point, if they waited til it was 'done' rather than until March of each year then they could do a lot more of what people want.
I'd happily stop paying the £500 a year subscription and pay a larger update cost 'when it's ready' if it means we get some genuinely exciting new features and proper fixes to the annoyances.
I mean, this year, the sole benefit of my subscription will be that I get the 2013 version for interoperability with clients and colleagues who are also upgrading to 2013. However, I'll get the same poor performance, my pre-2013 scripts will break, and I'll get nothing in the way interesting new features. So I'm paying £500 a year just so I can swap files with other users who are also only upgrading because they pay £500 a year.
And complaining about the endless free ZBrush upgrades because they're "incremental"? You must be smoking the good shit.
I'm not complaining about the free updates to ZBrush, of course it's great that we get free new stuff on a regular basis, I just think it would be a better way of delivering things if they collated a bunch of new ideas, worked them out and then packaged them in to major releases rather than constant incremental updates. I understand I'm probably alone in this though and not suggesting it's necessarily a better way of doing things. In fact reading this back now I agree, from a consumers point of view the incremental updates are great. I suppose the twist here though, is that you don't pay a subscription to Pixologic to have to maintain access to these updates, and they release their major updates when they're ready and not to a regular release schedule.
They had changed the default for the scale tool but switched it back in the first service pack. If you're talking about not being able to scale after certain operations I've run into that too, I think it has to do with the new pinning system and durring some operations verts get pinned but not visually updated and there is no way to unpin them. Collapsing the stack and reapplying UVW seems to be the only work around for this.
Does collapsing the stack, applying UVW Unwrap and clicking "Reset UVWs" fix the problem? If you're on any other channel besides 1 you should change the channel before clicking "Reset UVWs". This corruption normally doesn't happen to me on UV1 but on any other UV channel.
This comes from the way the application works. The way I understand it, every vert is assigned a number when you copy/paste the UV's it tries its best to put each number where the original was often making a crazy patchwork. I've only been able to use copy/paste when I have multiple separate objects that where all identical copies of each other, not combined into one object but with a UVW Unwrap instance applied to them all. Then it works because the vert numbering matches exactly.
extremely frequent crash from rectangularize UV island tool...).
I've never had "Straighten Selection" crash max or the UV editor. There have been plenty of times it doesn't do what I want but its never crashed. I just shrug and go back to the old way of doing it through flatten U/V scripts I wrote a while back. Which actually work better on selections because they treat each selection of edges as its own group to straighten instead of smashing selections down to one flat line.
Personally it would be great to be able to set the defaults again in the UV editor floating windows like "relax by face" instead of edge angle. Poir to 2012 there was "save as default" button on the floating windows. The main advantage of this was that it set the default behavior for that function.
So instead of changing the default and happily pressing R and getting the default relax I want I now have to, open the relax dialog, switch the drop down menu, then relax. What a pain, I just want to press R... I'll probably have to write some convoluted maxscript to get me back to the functionality I had 2 releases ago.
It would also be great if the UV editor didn't lag for 2 seconds when I close it...
So, Autodesk, listen, build and then ship...in that order. We'll wait.
That's the thing they created a subscription where they promise regular updates. They still do big things just not for every release so you can stick to the old method of purchasing every few years and get some pretty big advancements.
The point where it makes sense for some businesses, is that being on subscription is cheaper than going all out and re-purchasing en-mass every major feature release. I think there might be a support component to it also that is attractive to some businesses.
A lot of people who weren't on subscription, stayed on 2009 until 2011-12 came out then there was enough good stuff that they felt like upgrading. Some people are still on 2009 clinging to their patchwork of scripts and plug-ins that gives them roughly about the same functionality. Mostly these are people clinging to the old caddy system... You like your cars 40 tons and with tail fins, cool... the rest of us like going 0-60 in under 20min and not burning through an oil field to get there.
So yea its up to you, wait for the big stuff or get on subscription and crawl along.
So yea its up to you, wait for the big stuff or get on subscription and crawl along.
I see your point, and for larger companies (presumably the primary source of revenue and user base) a subscription model does make perfect sense.
It seems to me though, that with this subscription model and yearly release schedule, they end up having to make incremental fixes and changes to the incremental changes they made they year before, so even after two or three releases, the advancements are still somewhat of a crawl. I mean, if I think back to Max 2009, I don't think there's really anything in 10/11/12 that I couldn't live without and the performance back in 09 was in my opinion, the best it's ever been.
And the other problem is backwards compatibility. If they kept a fluid compatibility between versions then 'the rest of us' could upgrade once every few years as you say, but the lack of support for older files in each new version pretty much forces us to upgrade. As I mentioned in my previous post, the sole reason I will update this year is because companies I work with will upgrade on their subscription and I'll have to swap 2013 files with them.
just bring back my boxes for extrude chamfer etc on the right side again and dont make them float above my geometry or atleast make that a on off option and I'll grit my teeth about everything else!
and my viewport make it default like older maxes when I model and realistic mode as a option !
