4 ms·

I can't read the article (server does not respond) but I believe it is not only about Autocad. I hear people complain about Revit and 3dsMax as well. What I mos

by thdrdt 6y ago

I can't read the article (server does not respond) but I believe it is not only about Autocad. I hear people complain about Revit and 3dsMax as well. What I mostly hear is: very expensive, lots of bugs, lags with new features and improvements. The software gets the job done and is in the industry standards but people are starting to look somewhere else.

esperent 6y ago
Yes, exactly. I use 3ds Max occasionally and there's no other piece of software I've ever used that crashes so often. Every time I perform an action that I haven't tried before, I fully expect the program to crash and then I'll have to spend a few hours searching for workarounds. Working with large models or scenes takes so long to reload that every crash represents around 10 minutes of lost time, and I've easily had twenty - thirty crashes on a bad day.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  You talk about large models or scenes; I'm under the impression that in the film industry, they'd have workstations with hundreds GBs of RAM and double graphics. I'm just wondering, could the issue lie in 3ds Max being optimized for a different beast of a machine..?
  - pfranz 6y ago
    I haven't used 3ds Max much. My impression is that it is more heavily used in games and maybe TV/commercial work. I have over a decade of experience with Maya, which was purchased by Autodesk in 2005 and looks to have been used on every Best VFX Oscar winner since 1997. Machine capacity only relates to the amount of data you're working with (workstations can have between 16-128GB of RAM and may have a gaming GPU or a pro GPU). The crashiness often comes from other things. Maya likes to corrupt its preferences. Complaints against Maya mirror the complaints I see for 3ds Max and their CAD software.
    - esperent 6y ago
      Oh man, you're giving me flashback to days spent resetting max's preferences over and over trying to fix a bug. Like, how does the config folder keep getting corrupted? Why? It makes no sense.
      - DonHopkins 6y ago
        I wrote a batch animation exporter shell script that had to restart max in a loop, repeatedly running a maxscript function blowChunks() to export chunks of 50 animations at a time, then restarting max to export the next chunk, because if it tried to export too many animations from the same process, max would eventually go senile and crash. (Search for "chunks":) https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/maxscript/maxis-maxscript.ms.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/maxscript/maxis-maxscrip... Automating The Sims Character Animation Pipeline with MaxScript: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/automating-the-sims-character-animation-pipeline-with-maxscript-bc490787d7a2 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/automating-the-sims-character...
    - ravenstine 6y ago
      Maya is one of the most horrible pieces software I've used. It's also simultaneously one of the best because it's so feature rich. That said, it's truly horrendous in a lot of ways. Simple operations can crash it for no apparent reason, even when poly count is low. Perfectly clean geometry can get corrupted after reopening a scene. Basic features are clearly neglected and have serious flows; the booleans are the worst out of any 3D modeling software. The most of the import plugins are a joke, forcing you to use a separate program to convert geometry to something basic like OBJ. The context menu on right-click is STILL terrible in the year 2020. Some settings seem to never stick. Little things like the nav-cube got removed with Viewport 2.0, which was supposed to make everything better. NURBS modeling sucks so bad that most studios don't even use it and prefer subdiv modeling. Until recently, scene objects didn't have UUIDs. Sad thing is that Autodesk has a monopoly over this scene. It's kind of amazing that the industry tolerates this. Then again, I still use it to this day because I'm so used to it.
jacquesm 6y ago
CAD software is hard. That's why it is expensive and has lots of bugs. It is super easy to make something that is 5% or so of a CAD program that will look impressive, will be super fast and feels like a huge improvement. And then you add the other 95%. By that time it will be just as slow as the incumbent, even more buggy and the interface will look like crap and will be hard to learn. As the author of a CAD/CAM package I remember clearly that the only way to stay out of that trap was to make it a niche thing. Of which there are 1000's none of them interoperable with the rest.
- thdrdt 6y ago
  Well I hear a lot of praise about Fusion 360. So it's not all bad. And I don't agree with your statement. Blender is a great example for this. Although it is not constraint based it is a full feature package which is very fast. Compare this to 3dsMax which is exactly what you describe.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Blender should be considered a true gem of the open source community. But the first UIs were confusing at best and infuriating at worst.
    - lokedhs 6y ago
      I believe Blender's UI is still confusing and is infuriating to me. Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to 3D modelling, but I was able to figure out pretty much everything I needed to make things in Lightwave back in the 90's, but even after watching several tutorials I still struggle with Blender.
      - DonHopkins 6y ago
        Blender 2.8 has a new redesigned user interface that is a lot easier to use. It's definitely worth trying again if you haven't recently! It's still insanely complicated of course, but that just comes with the territory. There are many great tutorials available, but make sure you're looking at recent ones, since so much has changed for the better in 2.8.

by thdrdt 6y ago

esperent 6y ago

Yes, exactly. I use 3ds Max occasionally and there's no other piece of software I've ever used that crashes so often. Every time I perform an action that I haven't tried before, I fully expect the program to crash and then I'll have to spend a few hours searching for workarounds. Working with large models or scenes takes so long to reload that every crash represents around 10 minutes of lost time, and I've easily had twenty - thirty crashes on a bad day.

