3dsmax 2016 - Is it usable in production straight out the box ?

[Drawehn]

Kinda. I was talking about the blue symbol that looks like a donut and tells you to hang on...we named it donut of annoyance.

With Max 2016 we see a lot of it sadly.

And changing the layer of an object is a pain in butt. It used to be so simple, sigh.

[stevesideas]

Ahh I see. My bad Yes, 2016 does seem very slow. Hopefully a service pack will be released soon..

[glorybound]

The beta testers have a SP to test, so maybe soon.

Ahh I see. My bad Yes, 2016 does seem very slow. Hopefully a service pack will be released soon..

[stevesideas]

That's good news !

[Bruce Hart]

Kinda. I was talking about the blue symbol that looks like a donut and tells you to hang on...we named it donut of annoyance.

With Max 2016 we see a lot of it sadly.

And changing the layer of an object is a pain in butt. It used to be so simple, sigh.

Donut eh? That's cute. I call it "the spinning wheel of death"

[alexyork]

It amazes me that things like the new Layer Manager can make it through to retail. I mean if they pushed that out to a group of professionals as a potential idea it would be one of the very first things to come back as a no-go. The same with the "new" material list window, whatever that's called. I greatly prefer the old one - just many times more efficient and clear to work with when you have hundreds of mats. They've continually added functionality but somehow decreased productivity with max over the years. That's a real skill...!

I really do hope that SP1 will address all these show-stopping issues. Stuff like changing object layers or working with groups should be super quick and is such a common task day-to-day that it can kill your efficiency significantly if it's bugged or crippled.

I just have a sad feeling that I'm going be sticking to 2014 until 2017 is released with proper UHD/4k support. All the main 3d content stock library providers and almost all studios and freelancers here are still working with 2014 anyway so there's no compatibility issue there either.

[gandhics]

Kinda. I was talking about the blue symbol that looks like a donut and tells you to hang on...we named it donut of annoyance.

With Max 2016 we see a lot of it sadly.

And changing the layer of an object is a pain in butt. It used to be so simple, sigh.

In 2016, they added back "Add to Active Layer" button.
You can select objects and make a layer active(click layer icon and make it blue) and click the button.

In 2015, you lose selection when you active layer, but you don't lose selection in 2016.
Therefore, you cam active layer after you already select objects.

[theedge]

Yep ! It took a while, but we finally have that Add button, which makes the Layer Explorer usable at last !

[Dave_Wortley]

We are having problems with Max 2016. On heavy scenes there is a 1 second donut when selecting any object in the scene. Really annoying. The layer manager isn't great either.

You can try turning off the new selection highlighting Alt+J, and also try turning off hardware hit testing,

NitrousGraphicsManager.HardwareHitTestEnabled = false

See if that improves things.

[Drawehn]

Yeah, we finally figured out the new layer manager as well We skipped 2015 so to us it's all quite different in 2016.

We immediately turned of the new selection highlighting, so it's not what's causing our delays.

We are having a Autodesk support look into it now so I will post the outcome.

[ior=0]

I'm trying to think of something none offensive to say about Max's UI designers, BUT CAN'T! Every since that stupid square start menu "THING", the UI design seems to have been given to a bunch of monkeys in a cage...I'm waiting for the work of Shakespeare... but I bloody don't have infinity.

[Brian Bradley]

I'm trying to think of something none offensive to say about Max's UI designers, BUT CAN'T! Every since that stupid square start menu "THING", the UI design seems to have been given to a bunch of monkeys in a cage...I'm waiting for the work of Shakespeare... but I bloody don't have infinity.

Harsh, but it isn't as if the team aren't aware that they have plenty of work to do. I guess priorities are always difficult to juggle.

Bri

[Drawehn]

We just talked to Autodesk support. The guy could reproduce the problem of the selection delay on one of his machines. The suspicion is that a lot of objects in a scene cause this problem in Max 2016. Not every machine has this problem so maybe it's in connection with certain graphic cards (nvidia). He will pass the problem onto their development teams.
It means that we will stay on Max 2014 for the time being.

[Donald2B]

I have a machine with more than 32 cores (48 to be exact) and I've run into a LOT of strange issues with a LOT of software. In some cases my computer would be MUCH slower than a much older computer due to the number of cores.

Could that potentially be a problem here?

[Drawehn]

Oh wow.

No, I don't think so. My machine has only (sniff) 8 physical cores (16 virtual ones) and the other one has only 4 / 8. Both machines habe that problem and it only occures in Max 2016.

48 cores sounds awesome. Shame it is causing you so much trouble.