And the other problem is backwards compatibility. If they kept a fluid compatibility between versions then 'the rest of us' could upgrade once every few years as you say, but the lack of support for older files in each new version pretty much forces us to upgrade. As I mentioned in my previous post, the sole reason I will update this year is because companies I work with will upgrade on their subscription and I'll have to swap 2013 files with them.
Max can save out files to older formats. Like max 2012 can save as 2012, 2011, or 2010 .max files. If your clients files cant be opened in your copy of max, just ask them to save it out into a version that's compatible with your copy of max.
Replies
"Egg Spline
The Egg spline lets you create splines that are shaped like a chicken egg."
I know we have some limits compared to Switcher, but we tried to integrate them more cleanly into the product. Some things were lost in doing this.
re: date
I don't think we announced, but generally think around mid-April
re: shaders
Nitrous still doesn't permit what you want, though we got closer to that goal. We know it is an issue, but we spent years getting our DX9 viewport perfected and you can't expect us to do it all at once. We know it is important.
re: maya
Should be announced too. Go to Adsk product center pages.
Easter is coming up. We wanted to be prepared.
I don't know. I think they are small adjustments. We still have work to do to improve UVs, luckily Robin, from this forum, is helping us.
I second the new caddies. They suck. Want the old ones back.
This is a joke, right? I mean, Autodesk didn't say that, did they? The performance in DX9 is not great, nor is it's ability to display (correctly) realtime shaders. There's no support for custom tangents/binormals and a slew of other things. "perfected" - FAR from it.
I'm glad to see better UV tools coming and to have better performance in Nitrous (and more stability overall), but I never use Nitrous. It needs to have DX shader support for it to be any tangible use. It's okay for working on a highpoly mesh, but that's really about it.
Huge disappointment! This is the number 1 problem with viewport graphics in Max at the moment. DX9 is very limited and bugged, but does allow custom shaders. If Nitrous doesn't allow custom shaders there is no way to get top level visual quality...
Ken, honestly i wouldn't mind working together with Autodesk to get at least one sort of shader integrated/working with 3DS Max.
Yes pleeeeeeeeeash!
Playlist with new features.
I don't mind quick access to routine stuff, and optimized setup's with extra candy (plus, it's kinda heads way from being finalized, so there is that) but so far, alot of the 'extra's' don't seem to be there that could be beneficial.
For example, since Nitrous is a no go on custom shaders, how about a nice shader inside Nitrous prefabed? Alot of the stuff currently in Max, even in Nitrous doesn't look right, especially Anisotropic-Lighting, so the visual Fidelity is extremely marred at this point.
Hell, why don't you guys allowed for users with custom shortcut switches to access the scene as they fit? It would be awesome if we could have two shortcuts, with one of them being DX9 and the other Nitrous instead of manually setting up stuff and restarting.
Caddies also are another issue, why not allow for legacy to be enabled if one desires? With all the fat that Max needs to lose, I don't think caddies are the one that requires that flaming passion of 'care' as many might think.
Hope we get to see more, because currently, alot of the stuff looks pretty...I don't want to say bad, but it doesn't look too hot.
Oh well, looks like I'll be using Maya for another year.
+1 for how EPIC this would be! Xoliul is the man when it comes to knowing the needs of game-artists in 3ds max.....take him up on his offer!
That was a mistake to list. In 2013, we did not get time to address the issues. This is also a priority to look at now that the release is off to manufacturing.
Pros:
Maya style navigation
Not because it's better but because its the default for so many apps.
Customizable Workspaces
This could be handy. I often jump between animation and modeling and have a bunch of jerry-rigged scripts to handle this transition, hopefully this will help.
GPoly
If it speeds up my specific workflows, awesome. But approaching this with skepticism...
QuickTime Support for 64bit
Hey, cool! Finally...
Skin Modifier Improvements
These are nice, but so much more needs to be done, hopefully this is ground work for things to come.
Cons:
"Unfortunately, you cant use 2012 plug-ins with 3ds Max 2013."
Bummer this means by the time 2014 rolls around the plug-ins I depend on will finally get around to updating.
Mental ray Renderer
Something tells me this still calculates the edge padding incorrectly when using Render to Texture. I don't even care that it never gets the background color of a normal map correct as long as it gets the edge padding right.
How is that even acceptable?
Overall
It seems like a release that I could skip and not miss much of. I'm not even really sure its worth going through the headache of installing and trying to update plug-ins, install scripts and customize the UI?
Not much for the game artists in this one but the direction is looking good. Im really glad you glad AD are finally fixing all these little issues.
