Does anyone have links or other resources for how max works under the hood? something along the line of how the dependency graph works in maya. I’m trying to wrap my head around it and my brain keeps wanting to reference maya because i have no idea how max thinks.
Thanks
Hello,
By “under the hood” do you mean the API? If you do then there was an informative video series created by the Max team about the API a few years ago which can be downloaded here.
-Harry
**edit
I got the video and watching now. This looks like it what im after, thanks for the link!
I was mainly after the methodologies. For example in maya, everything is a node and its all tied together and each node does something with its inputs and outputs something for another node to use. But max is just bonkers to me. Maybe the documentation is lacking, but it seems like im wandering around in a dark room.
to me, I think of Maya as a platform and Max as an application.
to me, I think of Maya as a platform and Max as an application.
You know, this made me want to start doing analogies, but everything that came to mind was highly profane and NSFW…
as frustrated as maya ever made me, i take it all back after working with max for a couple weeks. Maybe its the python support that frustrating 
I was mainly after the methodologies. For example in maya, everything is a node
I’ve heard people say Maya is node-based and Softimage is procedural, I’m not really sure what 3ds Max is, I’ve always thought of it as being sort of a layer-based application because of the modifier stack (which is similar to Maya’s construction history but I find it easier to move up and down through the modifiers and deformers) and List controllers (which are one of the few things I miss about 3ds Max now I’ve moved to Maya).
-Harry
as frustrated as maya ever made me, i take it all back after working with max for a couple weeks. Maybe its the python support that frustrating
Rest assured that works both ways 
I’d say Max is reference based. Coming up with an easy to grasp description of what that means does not seem trivial though heh.
