Max 2018 and Arnold in real life production.

[ott]

Ok, Arnold is new for max users and gives a lot of fine possibilities.

In everyday production life of a visualisation artist whose job is mostly visualize architecture there are some real shortcomings.

First, if somebody suggests to use downloadable Nvidia Mr for 2018, answer is, it is not as stable and have a lot of bugs (compared to 2017). It is not a solution! Nobody has properly tested it with all the plug-ins.

And truth is, if something does not work, it is impossible to get help. Yes it is!

Here are some really annoing things I have noticed:

- No support and cooperation with Itoosoft to make Arnold rendering possible, a lot of us need Forest Pro and RailClone. Can't live without it.

- Physical camera Automatic tilt (for vertical lines) works only in viewport, renderings do not care about it. It is a big minus (look the attachment).

- Reflections with out of the box materials, like water, are sometimes tint black  (look the attachment).

- Network Bucket rendering-style (free) option for 5 nodes do not exist any more like it was in Mr 2017

- No proper native Ocean shader bump map exist for Arnold-Max (maybe for maya only).

If you have to use Max for living it is a really s* situation now. I have to make a lot of visualizations of seaside sites, ports, architecture etc. I also teach Max for young architects. We have Forest Pro licenses too in classroom. I refuse to teach them Max2018.

Autodesk! Maybe it was better for you not to publish a new version every year, but in two years. Then everybody have time to fit and you can test your software.

And maybe then you can lower the prices and more young people can afford it (look Adobe, it has reasonable prices).

We do not mind, do everything right and then publish!

[jenni.oconnor · Accepted solution]

New MAXtoA features are being added all the time, and things like Itoo and Vertical Tilt support are being looked at for a future update.

Be sure to keep up with the latest free MAXtoA plugin, available on the Solid Angle web site: https://www.solidangle.com/arnold/download/

Solid Angle has direct support for MAXtoA on their "Arnold Answers" page: https://answers.arnoldrenderer.com/spaces/10/index.html - I encourage you to post issues there as their developers and support people are quite active. If you are on the latest version of MAXtoA and are still having issues like the reflections, please let us know.

At this time Arnold does not support network distributed bucket rendering like mental ray. For mental ray, we provide support in 3ds Max 2017 and earlier, and other questions should be directed to NVIDIA.

We appreciate your feedback on the other issues, and your concerns have been passed along to management.

 - Jenni