This is a classic case of how a software responds to change. The term “response to change” is the foundation of the entire software development.
The only problem is that those specific users of 3Ds Max might exist in the lower ranks of the “chain-of-command”. As for example if the software is used on high-end industrial sector mostly. It’s users will just do their shift and go home by 17:00 - not actually have a voice on how to make their job and software better.
It’s called Mudbox(or at least tech derived from) A once great potential rival to Zbrush, created by WETA workshop, and put to a slow death by Adesk…
This is just uninformed and untrue hyperbole. Max is healthier now than it’s been in many years. True, it is bloated(so is Maya), but it has progressed quite a bit. I’ve been using it 15 years and am in the beta. The dev team is bigger now than its ever been. It does feel dated since I’ve started to us Blender too, but to just write it off without knowing much about it serves no purpose.
As for crashing, in the 15 years I’ve been using it it has been very stable for me. Maya, on the other hand… sometimes working in there is like defusing a bomb.
I had the misfortune to use the 2017 version of Max for a client project recently and I had Max crash at least once a day. That is my personal story on Max, not being any kind of regular user or expert.
The story I recounted comes from a lead artist at a studio. He and the other staff there use Max all day every day for years and they are the people who are fed up with the lack of progress and stability with Max. They ARE expert users who use Max for eight-plus hours a day, five or six days a week.
There are several artists there who have seen the improvements in Blender with the 2.8 series and now regard Blender as a credible alternative to Max.
I’m curious about how you can claim Max is healthy considering it’s crashing every time I use it. I’m not even using it in a very extensive way, the bare minimum for video game production. That software takes forever to load, it is indeed bloated with tons of features I don’t need (and that’s why I like the modular aspect of Blender), crashes and corrupts its own files. My entire team has switched for Blender, everyone will admit that Blender is not the best tool in the world for video game production but at least it’s stable and fast.
In my experience Max can crash a lot or not much depending on how you used, when I was learning it, I used the buttons for modeling but that was slow, then I added shorcuts and that made me more aware of when the popovers are closed or just “dissapeared”. This way I didn’t have to add more edit poly on top of another while selections are active because things seems broken and producing more crashes.
In my experience Max crashes a lot especially when modelling sometimes when rigging/animating but is more or less stable for other tasks like shading/rendering and particles for example.
There are indeed users who experience this. Personally, I’ve been using the program since R4 and it’s been stable throughout that time, except for the 2012 ‘XBR’ debacle that almost killed Max entirely and took several years to get the program back on track. 2017 version was actually solid. 
These are the users who use the program every day, and complain, but do nothing about it. They should be on the beta forums and actively engaged in the future of the program if they use it professionally every day. Also, if they’re in a studio(I work freelance so have full control of my system/setup) they may be suffering from the studio setup restrictions/limitations and have no control over how the pipeline is setup, which can lead to workflow and stability issues. Also, a lot of ‘9-5 users’ don’t actually know the program too well beyond their day-to-day usage.
Why do you think I’m here? 
I’ve been using 2.80 almost a year now and can definitely see it as an alternative in the future. Unfortunately, it suffers from terrible performance issues in a lot of key areas and the undo buffer is badly broken. There are a lot of pro users who are put off by these glaring issues.
The development is as healthy as it’s been in years. The dev team are 100-strong and have had a huge job pulling the program back from the brink of doom that occurred during the 2012 ‘XBR’ imitative. It is back on track, but a little too late for my liking. That’s why I’m here.
I’m not sure about your crashing issues, but I use it daily for game dev production and it’s solid. I can’t even remember the last time 2020 crashed for me. Loading times have increased a lot(2021 has made a lot of speed fixes) The bloat in Max is a nightmare. I agree 100%. Using blender this last while really does show up Max as becoming quite outdated in UI/UX/workflow. However, for pure performance, Blender is in dire need of addressing and is unusable in a lot of cases with even semi-complex scenarios. This is the difference when it comes to production, the bells and whistles can be overlooked for performance. Blender simply isn’t there yet and it’s these performance issues that are holding it back.
Indeed. 
This is one of my favourite aspects of Blender. I still can’t believe the whole program is only a few 100 megs. 
