Any Advice for learning 3ds Max as a blender user?

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PLEASE READ BEFORE POST:
I mainly use blender but my work conditions requires me to learn 3ds Max (and a small room for Maya later). So Anything I should look out for or expect going knee deep in 3ds Max?

I will not accept any troll or fanboyism and will flag it. I don’t want to hear wich is the ultimate software (don’t care) as I understand both have their own workflow
This is serious work related topic and I can’t find any good video or topic on this anywhere. (and now that we have 2.8 things might be similar in some points?)

If you mainly worked with 3ds Max before (or used it for work) I really love to hear your advice.

Edit: also If you could go a little deep on the workflow of modeling and rendering.

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OK. So I will not be able to help directly with 3D Max, but you did mention also Maya. And the fact that I do own 3D Max and I had a client of my studio that required a project delivered to Max and I had an artist who primarily worked in 3D Max at my studio for a while. And we were going from Blender - fbx - to Max.

So I have opened 3D Max on a few occasions. The man take away for me as a person who was proficient in Blender and Maya was that 3D Max navigation was totally different. And that is the first thing that usually gets me confused.

Second to that, the workflow in Max seemed completely different and the interface was also completely different and convoluted from either Blender or Maya.

And my experience was I was proficient in Blender first, and then Softimage and then Maya. So I understand the transition phase. Especially since, before Blender I was using LightWave. And of course I have had to learn both Unreal and Unity. Even a stint using Houdini.

And so the best thing I can give you is my approach to the transition phase from one software to the next, since I have done it several times. And that is I usually take it very slow and crack open the manual or get a very good tutorial on the interface. (starting with navigation) I usually spend about a week learning the interface. That tells me where the familiar tools and workflows can be found. And then I usually continue through a basics tutorial series or the manual until I have covered all of the basics. And since I am already a 3D “veteran” I don’t need to be told “how” as much as “where”. Hope that helps.

In general, my finding on Maya, was that there was a lot more similarity between Blender and Maya - even in certain terms and similar key shorts. All three have some kind of Outliner (Max I think it is called Navigator) but different ways to access it and use it.

I think you will find the workflows to be about 80 percent the same on all of the basics. So expect to be mostly searching for where rather than how. If that makes sense.

And just FYI we usually manage assets in my studio between multiple software all the time. These days it is usually Maya, Blender and Zbrush. (not to mention painting and game apps)

Best of luck!

Oh… PS: “Blender rules the world! Autodesk is the Evil Empire and you are going to burn in hell you traitor”.

There, got that out of the way. :smiley:

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3ds max is quite similar to blender, especially 2.8. The navigation in the viewport is different, but it can be modified (at least there’s a maya preset). Default max is much less shortcut driven, so if you want to speed things up, you’ll need to add a lot of shortcuts.
The most important thing for modelling is Editable Poly (or Edit poly modifier). This converts meshes to a representation that’s similar to blender where all the editing tools are. 3ds max has modifiers as in blender, so that should feel familiar (different names though). Splines are much more powerful in max and combination with modifiers it can achieve a lot of things which are impossible to get in blender this way.
What works well is the FBX export/import if you want to keep working in blender and only use 3ds max to assemble the scene.
On the other hand a lot of things are missing in max - sculpting is a joke, texture painting, no compositor, VSE.

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I thought Maya was all node based so it’s more flexible?
Also most companies here can’t work outside of 3ds max. It’s an old academic standard here.
They even say no to fbx. (And obj is a nightmare)

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Are you mixing up Maya and Houdini?

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As in terms of modifiers.
So after watching some video I think Max’s workflow is more live and none destructive.

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Ah, I see. Well I’m not qualified to give advice about AD products.
I was just thinking when I saw you writing node based. Never mind.

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Quick question how are pie menus doing in max?

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There should be well enough information available on the web for 3d studio Max training , it should cover the basic navigation and where specific things are located. I’m not being a troll, but thats how I learned Max 20 years ago, and there is even more information and resources available now.

You’d be better served actually going to autodesk forums or third party Max forums for specifics, while still posting here. You’d get more from those groups, than Blender users who are familiar with Max.

As mentioned above the modifier stack is useful and main tool bar tab. You can also customize Max to you liking as well. The biggest thing similar to Blender addons is the 3rd party pulgin market. This will be what adds the usefulness to Max, once you get familiar with the UI. (PM for specfic scripts list, too lazy to post now,lol)

Focus the first two weeks on getting use to the navigation, shortcut commands, start the process of building into muscle memory. If you have a solid understanding of your fundamentals, jumping into Max shouldn’t take more than a month (feeling comfortable)

The rest will fall into place overtime (stacking knowledge incrementally)

P.S. https://tinyurl.com/yxcpcfzj
https://tinyurl.com/yyg2etzl
https://tinyurl.com/yxkw59fk

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It is absolutely. But it is kept away from sight mostly. You don’t notice it unless you go into the node editor. Many people don’t know this but for quite a long time you could set up a sort of chain or modifiers with nodes in Maya. Recently however it has gotten a lot of updates to the node way of working. But it has been that way under the hood for as long as I know.

As to 3D Max. Yeah it got a recent complete overhaul of the node system. It was starting to look a lot like ICE. I am not in touch with how far they took it though.

Yeah, with a few clients I have been asked to deliver in 3D Max or Maya.

We do all of the conversion from Blender to Max/Maya internally. It is not always possible if they require certain things in any of these apps. But it is an option in some cases.

