Autdesks Max future direction / NDA / etc

Community
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hehe first thread first question:

as you might know, Ken Pimentel often mentions a NDA-only meeting with GameDev VIP’s about Max’s future direction etc…
He also says everyone was so happy and satisfied and impressed etc… Since there seem to be so much frustration here with
Max and Adesk’s way of doing things ( or better say fail to do ) on this professional forum, I would like to know if anyone here
has been on this meeting ?

Let me be clear, i do not ask for info under the NDA or so, just if anyone has been there,
and if: would he/she be able to tell something about the impression and general feeling about his thing ?
Or is even the fact of having been there under NDA ?

Everyone is free to join to speculate and of course if any person definitley want’s to break the NDA, well than start !
just joking :wink:

And if no one got any info on this or don’t want to share, we could speculate at least about, what this

Max’s future is BRIGHT™

all might be about…

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My guess would be that all of this is just another huge PR bubble. In the years ADSK has clearly shown which direction its business is headed, so, why the spin all of a sudden especially since virtually there’s no competition right now?

But of course, optimistically, I’d really be looking forward to the “news”, however, judging from the beta testers’ responses on Max 2010, it either won’t happen the very next release or it won’t happen at all.

My $0.02

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Let’s be very clear- you can fill a room with artists and impress them with a bunch of ‘features’ and bells and whistles that HURT your program in the long run. The problem with Max has not been lack of features- it has been bloatedness, instability, and poor exposure of those features. Max is a collection of wads of bubblegum held together with toothpicks. Adding NEW pieces of bubblegum will only make it temporarily and superficially more tasty, but the fact remains it is still held together with toothpicks. You can pick a dozen or two dozen marketing drones and artists and come out with a list of max features they will be jerking off to, but that doesn’t fundamentally address the problems with Max. If the problems COULD have been addressed, they WOULD have been addressed. You don’t think Autodesk knows that selection is broken and snaps haven’t been updated in more than 10 years? Why fix your material system when you can just add new rendering features?

Trusting an Autodesk employee with a blog to give impartial information and an objective view of the future is like trusting Dana Perino to give you an honest assessment of George W.

But anyway, I checked Ken’s blog, nothing on there about this meeting- do you have any links to where he mentions or talks about it?

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the impression i got ( but of course without info or anything)
it might well be a step into the direction of stability, core improvement etc…
on the other side it could just be a little spin put there to keep people interested…

To be clear, of course it would’nt be a brand new Max with rewritten core…
but at least it looks like something is cooking…

here he started mentioning the SIGGRAPH NDA session…

http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/blogs_ken/blog_detail/whats_the_future/

than this…
http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/blogs_ken/blog_detail/siggraph_and_beyond/

there are many other places ( cgtalk etc… ) where Ken posted to fight against all this Anti-ADESK , but it’s impossible for me to collect all this pieces…

In short:
Every critics about Max progress being on a grinding halt, was answered by - simply speaking - “The future of Max is bright” and people under that NDA are happy to be part of that future blabla …

If interested, don’t forget to read the discussions in the bottom part of Ken’s blog, where he tries to go into more detail, especially in this blogentry about the softimage deal
http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/blogs_ken/blog_detail/autodesk_acquires_softimage_choose_your_passion/

EDIT:
a little correction - my line “GameDev-VIP” was somewhat wrong memory, it was AE for “Application Engineers”, but that inlcuded Games,Film/VFX etc…

here some quotes:

Posted by phormis on 10 Aug, 2008 at 07:14 PM

When I worked for Autodesk, I used to be one of those AE’s (before I went to Blizzard then Blur then On my own). So from what you have said my expectations are VERY high.Let me say this, as someone who has been using 3d Studio since DOS 1.0, if Autodesk lets us down again in favor of Maya I am sure I will not be the only one looking to move to another package.

Live up to the hype, please. Max is the best all around package out there. I just wish Autodesk could see that.

Posted by Ken Pimentel on 10 Aug, 2008 at 08:58 PM

No one can live up to the hype and meet the expectations of everyone, but, we can deliver a roadmap that addresses long standing concerns. It’s not like this can all be achieved in a single concentrated effort. It’s a journey, and there are some exciting and unexpected places we’ll be taking you to. We may not reach your favorite destination on the first leg of the trip, but we may take you to some interesting places that you didn’t expect before we get to your favorite destination. Join us. You won’t regret it.

