i HATE 3d studio max, big problem

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21

Max is not that Bad. Unfortunately you often need someone to ask if you’re just beginning to lean it. From a certain point on I learned most of it not by tutorials (unfortunately) but by other people. It’s very good if you know people to teach you. But it won’t help if not.

Still - not all is lost.
If you ARE looking for Max tutorials - especially LowPoly go here: http://www.mr-chompers.com/tutorial/tutorial.htm

This guy is a professional and offers loads of video-tutorials for free.
I learned a big deal of my basic knowledge from him.

If you really hate max with a passion - there are still tons of other 3D packages out there, though.
In case of Blender you probably won’t find a better community that this one right here. So should you decide for it - you’ve come to the right spot. :wink:

22

All tools and alot of other things can be assign to hotkeys. The quadmenus are fully customizable and alot of other things can be changed aswell, I suggest that you customzie it i way that fits your needs.
If it were counter productive I don’t belive so many big companies would use it…

I belive 3ds Max is confusing for you because are used to Blenders interface. I felt the same thing about blenders UI when I learn it.

Well you can do this in 3ds max aswell. Create a Plane-> Convert to editable poly and use shif+move/scale/rotate to extrude edges.
here’s a video: http://www.3dzealot.com/php/index.php

Everybody hates Max when first introduced.
Well I didn’t and there are alot of others i can assure you that. MAX wouldn’t have became so popular as is if weren’t a good application.

Max doesn’t have a render engine
What??? That’s not true. Max is shipped with both Mental Ray and the old robust Scanline renderer. There also alot of plugin render engines for max (Vray, Brazil, Maxwell etc…)

Adapting to Max was an extreme struggle. Enough that I thought that I had gone stupid, till I realized that I had learned C++ and Macromedia Director easily in the same time period.
Well I have taught to 12-year-old students and had very little problems understanding the interface. In less than a week they went from having no 3d-expecince at all to being able to create i simple but good animations. Unforunarly I have no examples to show you . But this on this page http://www.cng.se/ you can find a couple of animation (the animations are found under Projekt -> Animationsprojekt) made by some older students in a similar project, the timeframe for this perticular project was one week and the student had no previous 3d knowlege. …

23

Quote:
Everybody hates Max when first introduced.
Well I didn’t and there are alot of others i can assure you that. MAX wouldn’t have became so popular as is if weren’t a good application.

Ok, I was being overly broad. I want to reassure hessiess that what he’s going through is not unique. To qualify: people who learn 3d CG starting with Blender, and then take a class using MAX have a hard time getting used to the non-Blender interface and workflow.

And assigning hotkeys and changing the screen layout doesn’t speed up workflow when the school’s network is set up to delete all that overnight. It is a waste of time and counterproductive in a school setting. And that’s what we are talking about. He’s in school, not in a CG artist’s seat at some large company.

We’re not here to bash Max. We’re here to support Hessiess in a confusing and troubling time for him.

24

I went through the same thing, thankfully my lecturer let me use Blender instead since it wasn’t an application specific course.

Though, I have to say, stay with it, it’ll give you experience with other applications which isn’t a bad thing. Even if you don’t use Max later on, at least you’ll know it. Even though I used Blender to pass the course, I learnt a bit of Max anyway.

Mystery

25

Max has a great render engine with progress information, which Blender is sadly lacking. It actually has 2 render engines, it’s own internal scanline and the award winning used in many movies Mental Ray engine. Yafray is ok, but it is hardly integrated into Blender the way Mental Ray is integrated into Max.

A great thing about max is how easy it is to set up motion. Max controllers are great. Blender does not even come close to simulating the 3DSMax crowd plugin. 3DSMax particles are still superior to Blenders (even though they are out of date).

MaxScripting is solid and intuitive with a dialog box that will actually spit out the MaxScript code based upon the last action you issued in the UI (when is Blender going to have that?). Presently in Blender I have to troll through half written python API and beg on forums to get my scripting done.

