I am really stunned by Blender’s new viewport called eevee. This is going to be huge competition for marmoset toolbag and possibly game engines in the future(once VR becomes a thing in Blender). Makes me wonder why Autodesk isn’t implementing something like this in 3dsmax. 3dsmax deserves a better viewport imho. Love 3dsmax but Autodesk seems to be more focused on Maya with each new release.
It’s still in early development and they intend to add soft shadows, sss and other stuff quite soon. Autodesk better get 3dsmax viewport upgraded.
Blender cycles is getting disney principled shader and denoising in 2.79 and this PBR viewport in 2.80… Making autodesk run for their money faster and faster
Well, you usually don’t care much about your lawn if your house is on fire. They cut back on R&D expenses, software maintenance and people - they fired 10% of their staff “recently”, including the complete Viewport dev team for max. So afaik there currently is not one developer left who has been working on the current Viewport technology in max.
But honestly, I don’t need a “realtime”/“engine” like viewport if max doesn’t even handle tangent/bi-normals correctly Normal maps look like crap anyways.
I heard about the Disney shader. Definitely trying it once it’s out. I am not happy with the slow development 3dsmx is getting while Maya gets all the attention. I must admit I am loving Blender more as I continue to use it. It’s being adopted now by studios as an auxillary tool and some employees are now allowed to use it in projects which is good news. I think the competition is a good for the industry. I remember reading somewhere that Blender was downloaded 6 million times last year and is being downloaded half a million times a month. I am glad I use it from time to time. It’s a great software.
@ Fritzlachatte Autodesk better run, there are rumours that they might drop 3dsmax sometime the way Softimage was killed off. Or maybe merge 3dsmax and Maya into one? But I am curious, if they merge 3dsmax into Maya, I wonder if the archviz industry will still embrace it.
That’s not cool on their part. 3dsmax viewport has been really crapy for a long time. Meanwhile they keep developing Maya’s viewport 2.0.
Really? I have always thought Maya had more users due to it’s use in movies, tv, animations, vfx and all. 3dsmax seems used more in archviz and construction/automobile firms. Thus why Maya is getting more features and the supposed rumours.
Try to think how many small arch-viz studios there are in the World, or in you Country or city. Also think how many freelancer too.
And think how many studio there are for movies/VXF etc… studios Maya based there are.
Yes, Maya is used, I think, for AAA movies, animations, etc… etc… but, 3ds max is more popular.
Closest thing I have found is the third post in this thread http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=8248862#post8248862 . It only refers to the shanghai team itself, not their work. Maybe there’s something to be found in the “less public” forum but I can’t link that of course, or it might be already gone anyways. Afaik it was the Shanghai team doing all the nitrous stuff over the years.
based on how it usually looks in bigger companies, they are not “pandering” in any way (such as “we are putting more developers on maya” or “we are forbidding max developers to add features” - they just have 2 independent teams, each working on single software, and one of them produces more new features for various reasons (such as legacy issues)
So why does 3dsmax continue to remain stale? Is Autodesk not questioning why this is or they don’t care? I can’t understand why 3dsmax continues to get a very crappy viewport compared to Maya. Even Maya has a lighter version. 3dsmax does not. Maya has better hair/vfx
3dsmax hair and fur still very much the same. At some point, we are gonna need some of these features like wind, ocean hair for archviz in the possible future. Better tools, easier life
Legacy issues? Any chance you can pls elaborate on this?
This is cliché answer, but is it stale from sales perspective? If the sales are not down, then there is no reason to change anything from the point of view of executives.
When you are just adding new features, the code starts to rot and needs to be refreshed from time to time. If you do not do this, you get into technical debt - you add features quickly, but needed repairs/cleanups are not done. At some point, the debt overcomes you and starts slowing down the development. This is why we are doing just cleanups/rewrites for approx 3 months each year. 3ds max has all sorts of 20 years of technical debt accumulated, that slows everything down.
Okay, I do recall a time when 3dsmax was getting a lot of cool features so what they are doing now is refreshing and cleaning up code. Didn’t know that tbh. Thanks for the info.
But I would wonder why not split the devs into two teams? One that adds new features and the other that cleans up code? Wouldn’t that be a better approach. Blender is open source. Probably doesn’t have as much devs as Autodesk yet they seem to be up and doing feature wise.
Its probably really hard to develop new features if the underlying code that is supposed to be the foundation keeps changing because it is being updated. I mean it can be done but in smaller, gradual steps.
Maxon is pretty much doing that with Cinema 4D right now - the last 2/3 releases all included a big feature coupled with minor workflow additions. Under the hood they are supposedly rewritting everything.
I think sometimes we as users get a little carried away with how we think things can be changed easily but as most code troubleshooting goes I imagine one small thing can be tied to 100 other big things. Change that thing and the whole system goes weird.
That said, with the leadership and commitment that Autodesk has shown in the past I somehow doubt they’ve been doing “that much” to the base of the program. Its not a knock off to the dev team but to the organization as a whole - You can’t update stuff regularly if you company goals change from week to week. Since most of the functionality (node material editor etc…) presumably just got patched in because they were plugins before, the debt in 3ds max is probably super duper high.