Posted by visualz on 28 Jul, 2008 at 03:19 PM

oh boy oh boy oh boy.
‘looking into the crystal ball was really exciting and I’m very stoked on the future roadmap for 3ds Max.

Schwing!

//garyD

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judging from the beta testers’ responses on Max 2010, it either won’t happen the very next release or it won’t happen at all.

could you elaborate a little bit here ? :D:

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I’ve been on various beta, alpha and advisory board meetings with Autodesk.

I’ve stopped doing this a few years ago out of frustration because the company totally does not listen to their more experienced users anymore. In the past, when it was still Discreet and early autodesk days, there were great, productive talks in the alpha and beta forums between users and autodesk employees, but that time is long gone.

Maybe that makes business sense, because there is a much larger group of users that never push max as far as the small percentage of ‘hardcore’ users that do, but I’ve felt really frustrated about it in the past.

So frustrated that I even picked up programming to ‘just do it myself’.

Autodesk has largely dumped their core user group and is now focusing on getting new users who will never use 3dsMax to the extend the core group does.

I’ve long made peace with their new focus, but obviously hold on to a small amount of hope they will eventually put their focus back on the core group of users.

The last beta/alpha I was on was around the time Maya got bought and there was an extreme amount of negative feedback on the beta board from users towards Autodesk and their direction with 3dsMax.

I think a good portion of those who gave negative feedback were simply not invited back, so that is a good way to ‘fake’ positive feedback.

So it just depends on whether the people they showed ‘their new direction’ to are people that use 3dsMax in a similar way that you do.

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whoa - kees
sadly you really confirmed my own suspicion during the last 2 yrs…
That ADESK’s only focus is broadening the userbase and catching new users by things like the ViewCube etc. and dumping the needs of the minority of hardcore users… only trying to grab all those “Using Max once a week” - archivz kind of user…

Well - all this already got rubbed directly into the face of Ken Pimentel by a more broader public via various posts by users like me and others, on ctalk, the area and his own blog…
if the insiders and beta people still get feedback in the way you describe, than it was about time to let my subscription drop and i should start loosening my pationate bindings to 3ds Max…
all hope is lost than…

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Well my intention wasn’t for you to loose your passion for 3dsMax.
I still use it myself and I like using it.

I just don’t hold my breath for Autodesk to move at the pace I want them to move to keep up with the industry I am in. I’m not on subscription myself, so the lack of innovation doesn’t bother me as much since I don’t pay for any updates.

There aren’t to many other public software providers that are moving much faster then Autodesk, so in that regard, I’m not sure where to put your money.

I personally see game companies develop more and more tools in-house and so I think the future will be bright, no matter if they are Autodesk tools or tools build by game studios. Game companies are not going to sit and wait for Autodesk to lead the way, that’s for sure.

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hehe - no fear…
i made this decision already a few weeks ago, when i got fed up by all this
“wait for the future” and after that rushed 2009 release in 6 month
for some UI overhauls…
not to forget the rescheduled release cycle which would have left me paying blindly for some future release, without even having the slightest idea which dialogs and buttons they move around this time… :D:

talking about the pace in gamedev , did you really watch that 45 min softimage video with the to CEO’s ?
they mentioned exactly the change going on in gamedev pipelines and how the gamesector is evolving that fast…

so it looks like ADESK is aware of that but nobody knows what they are cooking or if it’s their simple plan to buy the whole industry…:curses:

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I’ve been on several “user advisory board” and alpha/beta/whatever meetings and on the pre-release builds, probably since Max 5 or so.

I used to spend much more time in the betas, but have pretty much given up recently. Once the software is alpha, pretty much all “new” features are locked and new features might get cut if they don’t get to a “works well enough” state before beta or so.

I don’t know where exactly the “what new features we will add for the next release” decisions are made, but they sure haven’t been anywhere near me.

Now I just pray they won’t break features that used to work… (Scene Explorer, anyone? :slight_smile:

SamiV.

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Scene Explorer or worse the Select By Name dialog are so hugely fu*ked up I don’t even know where to start! But when you even revert to the old-schoold select by name dialog it’s still broken since Max 9 as it doesn’t properly support the user setup UI colors and hence on dark UI schemes makes it very hard to read the text in it.

