4 ms·

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,

by 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.

by pfranz 6y ago

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.