See the features, there is another feeding primitive, like the donut:
- Blobmesh meatballs 
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…
:evil: :evil:
Joao.
I wonder what impact the MentalRay license will have on 3rd party render solutions like VRay, Brazil, fR, etc.?
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
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…
I wonder if we will have to Upgrade the plugins we use…
THAT…would be a hassle :evil:
Nil
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 :evil: ..thats pretty lame )
mental ray also a very slow renderer isnt it?
(i didnt see it…)
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’?
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!
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.
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
Yes, as far as I know we are going to need max6 recompiles of all plugins.
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
well from what ive seen of MR’s history you do have to pay for additional network liscences however its not that much to pay. I dont know about fR’s liscenceing but brazils sucks. 1 work liscence and 2 network. With vray we get 10 DR liscences not limited to processor count. so you can have up to 40 processors on a DR if you have quad processor mobo’s. and for normal network liscencing. its unlimited. All at a tidy little vray price 
gotta love chaos guys
Not that much???
Last time I checked one MR rendernode (up to 2 processors) for max cost around $3000. I’m sure the price has been lowered a bit since then, but it is still very expensive compared to VRay (or fR or Brazil even).
whoa, mental ray is the slowest renderer i know, and if i may ask, why doesn’t VRAY come with max, i mean there is no competition, marketing wise brazil teams up with BOXX and mental ray teams with MAX, you all know that Vray out-performs both, i think vlado & co. should do some marketing and truly set the standards in raytracing.
by the way, max 6 is dissapointing
:lol:
I don´t see it that negative. Particle Flow and Mental Ray are nice additions for those who need them, an improved Schematic view and layer bar are useful too. We all lnow that Max has come of age and thast clearly visible in almost any area of the Software. Of course these addition´s won´t change the way Max works internally and some of the problems (bugs and workflow wise) won´t be adressed by this, but actually I didn´t expect any deep modifications to Max´ core in the first place. The code is simply to old, and there seems to be very few people from the old team left who really know the code. From what I´ve heard repeatedly from different sources they´ve been secretly working on the next generation of Max for more than 2 years now.
All they can do is keep the money rolling as long as they need to develop the new version.
Also they say they really focused on bugs this time. They claim to have ironed out more than 100 “severe” bugs before even going to beta stage.
See http://www.3d-palace.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=630#3611
If this version is as stable as it sounds for me its worth the price for the upgrade.
Stefan
Well, Particle Flow is a real cool thing. I used it 2 projects and all I can say it’s the first inovation by discreet since Max 3 (or was this kintex 
).
Beside this MentalRay is a old render, that makes working with GI a pain in the a… The feature are nice and with all the shaders it looks even cool, but setting up a scene take 5 times longer and worst case you have to buy render licences!
SO I VOTE FOR: VRAY FREE SHOULD BE PART OF MAX 6!!!
(well don’t think discreet will do that… to much inovation power)
Else, I do not see a reason for updating Max. I wait for Max 7 and if they charge me to much I switch to Maya (It will get Vray sometimes) if I need it. It’s cheaper you know… But, there is a lot promising stuff out there too. Just looking at zBrush (extremly cool) and some new modelling tools.
I think Alias, Avid and Discreet ruled the market to long, soon we will see real great stuff from ex-developer.
robert