- Current UI path system is problematic as others have noted. For months Max was working as planned by loading my custom UI on start-up. Now I have to manually load my UI scheme every time I load Max. I’ve spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why Max is doing this, but I gave up.
- Project folders, while a good concept, are poorly implemented. It seems more of a beta feature that “works” but doesn’t work well. It would be nice if there was a server application that could be used to manage all the projects from one location. When installing Max there could be an option to manage projects locally or to use a server. Maybe combine the project functions with Backburner. Some of the things the manager application could do:
- Create projects
- Archive projects
- Set permissions
- Define folder structure per project
- Maybe move files around while maintaing path integrity
- Maybe by combining with Backburner you could create reports on the number of render jobs a particular project has submitted, how many render hours a job has consumed, how many failed jobs, etc. Might be useful for determining which projects/users need help in better managing their process.
- Too many time I see software features, in Max or others, that are geared toward satisfying the individual user without considering how the feature would be managed across an office of 5 or 10 or 100 users. We spend a lot of time “fixing features” to maintaining office standards and workflow.
- Oh yes. How about creating Service Sacks that are backwards compatible with the Extensions you may have released a month earlier.
- More robust poly tools. Acquire the rights to PolyBoost if you have too.
the splitting of trackview into curves and dopesheet is inconsistent - the two interfaces should be more similar (the filters button moves places amongst others)
its really annoying to have so many tracks taking up space when you want to drill down to one transform.
right clicking a key should work the same in both views
some sort of hot rollover to change a track from curves to dopesheet and vice versa would be cool
A filter to select keys within a time range would be useful for high multiple items (plus filter to select keys by type of transform and axis)
I end up with a docked curve view and a docked dopesheet and its awkward
and isnt there any way of aborting something and giving control back to the user more quickly? - recently I’ve been force quitting while it thinks about dumping what’s in memory that I dont even want - because its quicker
In a recent work, with Max9 SP2, i have many problems with the TGA’a files out of render… switch to PNG… and the same problem… in 500 files, 4 or 5 files with errors.. work with since 3DSTudio 1 for DOS, and i never had this problem…
The Mirror tool in max has a weird bug I’ve always wondered about…it mirrors, but say in the case of target lights, leaves the icon of the light in the wrong direction. There are more problems with it under the hood if you try to export to real-time apps like Eon (or go to Maxwell). People say to use the mirror modifier, but it doesn’t have as nice of functionality IMHO…
Definitely include the fact, that work with max above lets say 10.000 objects in one scene is real pain. And this goes for objects with lots of sub elements inside a single mesh(for example trees). Max tools seem to fail above a number of objects. For example, if I want to apply some changes to an onyx tree just before I export it to a proxy, I have to restart max several times to keep it from crashing. A restart every time I apply a modifier. (for example a push to the leaves) Also, selecting and transforming many objects is way too slow.
We often work with large scale scenes with more than 10-20 thousand objects (proxy vegetation, people, other proxy props) so this is a major issue for us. This goes for selecting instances too. Selecting 100 objects is almost instant, when selecting for example 1560 light fixtures (in a scene I’m currently working on) takes almost 30 seconds, there is a quite noticeable decrease in performance above a certain number of things.
And also note that the attach feature in editable poly seems to mess up the memory. Attaching multiple objects at the same time (trough attach multiple command) kills max slowly.
type gc() in the script listener (pinkie to the bottom left) to free the undo buffers and clean up the memory.
The issue has also to do with the way the undo is handled.
Try setting it to the lowest (be it 0 or 1) in the preferences, and see if it helps.
That’s because the mirror tool simply does a scale of -100% in whichever axis you choose (and moves the result according to your offset value of course)
Well, it’s also because Max sucks when it comes to lots of objects. A single object with millions of polys is fine, but a thousand objects with 100 polys each is a nightmare. It’s because of the internal scene object list in max. And if groups are involved… it’s 10X worse.
Ah yes, dynedain, i didn’t mean that max was great
It’s just that the way it handles undos (it includes selections and such) it really a bitch on processing power and memory.
The garbage collection method was just a tiny drop in a sea of s**t… :lol:
I have a few scenes with several thousand objects in them that were created in R8. They are a little easier to handle in R9 for me. Although, I too hope that this is an area that is addressed in R10.
A very good help when dealing with large scenes is to use Maxscript for certain tasks. If you name your objects well, you can create simple little scipts that can hide/unhide, select or whatever your objects without using the normal select and command process. Also, you can script object attachments so that it does not save the progress to the undo memory. I use that when attaching anything over about 100 objects together. I have found that one major contributor to massive slowdown is when trying to display too many objects. If you have DX cache enabled, you can eat up a lot of memory real fast and it can slow things down as it tries to recache while you work. That can be memory and processing that you could be using for other tasks that can also require a lot when you have that many objects. Displaying objects as box’s helps a lot in this regaurd as it won’t try and cache.
Duplicate script problems due to the copying of all scripts to the local users’ macroscripts dir
INI FILES. WTF WERE YOU THINKING.
No unified place to change and edit local texture paths on multiple machines since the 3dsmax.ini file is now in the user directory.
PLX PLACE THE USER DIRECTORY IN A MORE OBSCURE PLACE NEXT TIME. i mean, C:\Documents and Settings\dbuchhofer\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\3dsmax\9 - 32bit\enu is much too short and easily found/accessed.
Workaround or notification so as to avoid the 600 minute timeout when using a backburner manager that doesn’t have the same version of Max installed on it as the job that was sent. (Problem comes up a FUCKINGLOT with new people and new farms)
