3ds 6

[asango]

http://www.discreet.com/products/3dsmax6/

[Yadla]

See the features, there is another feeding primitive, like the donut:
- Blobmesh meatballs

[twinxel]

I'm wondering when they will re-write 3dsMax to support large polygon files better than today...
Sounds that we will never see this happening Liers....


Joao.

[PixelJockey]

I wonder what impact the MentalRay license will have on 3rd party render solutions like VRay, Brazil, fR, etc.?

[asango]

thats a good question pixeljockey. the rendering improvements included in 3ds 5 didnt seem to make much of a dent due to the spead and limited capabilities, but this might change that. i've never had any experience with metalRay so i couldn't compare it to other 3rd party renders, but i believe it carries a good rep.

all the arch vis ppl should love this stuff, not to mention some of the other great AutoCad support.

Users of Autodesk's suite of professional design tools (AutoCAD®, Autodesk® Architectural Desktop (ADT) 2004, and more) and other products such as Rhino and Form-Z, can now share .DWG data with the 3ds max 6 application with enhanced support for Layers, Instancing, Color, and more.

the proggy devos over at discreet must be on a constant diet of redbull and speed, how long ago was R5 released? not long. damn they're quick

[fliege]

cant believe it!

I fell off mey chair after reading the announce. I dont need anything of the new features! Not a single one. Vertex Paint and BLobmesh? What do they think we are doing, playdoh?
MAx lacks NLA, to release it as a major animation software without non linear animation is nuts! Its like suicide.

I feel very sorry for Chaotic Dimension, Cebas and Splutterfish, I know Mental RAy for XSI, and it will be hard to convince people to buy an extra raytracer...

what a sad day.....

[nildoe]

I wonder if we will have to Upgrade the plugins we use....
THAT...would be a hassle

Nil

[whitey_ro]

These 3 things are a GREAT improvement in my opinion :
Vertex Paint
Relax UV?s
Mirror Skin Weights
I work in the game industry and these are lifesavers. Still I think MAX is full of crap and unresolved bugs from the version 2(I know about 20 ways to crash max and the guys from support doesn't seem to pay attention to any of the requests ..thats pretty lame )

[losbellos]

mental ray also a very slow renderer isnt it?
(i didnt see it...)

[Basse]

Slow? Well the GI isn't that fast but the rest like the raytracer isn't that slow. The render itself has a really nice quality. But you can't really put it in the same group as Vray, Brazil and fR. You don't compare those to Renderman do ya'?

[fliege]

It makes me cry to see, that Discreet just implements Plugins and Scripts rather than writing new Software. eg Vertex Paint is a free plugin by Peter Watje, some other minor improvements (like the layer and modifier things) are already available at Scriptspot.com. The only new thing is: you get Mental Ray for free, like u do with Maya and XSI and soon with Lightwave ( we should talk about the aggressive marketing of Mental Images and their way to become industry standard sometime...).

It seems like they skipped the Max 5.5 release, which was called Petrus-Beta in May 2003 and featured Mental Ray, because it was only an update. In order to get a full release they picked a few minor things and scripts, noodled it together within two months and went to siggraph. I am sure it will be compatible to MAx 4.0 just like the last release, and thats a shame (ok its handy, but it means youre still working with old 4.0)

I am a bit angry right now!

[neutrino]

3ds max 5 ist still buggy, slow and instable. discreet should completly rewrite and optimize the code. many "features" could have been released as service updates. 900EUR for some ui enhancement ist too much. Of course Mental Ray is a big addition, but not everybody needs it and there are competitive alternatives for 3ds max like vray, fR or brazil.

[ljaffe]

In fact, you don't get mental ray for free. You single machine (up to two processors) license, if I uderstand right.
Any serious studio needs quite powerful renderfarm and I wonder how much those additional licenses cost. Certainly not less than vray, fR or Brazil...
Freelancers can hardly benefit from mental ray when it comes to animations, it can be painfully slow. (To be honest, the last time I worked with MR is 5 years ago within Softimage 3.5 on SGI O2; things may have changed since)

Best Regards,
LJ

[egz]

I wonder if we will have to Upgrade the plugins we use....
THAT...would be a hassle

Nil

Yes, as far as I know we are going to need max6 recompiles of all plugins.

[Da_elf]

i never moved from max4. im happy where i am since they got it fairly stable. the feedback i kept getting about 5's bugs was enough for me to ignore its features