3DS Max features and future, my personal timeline

AdrianWise8371 — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 11:35:09 GMT

Looking at the newly published timeline, not just this new release, the work put into Max in recent years has significantly changed how I work, how quickly I can create content and increased the quality of what I can create in that time.

I've always had great sympathy for the Dev team, with 3DS Max being used in so many different industries it is an impossible task to keep everyone happy, year on year there's always a call from users, "but what about...", and then the eternal "stop adding new features" "fix this first" if you look closely at the release notes over recent years the Dev team somehow have manage to do both.

3DS Max 2016 introduced Open Sub Div and Crease Sets, however the significant improvement in this area was in the UV seams and stretches allowing me to create low and high poly assets in one go. Templates, while not a big-ticket item for a lot of users, allowed me set up a series of templates for different rendering, modelling, and rigging tasks, I can only imagine how useful this is for users who dip into 3DS Max occasionally, or use it for "just rendering" their CAD assets. 2016 also added a feature that came a single tick box but saved me huge amounts of time, as someone who enjoys character creation but doesn't specialise in it, Dual Quanternion Skinning fixed all those difficult joint twists in one simple click, but it dint stop there, a few months later Ext 1 added voxel and heat map skinning that radically shortened the amount of time it took to skin a character.

3DS Max 2017 arrived and the was a focus on rendering in the new release as a prelude to Mental Rays removal, I was a long time user of Mental Ray and my asset library was all Mental Ray the scene converter made switching assets over to the new Physical Material quick and painless, and I found the new ART renderers simple UI and settings a refreshing change from the minefield that was Mental Ray, and significantly quicker! A revamp of the Boolean tool made Boolean operations editable and reliable allowing users to really engage with it as a way of modelling more complex geometry. Substantial improvements in UV unwrapping also came in 2017, however that wasn’t a surprise to me as a couple of months earlier I’d posted on Facebook that I’d had repetitive crashes whilst unwrapping and a member of the Dev team reached out and asked for my email address so they could look up the CERs from the crashes and the file associated with it, the next day I got an email informing me the bug had been found and fixed and would be in the next update, little did I know how significant an update it was going to be. 2017 update 1 dropped and blended box mapping came and reduced the complexity of my material graphs, gone were the days of mix maps in mix maps and three UV Map Modifiers in every object. The data channel modifier blew my mind, it meant I could bounce up and down the modifier stack and change topology anyway I liked, and the DCM would just handle it for me. To me all the clever things it could do with animation and motion graphics weren’t important, to me it was a substantial change in how I could model moving forward particularly when using Booleans.

When Max 2018 came it was all about Arnold 1.0 for me, gone was Mental Ray and here was a solution that was so simple to use, and ridiculously fast the fact that I could just run a scene converter to change my Mental Ray scenes to ART and then select Arnold, tick a box to enable Legacy Maps [why that’s not on be default I don’t know] and just hit render made the switch painless, and all of my concern about moving away from Mental Ray was gone, the herculean effort put into integrating Arnold and the physical material in such a short space of time was incredible. Update 2 came with new spline tools, now whilst this doesn’t sound like much it just made creating things so much easier, wires, ropes, hoses were now done in minutes as opposed to half the day making sure they didn’t intersect. Then Update 3 came along with a splash literally as we now had fluids in 3DS Max, what fun I had with that, to the extent that I was asked to help create the fluid presets that came in Update 4 shortly after. It needs to be pointed out that never before had 3DS Max had four updates in one cycle, it was rare to have more than one prior to 2016, and here we were getting regular updates with new features every couple of months.

When 2019 was introduced OSL was the headline tool, now I’m no programmer, I occasionally write the odd script, slowly and badly, with lots of help from those that can, so I’m never going to start creating huge libraries of OSL Shaders I’ll leave that to Mads Drøschler, [Go check him out], but what OSL brought to Max in addition to the clever Advanced Wood Material, was all the other OSL Shaders everybody else writes and shares, and once you have those you can obviously just add, amend, tweak them yourself if you are so inclined. 2019 also illustrate the Dev team’s commitment to developing the tools recently added, Arnold continues to get updates adding new features like Toon Shading & Noise reduction and texture baking. OSL performance was improved in Update 1, Max Fluids has not been implemented and then forgotten in addition to the presets, a fluid loader was added so you can add existing Sims to new scenes, so you don’t have to create a new Sim each time.

3DS Max 2020 has just been released and again you can see the commitment to improving features, performance improvements and fixes. When Quad Chamfer was introduced it was the number one requested feature by users, and a certain proportion of the user base didn’t seem happy, the users asked they listened and answered, they continued to do so with fluids, as they have done with Max Fluids the Dev team have revisited Chamfer and made major upgrades to it usability, performance and features, Chamfer can now create both positive and negative chamfers, something I personally have asked for, it calculates the quad geometry much better in complex corners reducing the need to eliminate intersections, it now also integrates with the crease modifier and Data Channel modifier in converting crease weight to chamfers intelligently, the Data Channel Modifier interrogate the geometry by edge angle and assigns a crease weight the chamfer modifier uses that crease weight to dictate the size of the chamfer, saving time on selecting and assigning chamfers to edges, again allowing topology to change and update. We can’t talk about the 2020 release without talking about the publication of the Road Map, for the first time I can remember the Dev team have published what they are looking into for future releases, whilst these can’t be taken as promises or commitments to new features, they do provide an insight as to what they are looking at. Currently the number one requested feature on the 3DS Max ideas page [formerly UserVoice] is viewport tear off, and we can see that it has been accepted and is on the road map, if you take the time you can look at the ideas page and see a correlation between what is listed as implemented and released, what is accepted and under review and on the road map. In the old days of user voice, you were limited to a number of votes, and each year you may get an email saying some of your votes had been returned to you, and you could guess/work out what was going to be in the new release that year. You can clearly see that the Developers at Autodesk are listening to what we say, they are trying to keep users from so many different industries fed with new features and tools, improvements to those tools, improvements in performance, and bug fixes.

My timeline for 3DS Max features in recent years doesn’t include everything, because I don’t use all the tools in 3DS Max nobody does, because it serves such a wide variety of users I’ve highlighted the ones that have impacted me in my content creation workflow, and it’s been a long post, because so much has happen in such a short time frame. I’m all for incremental updates throughout the year, adding features when they are ready, not because its April and we have to have something now!

As I am every year, I’m excited to start using my new version and seeing how much it changes my workflow. If you are in doubt, log into your account and download 2012 or 2014 and see how many tools that are a part of your daily workflow just aren’t there, or just try to do what you did yesterday in an older version…

Happy Maxing

Re: 3DS Max features and future, my personal timeline

brentscannell — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 12:52:04 GMT

Great read! Thank you, Adrian

Re: 3DS Max features and future, my personal timeline

fla3d — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 13:28:36 GMT

Great read indeed! I know this is your personal timeline but I must add that the active shade in the viewport from 2019.3, just 3 month before the 2020 release was huge! Being able to zoom, pan, orbit and also select, move, rotate and scale objects while running the active shade was a game changer for look dev.

Re: 3DS Max features and future, my personal timeline

arturopolanco — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 14:54:47 GMT

@AdrianWise8371

Thanks for sharing!

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3DS Max features and future, my personal timeline

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