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Here is a script to help with pie menus

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/plugins/radially-pie-menu-editor-for-3ds-max

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That’s a bummer! OBJ definitely is not good as it does not retain object pivot.
FBX on the other hand works pretty well between blender and Max. It gets through a lot of different things (pivots, transforms, hierarchies, animation, deformation bones, even blendShapes).

I used to work on Max/VRay pipeline for years. Never modeled in Max! I used Silo for modeling way back, then blender once I made the switch. In a few Max/VRay studios I worked we had a bunch of people that never modeled in Max (everyone had their own prefered environment), we never had any issues. I met only 2 guys who liked modeling in Max, they were both good.
We basically used Max as the animation/rendering hub. Those were advertising studios, so it is a lot more relaxed when it comes to workflows and pipelines.

The Modifier Stack is pretty cool for achieving all types of vfx goals.
Haven’t used the Creation Graph.
Cloth sims are pretty good. Maybe my favorite between maya, max and blender.
It’s a popular platform for plugins.

Great thing, since 5 yrs ago or so, you can change navigation to maya style (that’s a big deal for me)

Good luck modeling in Max though. I think, coming from blender, it’ll be hard to enjoy it.

Edit:
Another really useful thing with fbx blender<>max, instances carry over!

Edit 2:
There were no Pies (out of the box, without plugins) last I used it. They have a context sensitive QuadMenu that is customizable. Definitely advise looking into it and customizing. Don’t forget to back up the customized Quad prefz! Max Prefz had a tendency to break down, not too often though.

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Thanks for the comments. By the looks of it max’s workflow is highly customizable.

Right now starting from Maya’s preset I’m making it a bit like blender keys. At least in small places that could benefit the most. Already missing the right click select though! :smiley:

Many thanks.

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I’ve had to work in 3ds max professionally. nothing is really hidden, Everything is usually accessible by a pull down menu. If you hover over the icon a small name pop up will display. It seems like everything uses a modifier. Some users like to keep the modifiers active and some people apply them as a one time use to keep the memory usage down. If your applying a modifier and nothing is happening 3d max has probably crashed. It will stay open and you can click on things but it’s gone into Zombie mode as I called it. Make sure auto back up is on in the preferences.
If your used to working with Eevee you will miss it. On the other hand 3ds has a bounding box display which is useful for very large scenes. If you are doing large scenes keep an eye on the memory usage as it can balloon pretty quick.
If you have Vray as a render engine it’s pretty simple it use. Just keep in mind Vray has it’s own light set up, surfacing and render pass manager etc. Look for archviz tutorials as they will usually cover everything you need to know.
http://www.scriptspot.com/ is a web page for 3ds max scripts you may find helpful.
I have no idea if this still works for the latest version of max, I was using 2014 version, But I found the outliner script useful for scene management. http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/outliner

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If your selections randomly glitch out, it is actually not a bug but you accidently turned of selection highlighting by pressing F2. Took me amabarrassingly long to figure that out :frowning:

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There’s already a lot of comments but let me share my thoughts. I learned a bit of blender, then was taught max and looked at how it was on blender so I learned both at the same time.
I recomend you looking at Arrimus 3D videos, which are the best you can find on the whole internet, free or paid and he uses max.

For me switching between both is no problem when it comes to navigation, moving and rotating are swapped and if you don’t use the scroll wheel you have another different shorcut, but if you used maya navigation it would be more different, and I don’t like having to press alt for everytime you move.

Coming from blender you will find shorcuts for modeling are almost non-existent, you have to edit BOTH editable poly and edit poly modifier, there’s no faster way for that, configure one of them write them down on a piece of paper and configure the other section.

Apart from that I have a few shorcuts for adding modifiers, one for adding an edit poly modifier and another for turbosmooth (Subdivision surface equivalent), I also have another for collapsing the stack (You can right click the modifier list and collapse to editable poly if you don’t want to look where to add the shorcut or are fine without one). Collapsing the stack is good to keep Max stable and not having a crash each 10 minutes or less.

Some useful modifiers are: UVW Map, Symmetry (better than mirror modifier) and blender’s simple deform which in max is split between 4 modifiers with the same name as in blender. There’s no array modifier, but you can download this https://www.itoosoft.com/es/freeplugins/clone

Also some modeling commands are under the ribbon menu, where everything from the edit poly modifier is duplicated with icons as well.

Also is very useful to use some modifiers in the object submodes, for example adding a FFD (Blender’s lattice) while some faces are selected, allowing you to only deform a part of an object. You can use the symmetry modifier after selecting a vertex and it will mirror along that point as a “pivot”.

I would recommend you checking @polynut 's thread about switching to blender from Max, since you will probably find a lot of the “where” as the first reply mentioned.

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The F2 is also useful when you want to see throught the selection, I would also add the F3 and F4 for toggling to wireframe and hidden wire? modes.

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I used 3ds max for about 12 years before switching to blender.

Honestly, I think you’ll find all 3d software is basically the same. All the same concepts and methods exist, its just different buttons in different places.

I think just about everything in Max can be found inside the GUI.

I really missed Max modifiers for awhile, since you could model in edit poly modifiers and progressively add to your model in a non destructive way. The symmetry modifier was also far superior to blenders when I came over here, but now 2.8 added bisecting (thank god) so its about the same.

Its been awhile since I used max, but last time I did, the default scanline renderer and mental ray were complete garbage compared to Cycles and Eevee. Cycles is the main reason I switched to blender.

But yeah, you’ll be fine. When you’re familiar with 3d, learning new software is easy. Just do your thing and google whenever you hit a roadblock.

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That was a nice touch LOL

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By the way in case you didn’t see this.

Might be some useful information.

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