heard, also nothing new in maya 2018 :)

[stevesideas]

Yes, single thread partical calcs are a nightmare for anything complicated.

[Dave_Wortley]

If it was up to me, I would, for example, at least attempt these things:

a) Update Particle Flow - at least basic multithreading should be easy to implement. Right now it chokes on a few hundred thousand particles. With proper Alembic particles support. Integrate that with MCG. Unify all the different particle APIs in 3ds Max (there's 3 or 4 ways to get particle data and every particle system supports a different set of those).
b) Implement actual dynamics - something like the Bullet physics library would be very good. PhysX didn't really work out that well.
c) Implement a proper API for instancing plugins, as well as hair plugins - as it is now, V-Ray has special code for Forest Pack, MultiScatter, CarbonScatter, RailClone, Ornatrix, HairFarm, Hair&Fur, Krakatoa's PRT loader etc. etc. Integrate MCG with this so that instances/hair/particles can be created procedurally.
d) Better handling of scenes with thousands of objects - these are a regular occurrence these days.
e) Better preview of the materials in the material editor - similar to the Maya new material editor.
f) Implement a standard way for plugins to generate velocity information (needed f.e. when importing Alembic files with velocity).
g) Tearable viewports.
h) Ability to put an IPR render as a background to the viewport, similar to what can be done in Maya.
i) Faster startup!
j) Faster scene save & load. I've seen people wait 20 mins for production scenes to load, how they get any work done is beyond me...
k) Fix Nitrous threading issues - because of the way Nitrous is glued to the rest of the 3ds Max UI, occasionally threading issues arise (like freezes, slow response etc).
l) There are a number of things that can be improved in the way 3ds Max deals with scene data internally, in order to minimize crashes and increase the opportunities for multithreaded scene processing.
m) Rework the texture baking workflow.
n) More modern procedural textures. The Noise texture has not been touched since Max 1!
o) Actually working render layers and overrides (in my opinion state sets/scene states didn't really work out that well)

I'm pretty sure I could get to z) if I think a bit longer

Best regards,
Vlado

Completely agree with this list! And I don't think it matters which industry you work in, all of the above would benefit!

[Dave_Wortley]

Also, vlado the Bullet Physics engine is actually implemented in 3dsmax, but only through the MCG plugin sadly....

[oglu]

if someone likes to play wiht the new bullet dynamics...
mainframe uploaded the scenes files for the bash promotion video...
https://www.mainframe.co.uk/bash

[duke2]

c) Implement a proper API for instancing plugins, as well as hair plugins - as it is now, V-Ray has special code for Forest Pack, MultiScatter, CarbonScatter, RailClone, Ornatrix, HairFarm, Hair&Fur, Krakatoa's PRT loader etc. etc. Integrate MCG with this so that instances/hair/particles can be created procedurally.


Best regards,
Vlado

You can't just expose an interface to these third party plugins? When I wanted to make a plugin that used Forest's instance id, Carlos just sent me an interface header and that was that.

[duke2]

There's something ass backwards about MCG as well. It takes an approach which is completely foreign to me. Why didn't they just emulate houdini or softimage ICE?

[duke2]

Yes, single thread partical calcs are a nightmare for anything complicated.

It's the same problem with most Max features - they're antiquated, neglected and the original dev is long gone so the best you can hope for is a replacement tool they does all or most of the existing features. Look at all the particle systems, state sets vs. render states or whatever they were called, bullet vs. physx vs. havoc, containers vs. xrefs, etc. etc.