BossingAround 6y ago
You talk about large models or scenes; I'm under the impression that in the film industry, they'd have workstations with hundreds GBs of RAM and double graphics. I'm just wondering, could the issue lie in 3ds Max being optimized for a different beast of a machine..?
- pfranz 6y ago
  I haven't used 3ds Max much. My impression is that it is more heavily used in games and maybe TV/commercial work. I have over a decade of experience with Maya, which was purchased by Autodesk in 2005 and looks to have been used on every Best VFX Oscar winner since 1997. Machine capacity only relates to the amount of data you're working with (workstations can have between 16-128GB of RAM and may have a gaming GPU or a pro GPU). The crashiness often comes from other things. Maya likes to corrupt its preferences. Complaints against Maya mirror the complaints I see for 3ds Max and their CAD software.
  - esperent 6y ago
    Oh man, you're giving me flashback to days spent resetting max's preferences over and over trying to fix a bug. Like, how does the config folder keep getting corrupted? Why? It makes no sense.
    - DonHopkins 6y ago
      I wrote a batch animation exporter shell script that had to restart max in a loop, repeatedly running a maxscript function blowChunks() to export chunks of 50 animations at a time, then restarting max to export the next chunk, because if it tried to export too many animations from the same process, max would eventually go senile and crash. (Search for "chunks":) https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/maxscript/maxis-maxscript.ms.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/maxscript/maxis-maxscrip... Automating The Sims Character Animation Pipeline with MaxScript: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/automating-the-sims-character-animation-pipeline-with-maxscript-bc490787d7a2 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/automating-the-sims-character...
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    Maya is one of the most horrible pieces software I've used. It's also simultaneously one of the best because it's so feature rich. That said, it's truly horrendous in a lot of ways. Simple operations can crash it for no apparent reason, even when poly count is low. Perfectly clean geometry can get corrupted after reopening a scene. Basic features are clearly neglected and have serious flows; the booleans are the worst out of any 3D modeling software. The most of the import plugins are a joke, forcing you to use a separate program to convert geometry to something basic like OBJ. The context menu on right-click is STILL terrible in the year 2020. Some settings seem to never stick. Little things like the nav-cube got removed with Viewport 2.0, which was supposed to make everything better. NURBS modeling sucks so bad that most studios don't even use it and prefer subdiv modeling. Until recently, scene objects didn't have UUIDs. Sad thing is that Autodesk has a monopoly over this scene. It's kind of amazing that the industry tolerates this. Then again, I still use it to this day because I'm so used to it.

jacquesm 6y ago

CAD software is hard. That's why it is expensive and has lots of bugs. It is super easy to make something that is 5% or so of a CAD program that will look impressive, will be super fast and feels like a huge improvement. And then you add the other 95%. By that time it will be just as slow as the incumbent, even more buggy and the interface will look like crap and will be hard to learn. As the author of a CAD/CAM package I remember clearly that the only way to stay out of that trap was to make it a niche thing. Of which there are 1000's none of them interoperable with the rest.

thdrdt 6y ago
Well I hear a lot of praise about Fusion 360. So it's not all bad. And I don't agree with your statement. Blender is a great example for this. Although it is not constraint based it is a full feature package which is very fast. Compare this to 3dsMax which is exactly what you describe.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Blender should be considered a true gem of the open source community. But the first UIs were confusing at best and infuriating at worst.
  - lokedhs 6y ago
    I believe Blender's UI is still confusing and is infuriating to me. Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to 3D modelling, but I was able to figure out pretty much everything I needed to make things in Lightwave back in the 90's, but even after watching several tutorials I still struggle with Blender.
    - DonHopkins 6y ago
      Blender 2.8 has a new redesigned user interface that is a lot easier to use. It's definitely worth trying again if you haven't recently! It's still insanely complicated of course, but that just comes with the territory. There are many great tutorials available, but make sure you're looking at recent ones, since so much has changed for the better in 2.8.