QuickTime Support for 64bit
Quicktime is a must for animation review meetings, since it can frame by frame and loop better than other formats. Since we've started using 64-bit we've had to render uncompressed AVIs, load in quicktime pro, and re-export.
I'll take full advantage of Human IK support with CAT too. I'm interested how the Curve Editor affects viewport performance.
Do I still need to deselect all my objects to get a decent frame rate in the viewport?
How will gPoly affect an art pipeline? Will you need to delete the Skin Mod and covert it back to an editable poly to update the mesh?
When do subscription users get to download this puppy?
I wouldn't mind a fix for the fact that the NON-OPTIONAL center snap target defaults to snapping to 3 axes, which means that unless you want the entire selection snapped to the background axis (never), you have to constantly lock and unlock your selection just to snap-drag stuff around.
Also, please, for the love of Flying Spaghetti Monster, un-bury the vertex-to-vertex snap functionality in the UV editor. I actually found it once and wept tears of joy, but it's so well hidden that I've forgotten where it is and am now once again forsaken.
don't have the details, sorry. We based it off Switcher, but we did not do 100% of Switcher because we were focused on integrating it as much as possible.
re: bugs
Don't have a list handy. 400 were fixed, I hope yours was.
re: vertex snap
Let's hope the docs reveal all.
You mean the button in the bottom right?
Snap to grid doesn't function quite the same way. What I ran across was a way to highlight a desired vertex within a UV island, even while using the freeform scale / move tool and in face selection mode, and have that vertex snap the whole island to other UV verts. It was buried in some unused commands in the quad menu, I need to look for it again.
yes....
there's even one here on polycount. it might not have all the bells and whistles of 3ds max, but since its inception to where it's at right now you could argue it's made far more progress in far shorter a time period than anything autodesk has come out with.
so that begs the question: why?
why can an unfunded solo project make more progress than a multi-million dollar product? why can a small project like that take the time to listen to artists, and impliment the things they want, to make their workflow better or faster... while autodesk can't?
why is it that people like xoliul can (in their spare time) whip up a viewport shader for games artists that's far better than anything autodesk have made?
is it REALLY that hard for you to communicate with people like epic, or crytek, and get some form of unified tangent basis going for normalmaps? or to make your render to texture tools as quick and efficient as something like xNormal? surely it's in YOUR best interests to do stuff like that... no?
just strikes me as very odd.
Ken: About the customizable workspace, are there any videos of this, is the ui fully drag/drop now then? And has there been any improvements to subdivision surface performance? Between Turbo Smooth, Mesh Smooth, and Subdivision Surface, TS is the only one that has got any optimization in years.
I think it's quite obvious that as each year passes, Autodesk's yearly updates become less exciting and more of an annoyance. Silly little things get added, big things get broken, performance either fails to improve or improve so marginally it's not even worth it yet every year we see this marketing BS about how 'X amount of people say this year is X percent faster than last year'... The whole requirement to include that fact tells me there's a problem. Ok so we got some viewport performance upgrades last year, but the ribbon is still crawling and it still takes an age to fire up Max from a cold start.
So my big question is this; why even release every year? Because its tradition? Because its 'what you do'? Or is it because you're scared? Scared to commit to shipping an actual improvement, scared to commit to actually listening, fixing problems, developing new features that people want and making sure your target market are happy.
This culture of regular releases baffles me. It's like ZBrush and their ridiculous constant 'let's release an incremental update every time we think of something cool' rather than just waiting, putting it together and then shipping.
Imagine if car companies did the same; 'oh we found a way to increase the brightness of your headlights, but your mp/g is still awful and the battery still sucks - introducing the BMW 3.55r3'.
It's quite obvious that Max is squarely offered at the games industry, so why are so many people in this thread disappointed. You've added a bunch of such minor tweaks and barely useful new features that it just seems like a waste of time. You've even broken some things like pre-2013 scripts.
Just take time out, figure out what people really want, take a couple years and make it happen. The only people who genuinely want yearly updates are Autodesk themselves. The company is just becoming a set of cogs that 'keep running' for no other reason than to keep up tradition despite the many cries for improvement.
As Gir says, small time zero budget indie devs are catching up fast and if Autodesk continue to put out such negligible updates then they'll be overtaken. The difference is not budget, or time, the difference is that these people listen, then they ship. Autodesk only does the latter, and barely.
These 3rd party devs and scripts are around because of the very existence of Autodesks shortcomings and I think relying on your subscribers and market position to crap out yearly upgrades that are increasingly minor and increasingly disappointing is a foolish and naive way of working.
So, Autodesk, listen, build and then ship...in that order. We'll wait.
And complaining about the endless free ZBrush upgrades because they're "incremental"? You must be smoking the good shit.