Really, I’d fu*k the ridiculous cube’s ass if only they could get the SBN dialog to work properly!

Seriously, how stupid do they have to be in order to invest so much time, money and effort in a feature that maybe 0.01% users will be OCASSIONALLY using (ViewCube) and fu*ck up a feature that surely 100% users will be using gazillions of times a day (Select By Name dialog)?! I mean, what gives?!

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the bit about the view cube made me think about this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR7UWImpG54

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[QUOTE=jeremyc;1826]the bit about the view cube made me think about this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR7UWImpG54[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that was gold! :smiley:

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Used to be that the guys pushing the software in their respective fields were invited in to the early stages of planning for new versions of 3dsmax. Though participation was no small effort and investment of personal time, it was quite rewarding as this was when the greatest advances in the software took shape. (This would be the R3-R7 time frame.)

Over time, the prerelease programs were less about collaboration and shifted more to a situation where Autodesk was looking for bug testing of the features they had already deemed worthy for inclusion in the next release. The situation was only exarcerbated with the advent of the yearly release schedule.

Another big issue was the replacement of the fast and functional original beta forum with the slow, clunky, awkward MyFeedback Portal.

Also not helping our situation as Tech Artists is that more recently, for the last 3 releases, it seems that Autodesk has focused on the attracting the arch/vis market.

With the advent of this most recent console transition, it became painfully clear that 3dsmax has not kept up with our industry and is not up to the job of modern game development. I have been reading some of the other posts on this site about the possibility of creating a new DCC solution. I will be looking forward to seeing what comes of it. I have often thought about what such and app might look like and what it might do. I wish you luck!

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Imagine if Autodesk was lead by any of us here (aside from a certain bankruptcy). With all the resources and all the brilliant minds of 3ds Max, Maya and XSI engineers put tohegher with some visionary in the lead… man! I can’t even think of what that one uber app would be like! I can only imagine it’d be something like Windows XP in terms of how many people would actually be using it and how many people would actually be satisfied with! Besides, it’d get the job done no matter what.

Dreams…

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I was privy to one of these talks by Autodesk on the future of max. Suffice to say, it wasn’t inspiring.

I felt that Autodesk was more keen on getting new customers than keeping their current ones. It’s called growth. If they find that they’re losing more customers (because of bugs) than they are gaining (because of new features), resources will be put toward redressing that, but at this stage that is definitely not the case. This is all very understandable as they are a business and as a public company are driven by shareholders. There’s no way that they or we can around that.

Autodesk will focus its products on the industry sectors that use their software most. For example, something like 80% the visual effects industry uses maya. In recent years 3ds max has seen massive growth in the design sector (companies needing to easily create small 3D elements without the need for dedicated expert 3D artists) and this should give you some idea of where future max releases will most probably be heading.

I don’t think Autodesk has any intention of making one uber 3d application as their audience is far too broad. I think they would rather offer a creative suite of applications, like Adobe does.

I’m still a max user (as I’ve been using it since 3ds dos 2) but it’s not something that I think has much of a future for the industry I’m in (animation and VFX) and I’m switching to maya. Of course Autodesk has no problem with that and their representatives told me as much. They actually encouraged it!
8¬.

P.S. I personally hope Blender can continue with its positive progression and hopefully stay on the roadmap it has planned (hotkeys, modifier stack, attribute editor, etc). Once it’s mature, it will be the program I will jump on to next. The future is not so dark…

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Funny thing is, i’m now on Max Beta too. Ken Pimentel invited me short after i started this thread. But thats just by coincidence, i guess it was because of my redone Jon Pebble benchmarks and my arguing on his blog and on the area…

Brad:
i think it is true what you are saying about your area (VFX/Film). But at the same time i think Max still fills some specific niches in that field (FumeFX, Thinking Particles etc.). For my specific needs (Generalist) the way Max is going looks quite okay. I’m not too over-enthusiastic about the directions too, especially the slow speed it is evolving. But generally speaking, taking part in the beta and finding this very good level of discussion on the betaboard keeps me on the Max-ball. Not to forget some of the announcements made there about the more distant future…

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there are four kinds of jewelry,wholesale jewelry,fashion jewelry,handmade jewelry and costume jewelry ,which one do you like ?

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