Quoted for agreement.
This is a very complicated subject and to understand why bmesh is not in blender yet one has to understand that the current mesh system has reached critical mass in a lot of ways unrelated to the n-gon issue at all. The n-gon part of bmesh was resolved and working almost 2 years ago, but because it didn’t address the wider problems with the current mesh code it wasn’t ready to be used in Blender.
To solve this I started a new mesh API built on top of the original bmesh structure (which worked just fine). The progress on this is slow but ongoing and is about 90 percent done. Unfortunately it’s the last 10 percent that usually ends up taking the most time (relatively speaking) and a lot of ‘little’ issues keep cropping up that while not difficult to resolve from a technical standpoint, require some sober thought in order to come to a solution that does not recreate the problems with the current mesh system. Further, even after the API is finalized, good documentation needs to be written so people know how to use it correctly.
Many people might erroneously think that 2.5 was the intended target date for this work or inform you that it will be done at some time or another. However because this is a project done completely during free time and by one person no such official date exists.
Cheers,
Briggs
I have faith in you Briggs, you know what you’re doing 
We should really appreciate that you’re willing to spend your free time on this project. It’s only sad that this is a one man only project… and there are no other blender developers out there who are also willing to help? 
Briggs needs to be compensated for such beneficial project in one way or the other. Hey, Briggs dude, go write a book about modeling in Blender and I’ll be your first customer. I’ll buy three copies. 
Or have somebody to write it for you. Me? I’m getting ready to produce quality video tutorials after 2.5’s release. I’ll do it ala Andy Brown of Modo. $25 each. Very cheap.
Hopefully your faith is not misplaced 
I hope I didn’t give that impression, because I’m sure there are quite a few people who would be willing to help, but I doubt that anyone has the time. Most developers are usually already engaged in other things. So even though a mesh refactor is important there are literally dozens of other things just as equally (or more) pressing. So not only do you need a developer that has the inclination to work on such a project, they also have to not be otherwise engaged and have sufficient free time to contribute to it.
I think it’s easy to forget sometimes that developer time is actually one of the scarcest commodities for Blender, and Open Source projects in general.
Cheers,
Briggs
Comparing Blender and Max is like comparing a comercial airplane to a cesna. Max was designed for studio production, to be standard and allow anyone to use it and to get the job done with heavy demand. it has a lot of fancy tools many of which you would never need or use unless your working on a big production but they do help speed workflow but doing thinks automatically, like auto pilot or hydrolics. The real under apprieciated power of max are the modifiers. Like filters in photoshop you can do a lot of reversible, non destructive, fast modeling if you master the modifiers, the problem is not many do. Max also has many different tools that its gathered over the years that make things easy, like the biped for riggs.
The real problem with max is that they got most of there tools from pluggins and third party apps that made things easy, they bought them up and slapped them in not really bothering to make them fit well. They didnt do much recoding for the plugins so sometimes they dont work quite right or have wierd menus or are found in strange places. Thats the downside. So like a commercial plane Max has many tools and features that make flying easier but theres a lot to choose from and much of it you might not need.
Blender on the other hand was designed to be efficient and fast. It was also designed to be intuitive but only for someone that already understands what they are doing, Ton himself has even said this. Blender has less tools than make but that doesnt mean it can’t get the job done. But because it has less tools sometime you have to find a creative work around. The good think is that because anyone can work on blender more tools will always be coming in, and because we have Ton and our other fine coders they tools will actually get proporly intigrated leading to a slimmer and more efficient program.
So while a commercial jet and a cesna are designed to do the same thing they are designed with differnent objectives in mind and its the same story for max and blender.
Is there some reason you’re replying to a 5 month old thread?
3ds max yeee
Next poll, Do we need yet another Ngon thread?
Blender 2.5 looks like it will fix a lot of my problems that I have blender.
Since we’re on the topic.
I learned 3d with max. Currently work with Maya professionally.
I have made the move to Blender recently because I feel it has finally become a rock solid app.
What do I miss?
Deleting and edge and not losing the face. <- how do I do that in Blender?
cut tool <- I know you guys mention the knife tool but so far I am not having the best of luck with it. I don’t like how it attempts to make quads for me. I’d rather do that clean up myself. Which brings me back to the delete edge tool.
But whatever, what I have learned from all 3 apps is that they can achieve the same things. But there is a different method to each.
I just wish I was familiar with Blenders now, because I am here to stay.
Thunder, I’m no expert, but I don’t think Blender has any spline modeling tools currently.
I know it’s an old thread, but for the smoothing groups, I think it’s just about vertices normals, they (probably) are interpolated with the other vertices in the same smoothing group. In Maya you can also change directly the normals, but manually. In Blender you can’t, but is it necessary ?
Hello, I now use Blender for my hobby, but before I have used 3dmax1.
I remember that I did not know anything in the first 6 months, but after with commitment and dedication I have discovered many features’.
I believe that your problem and that of many new users is the time. In the network are many tutorials that can serve.
But let me give you an advice: buy a book! http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/
Remember that all books are much more useful for many concepts in the sparse network.
But you can also give a reading the manual online. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual
My two firsts books are been:
“tutor Guide #01” and Blender manual 1.5, revised with v1.8 appendix
You currently cannot since Blender does not have n-gons.
Again, n-gons
[/quote]
There is work being done on this area of Blender so there may be some new options opening up that would address some of these problems.
Cheers,
Briggs
Well then I am very happy you are working at improving things and it was money well donated! 