I think the only thing why Autodesk sh*ts on their users is that 3dsmax became a standard for archviz and there is no choice. I really like how Modo looks after The Foundry bought them. It is shaping in something really cool and friendly , but there is a long way ahead to become a standard … Plus it is targeted to integration with Nuke , and that monster costs quite much !
Oh, 3ds Max just turned 25 years this weekend! 
For my part I’m beginning to be fed up with all the plugins installation and headaches needed to do FX work with max (and paying for them). I just bought a Houdini Indie license for 200$ and every hour I spend learning it is like:" WOOOW" it’s so well made and all those pricey max plugins, you don’t need them in Houdini, almost everything is there in better, you can paint hair, brush them, fracture objects, Bullet RBD sim, smoke, water, lava, distributed sim, sand and snow simulation etc.. But now I need to see how long it will take for me to transfer my pipeline entirely in Houdini… Probably years or decades! I will surely use both apps in the time being. And Vlado please don’t stop working on vray for Houdini! But anyway the good thing about houdini Indie is that we can workaround the limitation (HD render) by converting to max for rendering with vray. Converting in production is a real pain though!
Maybe I talk for nothing cause I’m still so newbie in Houdini and I don’t know all it’s limitations yet. But it makes me dream now! It looks like the perfect max reaplacement. (And about modeling: zbrush all the way!)
That’s not how it is supposed to work though (convert for rendering to defeat limitions). The limits are there to make you buy the real thing if you are doing serious production. Which leads to the second part. A lot of people praise Houdini as a “perfect replacement”. I beg to differ. It’s great for FX work and a great tool. But it is not necessarily a great replacement for every type of work. And it’s biggest drawback? It’s insanely expensive. Here we are waving our pitchforks at AD for raising prices and then praise Houdini which is 7000USD if you want a floating license and subscription is 4000USD (!).
Cheers,
Thorsten
Well, V-Ray for Houdini can render in Houdini Indie. For the moment at any rate…
Best regards,
Vlado
hii!
well something very uncool is the new license “idea” of only rental licenses for 3dsmax.
Its the same crap that adobe is doing and its all the time that i think “what i have to pay so much for a software that allways freezes, crashes for fun, is not able to handle more than 4k objects without lagging,…”
well its like an old car that gets some new fancy looking painting, but is still the same old crappy engine and run down parts inside 
i just hope the uneven 2017 is not as crap as usually the uneven numbers of 3dsmax..2013 and 2015 were total failures but you had to pay for them.
well i still dondt see a better way to make my archviz stuff and its like your “mother in law” .. you dondt really like it but you cant really change it
still if they want 1600euros renting and the crap is randomly freezing for some minutes or other stuff.. well hmmm thats not very worth the money.
most “new super features” are crap and useless.
but hooked on (or better stuck with) max forever
seeya daniel
I made sure that I could do that before buying my indie license (convert for rendering to defeat limitations). Someone form SideFX told me I could do that. So I’m not going to prevent me from doing something they are telling me themselves I can do. It’s hard enough and expensive enough to do my work as it is! I’m constantly trying to push software limitation and not the opposite! But remember it’s still a pain to convert stuff betwen apps so I don’t think I will be able to do that in a paid production, probably more for personnal project were deadline is not an issue.
Are you dure about that price of 7000USD? here I see 4495USD for a workstation license of houdini FX… http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com\_content&task=blogcategory&id=117&Itemid=374
Vlado are you sure it’s legal for you to do that? You are cracking Houdini Indie or what? LOL
Seriously, is it possible to have access to that V-Ray for Houdini Indie?
<shrug> I asked twice, didn’t get any reply so I assume SideFX doesn’t care. We haven’t done anything illegal, I guess this is partly because we didn’t implement the renderer in the way we were supposed to.
Seriously, is it possible to have access to that V-Ray for Houdini Indie?Sure, email me to vlado@chaosgroup.com and we can arrange that.
Best regards,
Vlado
Yep the correct answer is both are terrible 
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.