I know it's user driven, but not to the extent it should be. Almost every person on this thread has mentioned something that is missing. It's clear that Max is targeted at the games industry. Maya is a staple of the animation world, be that film or game or TV, but Max is quite obviously a staple of the games industry. Sure it's important in Arch-Viz, but with BIM taking a stronger hold each year and Revit becoming more widely used, I think games will remain the focus from here on. So why then, do so many people in this thread, people who work in the games industry find things to complain about.
I've filled out surveys, I've answered their questionnaires and some things still get left out. Of course you could say 'they can't do everything in one release', but that's my point, if they waited til it was 'done' rather than until March of each year then they could do a lot more of what people want.
I'd happily stop paying the £500 a year subscription and pay a larger update cost 'when it's ready' if it means we get some genuinely exciting new features and proper fixes to the annoyances.
I mean, this year, the sole benefit of my subscription will be that I get the 2013 version for interoperability with clients and colleagues who are also upgrading to 2013. However, I'll get the same poor performance, my pre-2013 scripts will break, and I'll get nothing in the way interesting new features. So I'm paying £500 a year just so I can swap files with other users who are also only upgrading because they pay £500 a year.
I'm not complaining about the free updates to ZBrush, of course it's great that we get free new stuff on a regular basis, I just think it would be a better way of delivering things if they collated a bunch of new ideas, worked them out and then packaged them in to major releases rather than constant incremental updates. I understand I'm probably alone in this though and not suggesting it's necessarily a better way of doing things. In fact reading this back now I agree, from a consumers point of view the incremental updates are great. I suppose the twist here though, is that you don't pay a subscription to Pixologic to have to maintain access to these updates, and they release their major updates when they're ready and not to a regular release schedule.
This!!
Does collapsing the stack, applying UVW Unwrap and clicking "Reset UVWs" fix the problem? If you're on any other channel besides 1 you should change the channel before clicking "Reset UVWs". This corruption normally doesn't happen to me on UV1 but on any other UV channel.
This comes from the way the application works. The way I understand it, every vert is assigned a number when you copy/paste the UV's it tries its best to put each number where the original was often making a crazy patchwork. I've only been able to use copy/paste when I have multiple separate objects that where all identical copies of each other, not combined into one object but with a UVW Unwrap instance applied to them all. Then it works because the vert numbering matches exactly.
I've never had "Straighten Selection" crash max or the UV editor. There have been plenty of times it doesn't do what I want but its never crashed. I just shrug and go back to the old way of doing it through flatten U/V scripts I wrote a while back. Which actually work better on selections because they treat each selection of edges as its own group to straighten instead of smashing selections down to one flat line.
Personally it would be great to be able to set the defaults again in the UV editor floating windows like "relax by face" instead of edge angle. Poir to 2012 there was "save as default" button on the floating windows. The main advantage of this was that it set the default behavior for that function.
So instead of changing the default and happily pressing R and getting the default relax I want I now have to, open the relax dialog, switch the drop down menu, then relax. What a pain, I just want to press R... I'll probably have to write some convoluted maxscript to get me back to the functionality I had 2 releases ago.
It would also be great if the UV editor didn't lag for 2 seconds when I close it...
The point where it makes sense for some businesses, is that being on subscription is cheaper than going all out and re-purchasing en-mass every major feature release. I think there might be a support component to it also that is attractive to some businesses.
A lot of people who weren't on subscription, stayed on 2009 until 2011-12 came out then there was enough good stuff that they felt like upgrading. Some people are still on 2009 clinging to their patchwork of scripts and plug-ins that gives them roughly about the same functionality. Mostly these are people clinging to the old caddy system... You like your cars 40 tons and with tail fins, cool... the rest of us like going 0-60 in under 20min and not burning through an oil field to get there.
So yea its up to you, wait for the big stuff or get on subscription and crawl along.
I see your point, and for larger companies (presumably the primary source of revenue and user base) a subscription model does make perfect sense.
It seems to me though, that with this subscription model and yearly release schedule, they end up having to make incremental fixes and changes to the incremental changes they made they year before, so even after two or three releases, the advancements are still somewhat of a crawl. I mean, if I think back to Max 2009, I don't think there's really anything in 10/11/12 that I couldn't live without and the performance back in 09 was in my opinion, the best it's ever been.
And the other problem is backwards compatibility. If they kept a fluid compatibility between versions then 'the rest of us' could upgrade once every few years as you say, but the lack of support for older files in each new version pretty much forces us to upgrade. As I mentioned in my previous post, the sole reason I will update this year is because companies I work with will upgrade on their subscription and I'll have to swap 2013 files with them.
and my viewport make it default like older maxes when I model and realistic mode as a option !
Max can save out files to older formats. Like max 2012 can save as 2012, 2011, or 2010 .max files. If your clients files cant be opened in your copy of max, just ask them to save it out into a version that's compatible with your copy of max.