Is 3DS Max dying?

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,,

I know that it might be controversial and I might be even talking nonsense.

However, back at the time when I was learning Maya in an digital graphics and gamedev school, I've heard that Maya was aimed for animation and that most movie studios use it, while 3DS Max was aimed for game developers and it's aim was 3D modelling.

Sometimes I would stumble into making of screenshots that most of the time were from 3DS Max, Maya was pretty much rare, but appearently this has started to change for newer projects (5 years or newer) that most of them have Maya in their modelling section. Even UDK and the later Unreal 4 uses Maya for their oficial tutorials, or at least for some of them.

What i've also noticed is that pretty much game dev courses here in Brazil will likely teach you Maya or in a second case, Blender, does this also happens in other countries?

A few months ago I've googled my question and from what i've read, Maya was acutally receving more updates compared to 3DS Max, and that it took a longer time to Autodesk to give 3DS Max important updates, also the fact that Autodesk decided to release Maya LT as an budget version for indie developers instead of an 3DS Max LT could be an signal that new gamedevs are moving to Maya, and that probably the schools worldwide are favouring Maya over 3DS Max.

What's you gentleman opinion about this? Do you believe that Autodesk could end axe 3DS Max as they did with Softimage, or nothing is going to happen?

[Anonymous]

Definitely not nonsense and what's more I occasionally find posts of a somewhat similar nature.
It is my deep belief that 3dsMax is not particularly good for any specific purpose.
Modeling, animation, rigging -- you name it -- other packages do it much better.
3dsMax never feels like a robust solution in any department (although you can do just about everything with it).
The only reason 3dsMax is so popular is that it has been there FOREVER and it has tons of plugins.
It's been there before packages like Maya/Softimage made a transition to lower-end hardware and
the newer packages like Houdini/Cinema4D/modo appeared.
Also for the people who used 3d Studio for DOS, 3dsMax was a natural choice.

Poor initial design decisions made further development to pile up incohesive solutions on a top of it for two decades.
Today 3dsMax is a bloated dinosaur forced to carry around a lot of dead weight.
That's partly a reason why it cannot be ported to any other platform.

I expect 3dsMax to be here for as long as the sales are good.
Seems like everyone around me uses it.
If the sales drop, I expect it to be gradually transformed into some cheap architecture visualization package.

[studioG433M]

IMHO on the other hand 3dsMax is not dying.

Maya popularity is a 'seasoned' fashion. 

3DsMax is great at modeling. The only software which I see better (in some way ) is Houdini.

Why? Take a look at some REAL pros at Max:

Paul Neale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLwanJo5BSE

Louis Marcoux

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCqUrZ01I7pHefLOQTGvNxg

if any software can do that... let me know.

Maya is great if it comes to animation, rigging, and motion graphics.

In my opinion, using it in gamedev is a BIG mistake.

Take a look at Bioware's MASS EFFECT Andromeda dev diary.

Transition from Max to Maya almost did not killed this project.

On the other hand, NaughtyDog... they use Maya for everything, even as rendering target from consoles.

They use it even as level editor, gameplay editor... everything. BUT.

They put "billions" of hours into transforming it into something which was Maya some time ago.

So Max is great at rendering ( now with Arnold ) take a look at some visualizations.

How many them were ( are ) made using Maya ?? Zero ?? Maybe slightly less 😉

Many days ago Autodesk didn't had even Max. It was developed by Kinetix studio and then bought by Autodesk.

The same with Maya. Developed by Alias and then bought by ... Autodesk 🙂

Because those two programs were developed completely separately they were aiming for completely different direction. And They didn't compete actually back in the days.

Initially Maya was aiming at car design, nearly 100% nurbs driven modeling workflow and tons of tools and optimizations towards this 'model of creation'. Not to mention is robust inter connectivity. Oh man... this program can do 'anything / everything'. 