Meanwhile, Max still clocks in at close to 10 gigs. The addon system in Blender is so clever, being able to just disable/enable specific addons for specific sessions/projects.
Years ago, there was a light version of Max called Gmax, but it obviously wasn’t making money for the Adesk corporation so they axed it. Yes, the plugin architecture of Max is ancient and the creaking core is fit to burst. Ultimately, this is why I decided some months back that Blender was the future for me after 15 years in Max. It’s all about future-proofing and where I think Max might be in 5 years Vs Blender.
Max will still be around, of course. It has more seats than any other DCC, is entrenched in the Archviz industry and is widely used in film/VFX - best selection of 3rd-party renderers and vfx plugins(Thinking Particles/FumeFX/PhoenixFD/Tyflow) and BiFrost will challenge Houdini in another 2 years or so of development.
For me though, I work in game dev so none of the above matters too much, and I see Blender as more than capable as a pipeline ‘hub’ program as we head into the next few years.
Kind of curious how you reach a bottle neck when working on a game pipeline with Blender?
I usually run into the performance issues with trying to deal with large scenes or assets in Blender for film/vfx.
But our pipeline for game stuff never gets overloaded. Unless of course we are talking about loading a Zbrush object in for retopo and then it can crawl. But we primarily use Maya for most of the hand retopo anyway. Which has better performance as well.
Regardless for that, my workaround has been to use a less dense mesh for retopo. We really don’t need millions of polys for retopo. And baking from the high res is done externally in substance for example.
It seems pretty rare that I see us hitting a peek for game assets.
Do you see that same thing?
Or are there other things you are missing from Blender? Or also are you speaking more generally about performance?
Found this on Autodesk forum “shameful development”
the name of the thread is very telling, in the last page some people are talking about switching to blender because of it being alot more stable and consistent than max.
I wonder if any of these people are members here in BA
That’s when I said goodbye to Max after 14 years of duty. I still think the early years were the most exciting, as is usually the case. I remember Max V2 and V2.5 brought tons of new and innovative features.
After 8 years of working with Blender I do still miss a couple of Max features though:
Well, four cases could be as follows(all performance related):
1 - sub-d modeling for baking high/low
2 - animating rigs
3 - look-dev with large/multiple texture sets
4 - level assembly of complex sets
I recently completed a 100K AAA weapon asset with close to 100 parts, 7x4K texture sets, and performance was fine. This would be a typical asset I might be working on and was a good test of how Blender performed all round. I was on a decent workstation with a 2080 and 32gigs ram. Note that I wasn’t using sub-d as I baked everything in Blender using the Bevel Shader, so this might have been a different story were I baking high poly meshes(more about the modeling as I would obviously be baking my maps in Painter/Designer)
Generally, I suppose. I also do the odd vfx/cinematic/film asset gig and large texture sets are definitely a bottleneck. A Streaming/atlasing/mipping system like Arnold .TX is definitely needed(as you and I have discussed here before, I’m sure)
I’m almost at that final farewell stage myself, but will probably keep using it for Arnold and Tyflow(and maybe Bifrost whenever that’s ready in 2-5 years) I missed the glory days of V2/V3, but jumping on board at V4 was still very exciting back in my fledgling days of the wonderful world of the Z axis.
Wow! I had no idea you were on Blender for that long.
All those missed features from Max I’ve worked around in Blender with all the fantastic addons out there. Splines were a very big one for me, but I’m getting along fine creating all my pipes/wires/etc using extruded verts in space with a subsurf mod and the Quickpipe addon. Works great.
I thought I’d miss Arnold more, but honestly, Cycles has really impressed me and is actually faster than Arnold GPU in all the tests I’ve done on the RTX 2080.
I used Vray for years. Sorry, I missed that one.
Versy Interesting. My team has moved mostly to baking in Substance/Painter. We used to use Blender and Mudbox primarily. Blender was real bad - as you say - for high density. So we just couldn’t do it. Enter Mudbox for that. But I am pretty sure they have migrated all but material group baking out of Blender and into Substance or Substance Painter.
Regarding animating. Absolutely. If I am trying to animate anything high density, or in a scene with a lot of density, it is just way too slow.
