Autodesk 3ds Make

[danny.austin]

I predominantly use 3ds max for modelling and some basic camera animation. On occasion a bit of particle flow... I've worked in ArchViz and now marketing for years and still only use a tiny part of 3ds max. I think there is room for a smaller product which would be essentially 3ds max under the hood but stripped back using only modelling, material/lighting and basic animation tools.

-Fully inteopable with 3ds max.

-Offered on a monthly sub rental but at a much cheaper cost than full 3ds max.

-Scanline rederer only and the ability to install 3rd party renderers and as a paid module, Arnold. 

-No Civil 

-No Populate

-Remove legacy modules such as Radiosity (yep, it's still there)

-Allow user to choose the modifiers they need at config statup

-No library content included

-Maybe drop MCG

-Keep Maxscript

-Reduced Viewport functionality. Remove XView and Stylised. 

-Trim this fat lad down some!

I think this could be a great opportunity to redesign the massively cumbersome and bloated UI of 3ds max. Dump all the legacy stuff and start fresh. Essentially a UI exercise. I'd love to know what you think.

[Anonymous]

Your room for a smaller product means going backward,  There always was two version.  the main one, an a smaller one called VIZ, and then Design.  A few years ago they unify both.   The main difference was Reactor and Lighting analysis. 

It will just be better an option in "customize > Preference " that let us desable all the features we don't use, so the software startup faster and takes less ram. 

[danny.austin]

actually I agree with that. The ability to disable features and sculpt the UI to be more basic/advanced depending on what you want would be really good. Perhaps a blender style preset could work.. if you are a modeller, you select the modelling preset and the UI changes to suit.


Viz was kind-of a cut down version, but not by much and Design was a marketing exercise which was to stop Adsk staff poaching other industry's clients.. (not my words, that came direct from Adsk area sales staff)


My idea here was a much smaller tool along the lines of Sketchup.

[Hart3D]

That's a good idea however I agree with tricotalazan - it would be better to simply have these legacy items turned off buy default and only reactivated if an old scene calls for it.

[danny.austin]

I think that would be a good compromise. Perhaps this could be integrated with the new 2018 workspace module...

[electrotoast_old]

We currently do defer loading of plugins on some of the legacy ones. You'd be surprised how many scenes end up activating them regardless. As mentioned by others, we've gone into this realm in the past with VIZ and 3ds Max Design, not to mention gmax. All of them ended up putting heavy pressure on the development team having to divide their focus during design, coding, and particularly QA. Even though, we will archive this one, please know that we always have this as an ongoing discussion internally in how we can create things more modular during development.

[danny.austin]

That's fair enough. I was looking at a bit more big picture I think.. Where the entire package became a modular beast that could be tailored to use... Rather than a separate dev track.

Don't knock Gmax. It's awesome. Haha

[electrotoast_old]

Certainly not knocking it! There's still people using it. The modular aspect is something we're always looking into. The difficult part is, tools that feed off of each other and handling those cases when one or other other is not there. It's a much bigger picture thing than just creating 3ds Max as modules. 🙂

[danny.austin]

I see what you mean. As a user I only see the finished product on the surface but as a devs I guess its a LOT more complicated