Max... from the beginning  was based on polygons. To see a difference take a look and compare what Maya has to offer with nurbs and what Max. As a contrast, try to extrude spline shape along other spline with Maya. Good luck with both 🙂

Maya is NOT well designed for modeling. Why ? Constant freezing transformations, clearing history every 5-10 clicks , no procedural modeling whatsoever.

"Today 3dsMax is a bloated dinosaur forced to carry around a lot of dead weight."

Oh, this is good. Maya as an another dinosaur, has its own flaws too:

Lack of modifiers, lack of any even tiny glimpse of procedural content creation, constant clearing history,

lack of modeling tools, nearly constant scene cleanup, 

modeling is pure garbage in my opinion ( as an example : try to mirror anything with rotated center ), possible to make manifold faces, vertices, and groups in outliner... every 2-3 clicks you have a new group with transforms... 

tools to being no a tool but rather a 'thing' to solve problems caused by other tools.

Example : Tool to replace invalid meshes in the scene with selected mesh.
Invalid meshes ? Why making them in the first place ??
not to mention inability to open its own files... from time to time...

So in other words none of current Autodesk programs is dying. Look at Mudbox. Raised from the grave.

"I expect 3dsMax to be here for as long as the sales are good."

Yeah... you can expect it with every program which will sell badly 🙂

From my perspective and what I witness, many studios are transitioning into Max again... 

So, at the end... every program has its own unique way of pissing users off 🙂

And all comes to simple ( I hope ) calculation: what given program has to offer in exchange for frustration ?

For me it is 3dsMax and Blender.

But I'm not an animator / rigger and I'm using Max since ver. 1.0 for Windows 95/NT.

So. Pick the one which is the least annoying for you and master it. It doesn't really matter which program you use.

If it serves its purpose - it is fine.

[Anonymous]

Can't see how using a more robust product can be a seasoned fashion.
Also if you are referring to procedural modeling (as the links suggest)
then Houdini is well known to be the best for that. Just letting you know 🙂

There's no point in comparing specific tools or features.
Some are better for the specific purpose and some are worse.
And some simply don't exist because of different workflows.
One cannot compare just the tools alone -- the UI itself plays a major role in the creation process.

In the end, you get the SAME polygons.
Not the magic Max polygons and plain old Maya polygons.
So yes -- anything you can create in Max you can create in any other sufficiently advanced package.

I've been using Max since 1996 and disliked it just about all these years.
But then again I don't consider myself being a REAL pro (whatever that means).

And to reiterate my initial statement: Max sucks but it doesn't seem to go anywhere.

[Anonymous]

I had the same question and I found this thread. Very spot on. It is sluggish, bloated and irrelevant when there is application like C4D that does almost all at a much faster pace. Either Autodesk will adapt and change which must be hard given their old code structure as you mentioned, or their sales will drop until it ceases to exist.

[denisT.MaxDoctor]

Guys, calm down! All is very simple ... as soon as a tool appears that is better than 3DS MAX in all respects, no one will buy MAX, and it will go away by itself. In the meantime, over the past 20 years that MAX is being criticized, this has not happened, which means "the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated".

[Anonymous]

My thoughts as a 3D professional. 

3Ds max is the go-to software for visualization and people who must work with CAD files.

That's not to say that it doesn't do anything else, it absolutely can do whatever you throw at it.

But recently, it's being used more and more as a visualization tool, and not much else.

Is max dying? Absolutely not. Look at all the thousands of viz studios over the world, every single one of them uses max. I can count on one hand, the number of firms that use something else. 

forest pack, railclone, Evermotion models, maxtrees, TYflow, V-ray, corona render, Fstorm. all these powerful softwares/rendes/model libraries are made natively for max.

Is max old? Yes.

But that just means the internet is full of documentation and veterans that has worked in it 10+ years.  It will not be going away anytime soon. 

[nnikbin]

The following screenshot is form this link. It shows the worldwide search trends during past 5 years for 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D and Blender. Because this link mades the comparision based on topics, not the raw search terms, it aggregates all searches about a product. For example the result for "Autodesk 3ds Max" contains other search terms like "3ds Max" and "3d Max".