Then of course, high texture sets (as we have discussed) forget it. Blender just crashes as it runs out of ram.
So yeah I guess, I must amend what I said about the game pipe. I kinda forgot how we had been working around that already.
Yes, I’ve been baking in Painter/Designer now for years(Painter for Normals/Designer for Curvature/AO) and it’s just unbeatable. You’re right there in the texturing environment, ready to go, and in recent version baking on the GPU is almost instant, even on large textures. High poly for me is Zbrush and 3dsMax. Blender is unusable for any sort of sub-d and/or non-destructive mod stack. Sculpting is a novelty in Blender still and far from production ready to the level of Zbrush, and obviously for your film/vfx work Mudbox has very powerful displacement layers/transfer.
This. Nightmare.
Certainly. UDIMS implemented, but it’s just a case of cart before the horse.
Especially nowadays. With ever more powerful GPU hardware coming online, AAA assets are becoming increasingly more complex, high poly, and texture heavy. Some of the characters are equal to cinematic characters of only a few years back. Same for environments, the days of the DOOM 1 level are well and truly over.
It is very interesting. Because I am having this same discussion with one of my main clients recently. Very large organization so there is a lot of departments. So we have engineers dealing with dense cad files, marketing guys trying to make slick animations, and then me and my team providing the real time assets. They control the hardware system that the simulation happens on, so it is not like we have to make a broad release for some poor guy with an old computer. It all runs on their system. There is definitely a lingering misconception that my team can’t make assets suitable for marketing - assets that can be shared between departments. I have been making the case that we can, and trying to solve redundant work. We really are right now on this crossroads where more than every before (even in the last 3-5 years) the lines between vfx and game/real time simulation are blurred.
There is no reason we can’t take an asset from the engineers, retopo and optimize, do all the baking and so on. And have it rendered in Arnold, Unreal Engine and used/or in a simulation with Unity.
I was actually a bit surprised myself when I wrote my previous post. Time flies when you’re having fun.
I’m also a Cycles fan. Love its look and the versatility of the node arsenal. And lately Cycles rendering speed has also improved noticeably, especially when you’ve got an RTX-compatible NVIDIA GPU, as you mentioned.
I am disappointed.
Autordesk will soon start to become collaborative, it is systemic, just as it happened with Microsoft towards Linux.
They will make a path of reorganization.
In reality it is a path destined to evolve in all sectors of society at the system level.
The world is changing, now more than ever.
When civilization will be much less suffocating in terms of survival, collaboration will prevail over competition, we all want fun in these places where we are looking for innovation and passion.
At that point everything will start to bloom, and nobody will want to go back. it has already started.
Why can I not see Egg Spline on that list?
When I started using Blender, I was surprised by the small amount of modifiers compared to Max. They aren’t really difficult to add and they add a lot of flexibility.
Hopefully this will be solved when everything node will be released.
You can already do that in Blender (bevel property).
Something I miss in blender is you can’t just simply add new control points manually or slide them along a curve. Curves are useable but not ideal, lots of room for improvement.
This also surprised me when I discovered blender. Once you’ve created a primtive it’s not possible to edit it anymore (hopefully solved by everything node). I miss the edit poly modifier, again: solved by everything node?
Those are “quality of life” features but the more you use them the more they become essential. Blender devs are focused on lots of new features and improvements, that’s fine, and a greater focus on performances will be key to draw larger companies and possible funds.
Lots of tools are bare and they’re clearly not up to industry standard, I’d love to see mid-term polish to existing features rather than seeing them constantly adding new stuffs.
Wait & see.
I began tooling around with odd 3D software on my parent’s Amiga in the late '80s. Moved to Max and loved it. Found Maya and fell in love. I really thought Maya was the crem-dela…
I saw Blender around years ago…thought it looked god awful. Wasn’t interested. Then out of necessity ($) I finally picked it up and forced myself to go through all the beginning tutorials. This was just around the time 2.8 came out.
Well, I gotta say, I’ve never looked back. I absolutely love Blender, the UI, the renderer/s (both Cycles and Eevee are amazing), the different tabbed workspaces, the customization…it’s all so damn good. And it’s being loved and supported like gangbusters!
And the community is fantastic!