Where is 3dsmax leading too?

[Richard7666]

Yeah they told me max was going to be discontinued.

No seriously, this talk has been going around for few years now. Realistically it won't happen. Not like they will remove tools that make max good at archviz or other tasks, why would they. Maya sucks every new version is worse and worse, I fear its max that's getting better Actually I take it back both are terrible

Yep the correct answer is both are terrible

[Dave_Wortley]

3dsmax is 25 years old, you can still see design aspects of version 1 in version 18 that we have now. There is a huge amount of technical debt in the code, things fudged together and code that's directly integrated with the UI which makes it a nightmare to perform major changes to the software for fear of breaking things. From what I understand there's been a huge drive to separate the UI and the functional code, you see evidence of it in lots of windows in Max 2016, the render scene dialog, the time configuration window, updates to PFlow... I hope we see a lot more of this in 2017 and 2018 as it may not seem a lot now but they'll be able to do so much in the way of improvements once they have split the UI and Scene Graph.

I personally look back at how I was coding things 3/4 years ago which was a fairly popular way to code and now look at the way I code and I've re-written a lot of my code from scratch to make it exponentially more efficient, they can't re-write max. They tried with a project called 'Nitrous' (not to be confused with the viewport engine), they redesigned max from scratch and if they had persisted with it we'd have something with a max core but with the power of houdini and it would have made xsi look slow, unfortunately the resources required would have meant max would have died and we'd probably be in a worse situation, it's such a huge huge job to make a DCC product. I really hoped Thinkbox would take this on but it's too scary for them to even consider. It's going to be a long long time before Modo is good enough for us to use, I think the Foundry are going to give it a good shout but that depends on how long an investment a Venture Capitalist is willing to wait for as the returns might not come for 10-15 years and in today' short-selling market I'm not sure they will be given the necessary budgets and team to make that kind of dent into the market. I actually see Autodesk stepping up a bit at the moment, with subscription models coming they have no choice but to offer a genuine reason to update constantly, at least for the first few years of the transition, once we're all stuck on subscription with no ability to stop paying and continue to use max/maya we may find ourselves trapped.... I've not really seen too many good features from Adobe since the CC transition? The one thing we have in our favour as 3dsmax users is the community and the power of the uservoice, we can vote for what we want, they do listen, just look at what they've been doing over the passed couple of years. If we all vote from an improved UI (of which there are currently over 4000 votes when you combine different requests), then we'll get a new UI... although with over 4000 dialog boxes and 6000 icons in 3dsmax I pity the poor team that has to go through each of these one by one and update them.

I think max 2017 will be a make or break with the subscription coming, they'd have to have some killer features to get us off maintenance subscriptions.