Obviously, this measure can not indicate commercial value of these products and their popularity among businesses and professional artists, but it could provide a relatively good measure for the popularity of these products among people all around the world.

Removing Blender from comparision and restricting the time range to past 12 months shows that Maya is more popular in North America, UK, Japan, Australia and some other countries, Cinema 4D is more popular in Germany, French, China and Chile and Max is more popular in many other regions. 

In 2015, I heard from a reliable source that Max was making a lot more money for Autodesk than Maya. I guess it still is, but with much less difference (Although, due to the bundling of products, especially the bundling of Max with AEC collection, it is not possible to separate the revenue of each product).

I hope Autodesk does its best to reverse the downward trends of Max and Maya. Demand from users like us can be a good stimulus for Autodesk to invest more in the development of these lovely products. Blender has made amazing progress with $157,000 monthly contribution! which is not comparable with 3.79B annual revenue and 1.21B annual net income of Autodesk (of course most of it is from AutoCAD, AEC and MFG sectors).

My personal opinion about the main question is: 3ds Max is not dying, especially if its loyal users seriously demand its development.

[Anonymous]

My short answer is yes.  Too expensive (especially now that Autodesk tried to force everyone including their previous loyal customers into horrendously expensive subscriptions) and far too little innovation in any of the recent version updates to make it even remotely worth paying subscription rates.  Autodesk became greedy, gambled, and is now losing ground rapidly.

In contrast, Blender...  A) is free; B) has a huge and rapidly growing community; C) is seeing new, innovative tool & capability updates in each successive release; D) now has a massive array of online video tutorials and new add-ons available; and E) finally - since about version 2.8 - ironed out the majority of UI quirks to a point where it feels and performs like many commercial CAD products.  As most in the new Blender user community are finding out, the few remaining quirks are continuing to be ironed-out in each successive release and they are well worth putting up with compared to shelling out ever-larger subscription fees to Autodesk for a tool that began losing its competitive edge a few years ago.

I, for one, was a dedicated Max modeler and animator for the better part of 15 years, but for the reasons mentioned above I made the full transition to Blender a few months ago.  Learning the new controls and workflow took a little time and patience, but I'm glad I did and I'm not looking back.  As the trend indicates, I think most 3D creative newcomers are also choosing this path without regret.

[studioG433M]

Few moths ago, studio I work for decided to move from Maya to Blender. Mainly modelers, which is completely understandable. So, from big studio perspective, making Blender as part of pipeline / workflow is BIG pain in the saa.
Because it is python driven does not makes it easier or better.

This ironing You talk about is in ~95% single user related "experience" to make it just usable for entry level newcomers.

Also Blenders c++ under the hood does not goes in pair with pyhon implementation. Also same python functions( those "native" ) can change between subversions. We had to rewrite our in-house tools because of Blender version change from 2.92 to 2.93. Reason ? O_o Just because.

If you want to make a native plugin, You have to compile you own Blender build which after some time may become incompatible with recent Blender version.

Sure, same for Max and Maya. But Blender is released few times per month, here we have 1 version per year.

For someone like me Blender is not stable enough to be considered as big project ready.

Blender has LTS version, right ? Who cares ??? If there will be anything just better in new version nobody will be able to stick with LTS one. Especially artists. Those are unstoppable 😉 

For small studio or just few people Blender is a perfect choice. For bigger entities, if they decide, be better prepared for just anything.

Yep, there are some successful implementations of Blender is big projects, but it requires a lot of work with unknown problems. Me as a max user, I could do similar adjustments as few other people in Blender. Without any problems as in 99.99% max tools are cross version compatible. And with smart plugin writing, you can have "native" assemblies which are cross main version compatible. My export plugin, written in max 2021 works on any max since 2012 up to 2022.2. And that's an environment I can work with, being sure nothing will catch me by surprise 🙂
And as for money... 300$ per Year. 25 per month. I'm selling one plugin for 20$. I wrote it once and sell it for 2 years now. So... for me max is ... for free 😄 From my perspective Max = Blender.