Max 2010 Impressions

[jujubee]

Anyone use it? x64? And if so, what are your impressions so far?

[Morne]

Played with it for about 10 minutes so far. Tutorials that comes with it is still same old crap, except for 5 or 6 very short new ones. Haven't found the new particle presets yet that are supposedly included (presets for water, fire smoke etc) the water obviously not being a sim, but just the look.
They decided to make default colours the dark colours. I like the dark colours except the icons looks crap since they are just white lines.
So far with a small scene the viewport does look slightly quicker.

But will wait for an actual job to make final comments.

[tammo]

I like it, the new viewport functions like ambient occlusion, Soft Shadows, Depth of Field and motion blur are very useful for rendering animation previews.
Almost looks like a rendering.

[Codi]

Only toyed with it for a bit. Will be hard to get used to the Ribon thing, but must force myself to fit in AD mindset ... I think what it needs is a good videotutorial by a "pro" using it efficiently.

Looking forward to know how do the containers work, they look promising.

About the default colors, I like black scheme too, but there is an annoying thing that I found, the axis toolbar (the one which is supposed to show XYZ...) has the button colors the same as the BG color, so they are not visible. You can change that playing with the Icon:Enabled Settings in Customize User interface\Colors\
DVP3D, you can change icon color/contrast/... this way too.

[zeronove]

Just installed on x64, works fine
new icons and colors for me are "cool", way better than previous colored ones that nowadays look a bit aged; instead, at first sight, I find annoying the emboss effect on buttons, any idea about how to get rid of that?

I suppose that dark colors scheme is a default only for plain max because my design flavour still come with light gray ad previous release.

A question: anyone knows when nVidia performance driver for 2010 will be available?

@ tammo: which graphic card are you running to use new viewport features efficiently?

[TRGraphics]

Does the viewport feature work with vray?

[Dschaga]

The new features are really fine but i'm a lil bit unhappy with the ui.

I really like Acad2010 because of the well organised UI and i really think that Ad have done something right with it, but when i look at same UI in 3ds max 2010 i see an unfinished alphaversion or an idea of an UI.
I see the old toolbar, which still try to place all icons in one single line instead using the new UI to places all icons in organised panels like in Acad.

It makes me somehow angry to see this company working in such an unprofessional way and earning so much money with subscriptions ... which maybe is the reason why the UI looks unfinished.