Max 8 or SP 1 -- are you using it? Informal poll.

[davision]

I figured that doing a poll on discreet's forum would bring out a bias for people having problems... so why not here.

I'm a subscription member, but I haven't yet installed 8 due to the fact it seems to have a bad reputation, especially where Character Studio is concerned.

For those who've braved the water how's the experience been? And do you use CS at all?

Lastly can you have 7 & 8 installed on one machine and use Vray on both installs?

[nvanherpt]

on subscription, not using 8. in fact not using 7.5 either.

[armilla]

This is a good idea. Thought about doing it myself after seeing the poll on the Discreet site yesterday, but was too lazy to start a thread.

I'm the same as Nik. I bought max6 with subscription, upgraded to max7, tried max7.1, but soon abandoned it and reverted back to 7 after finding the bug with "Loft", and due to the negative reports with 7.5, didn't bother with that at all.

Renewed my subscription this year because I was excited about all the exciting new tools that would be in 8, but have been too busy to install it. I'm always a bit wary of installing a new version for a large job, as if you find too many bugs with it and are already well into the modelling, you don't have the backwards compatibility to revert to an older version. So I think it'll be a while yet before I upgrade, especially as there seem to be a lot of grumblings that sp1 hasn't addressed all the bugs. Somehow doubt I'll bother renewing my subscription next year, but let's see what happens with max 64 bit.

It would be good if the announcement tomorrow about AME buying out npower is true, and finally bring to an end the woeful booleans in max. That would be a nice bonus for us subscription members and would in some ways make up for the poor quality control that seems to be occuring at AME with each major new release.

Sorry to ramble, I guess you only wanted a simple yes or no!

Andrew.

[rpc212]

Not yet, however I think I am going to make the leap today. Just about to install Vray in 8 so we'll see what happens. If it starts crashing I'll say goodbye and go back to 7.5.

And tomorrow will be interesting. I am really hoping for Power Booleans as was said above the current booleans are woeful to say the least! Tried PB trial and it was very nice not leaving open gaps in the mesh and making multiple booleans easy not a nightmare!

[Gijs]

Same thing, installed 8 and Vray runs fine, but still doing majority of work in 7. Pretty bad though that software which is so expensive, has such major bugs in every new version and also in subscription releases

[RErender]

We have not made the jump either, I was waiting for 8.1 but now I am not sure if they have fixed enough.

I have to balance that with the fact that moving to a new version has never been seemless and some problems seem to iron themselves out or we just learn how to work in a manner that avoids the pitfalls.

My biggest concern is with Backburner I have heard of many issues, we render 100's of thousands of frames in a year and issues here would kill us. Maybe Max 8.1 + Deadline is the answer.

All in all I am not too happy with Autodesk's performance so far, can we have Discreet back?

[rpc212]

Yeah, 8 has not gone well at all from most public accounts! Even 7 seemed to have lots of problems (7.5 bugs). Autodesk really needs to do something because people are really getting tired of buggy software and there are always new comers in the market.

Autodesk has tons of money and they better start hiring people like they have in the Chocolate industry where they test for quality with quality assurance agents that are ruthless irregardless if it costs the company money. They just don't care because their job is to protect the quality of the product. Now in saying this I fully realise that comparing a chocolate bar to a very complex piece of software is not fair, however, Autodesk is clearly not testing their software well enough and need better quality assurance in their development pipeline!

[davision]

Not that it matters much, but I don't think Autodesk was EVER removed from the 3D Studio equation. It was Autodesk or Kinetix (a division of Autodesk) who released it back in '89 for DOS... and I'm fairly sure the moniker "discreet" just came from Autodesk absorbing discreet logic's name & brand (partially) and it was still Autodesk all along. Now, they've just put the puppeteer's name back on the product. The quality control issues have always been there; since the perfect aforementioned example of boolean's has never been resolved. It's been broken for at least 10 years I think (I can't remember how they behaved in DOS). They included a disgustingly written & broken Dynamics utility for a long time until they threw in Havoc. Snapping has always been whacked. It's been forever since maps were made visible in the viewport but you still can't visualize a blend mix map (after NUMEROUS requests and I could go on. Such is the world with monopolies or oligopolies. Look at the state of Max and Windows and it's easy to see how the lack of competition erodes the user experience.

On a different note though, I've been using 7.5 since it's release and haven't noticed many issues at all (other than the lingering ones that have always been there). There were issues with some cebas plug-ins I think (I don't use them) but they were fixed fairly promptly. I can't say I've seen many other reports than that. I have used the Scene State and Batch Render and Viz stuff without issue.