Learning 3ds Max after Blender
polycounter lvl 9
Hello good people,
I've been using Blender for 3+ years now but I recently started studying games design and we have to use 3ds Max at school. I don't want to go into how much I hate 3ds Max right now and I know that I need the skills for it in my arsenal simply because it's one of the standards out there.
What I'm curious about is if there's someone else who also moved to 3ds Max after Blender and if they've found any useful scripts or workflows that made them feel more at home.
I'm mostly interested in stuff that makes vertex/edge modeling easier; maybe also placing around pivots in edit poly mode on the fly. Thanks and I hope my query is not too vague.
I've been using Blender for 3+ years now but I recently started studying games design and we have to use 3ds Max at school. I don't want to go into how much I hate 3ds Max right now and I know that I need the skills for it in my arsenal simply because it's one of the standards out there.
What I'm curious about is if there's someone else who also moved to 3ds Max after Blender and if they've found any useful scripts or workflows that made them feel more at home.
I'm mostly interested in stuff that makes vertex/edge modeling easier; maybe also placing around pivots in edit poly mode on the fly. Thanks and I hope my query is not too vague.
Replies
Max will grow on you
For the pivot, I use Miauu's pivot placer. There are other version in his script packs, don't remember if it's pack 1 or 2 but regardless, all the stuff he does is awesome, I recommend you check it, it really speeds up your workflow a lot.
go back in topic:
If you talking about modeling only, you don't really need to go deep in 3dsmax. Learning a new super-expencive modeling software with no benefits let you to un-focus on important stuff (aka produce good art).
I agree that 3dsmax and even more Maya are a standard in the industry, so my suggestion is to invest a little effort on 3dsmax just to learn the basics and the interface to be sure to have no wall between you and the others.
I can say I worked with blender on pretty big projects without any problems, even the pipeline was Maya/3Dsmax.
Basically because now days is normal to use different softwares to achive a result, think about Zbrush is normal to jump in there, than retopo probably in 3dcoat or topogun, paint in sspainter painter or MARI. than finally go in 3DSmax with a clean obj for the animators.
So my idea is to use what you like to model and just jump in 3dsmax when you have to share with the others.
sorry for the poor english
cheers!
thanks for your answer! I learnt a lot from your Juggernaut video back in the day:)
I do have the same problem with Max, that it is way too slow and involves too much clicking with the mouse.
As you said it will probably never become my go-to choice for modelling but also I don't want to be a hinderance to any production team.
I have already tried taking some models from Blender to 3ds Max and it seemed to work fine. Are there any scenarios where you need
a special setup or extra care to make sure that others can pick up in Max where you left off in Blender? Are there scenarios where it is
absolutely not feasible to exchange assets between these programs?
Thanks again for your input and congrats if you're working for FROM software now:)
There are trade-offs when switching to Max and I ended up liking what I gained more than what I lost, here are a few things to consider:
-Spline workflow. Blender does a decent job supporting splines but Max is king there. I use splines for a lot of things when I model and Max has a lot of cool features around this.
-Scripts. Blender is open source, and there are a lot of scripts available for it but they are not maintained and often stop working with a new release. Max has scriptspot and a lot of awesome commercial scripts that are well-maintained. I have to quote Miauu again here.
-Shading. (Now I know some users like Pior mananged to change this, but I have no clue how). Default viewport shading in Blender is terribad, I simply cannot do hard surface work in it because I can't figure out if the pinching I'm seeing in it will be apparent further down the pipeline or not. It's probably an easy fix, but I haven't found any.
-Bad geo is allowed in Blender, not in Max. It's totally possible to create non manifold geometry in Blender and F works almost all the time. It won't happen in Max.
Now there are things I never got used to in Max...
-why the f@#$% can you not rotate around mouse cursor like in Blender? It's simply dumb that if you have no sub-object selected you will simply rotate around the origin.
-Also not being able to remap some fuctions like arc rotate is very annoying. And has you mentionned, it generally requires more clicks to get the work done - caddy-style UI for many features like Chamfer, Connect etc. is not cool.
-UVing is retarded. Having to use a modifier for it has got to be the most stupid thing ever.
-It takes about 5 minutes to boot on some days... and it crashes easily when you're pushing it. Blender is very stable.
So as with everything, it's not all black and white, but Max is definitely a very robust tool and I love it despite its flaws. I wouldn't discard it entirely just yet
we are looking for Blender users too!
Yeah, welll sometimes can happen that you can't export the model because there are modifiers/vertex colors/special setup involved, but in this cases is not even possible to change the topology or the uvs, so even you barely know the software it should not be a problem.
Just be sure that before go home you have a copy of your file in 3dsmax format, so other people can open it.
On the other hand, before you give the data to the riggers you must clean up your model, without any history/modifier left and with the centers in the absolute center, so in this case I export to *.obj and re-import in the software to be sure to have just an index of vertices and normals
Select one or more components, run the script, now your 'working pivot' will be aligned to those components so you can rotate/scale other components from there.