Blender does not have procedural object which is one of Max’s strong ponts. As far as the interface goes, I see a lot of Blender screen grabs and blend files that re-arrange their UI to simulate the Max environement.

The modifer stack in Max is great. Also i find that Max’s material editor is far more intuitive to Maya’s or Blender’s

I agree that UV mapping is a pain. I find it to be a pain in Blender as well. However, Max’s modeling is far superior to Blender. A lot of the times I will do my modeling in Max just to get the job done, then import them into Blender for final manipulation.

I feel that Blender handles logo files (like Illustrator output converted to SVG) better than Max or Maya. Blender was the only app I tested that could accurately extrude my logo file and create a mesh ready for texturing without any sub object editing required.

The max community is strong as well and very helpful. Lots of free plugins are available!

I still love 3DSMax, my biggest gripe is that is crashes way too much to rely on.

As you can see, however, I use Blender in my daily work.

26

Funny to hear how a beginner critisizes Max’s modelling. lol!
All those hundreds of thousands of professionals that use Max productively obviously just don’t know what they’re doing. Oh, and they should stop using poly modelling, cause apparently that just doesn’t exist. Damn.

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ebow3d, just let them try Blender.

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Blender is mainly a poly-modeler, duh.
Comments like this one aren’t really helpful in any way.
EVERY 3D software seems confusing at first.

When it comes to selecting one’s preferred 3D Software you just can’t tell others which one is the best for their needs. That’s something everybody hat to experience themselves. You’d need to know how the person ticks.

There was this cool comparison of the most known software at blendernation (I think) a few days ago:http://www.tdt3d.com/articles_viewer.php?art_id=99

I really do not recommend any software over the other. No matter if it’s commercial or open source. If not dictated by the employer that’s always a personal decision.

29

Yepp, it definitely not the world’s most stable application… =) Blenders stability, UV-mapping, Fluids, selections tools, and Loop subdivide tool is the features a miss most when I use 3ds Max… thank god are allowed to use both =P

30

is it imposable to create the functionality of the 3d cursor in max? at lest to some degree, dident notice how much i used it until using a app without it

thnck you for all the sugetions :slight_smile:

i did not have anywhere neare the amount of frustration wen i started blender as i do now, i got hang of the basic functions within a day

31

The tutorials in the help files are a good way to quickly learn the workflow.
I recommend giving them a go to help get accustomed. With some cg studios starting to integrate Blender into their pipeline, you could find yourself in a very good position knowing both.
m.a.

32

Exactly what to you want to achieve? If can be more precise I might be able to help you =P

In 3ds Max 2008 (which will be release very soon)they have added feature called working pivot which a have some of the functionality the 3d cursor in blender has.
http://download.autodesk.com/us/3dsmax/siggraph2007/demos/Modeling%20-%20UVW.mp4

33

Oh yeah - when working with Max remember these things:

If your transform Gizmo is gone: Press ‘X’
If your view turns into Blocks when rotating: Press ‘O’
If you want to delete a single line or Vertex without rebuilding the whole Polygon: Select it and press ‘Backspace’
If you want to collapse a few polygons and don’t want to use merge or weldt - select all of them and chose ‘collapse’ from the QuadMenu.

These things make life in max a whole lot easier :wink:

34

A quote from Pixar’s job listings:

“…Pixar uses its own proprietary software built and maintained in-house. In general, we look for broad artistic and technical skills, rather than the ability to run one package over another. We concentrate on finding people with breadth, depth, communication skills and the ability to collaborate. If you have those attributes, we can teach you the specific tools.”

And:
“…So while it’s preferable for someone to have 3D knowledge, it’s not paramount. In fact 3/4 of the Animators on Toy Story were new to computers when hired.”

I, myself, am not trying to get into the CG industry, but it seems to me, that some big players are looking more at talent, than knowledge of a particular application.

There is more info at Pixar’s site Pixar

Lucasarts seem not to care what package you know.
ILM don’t seem to be too concerned about what package one knows either.

Dreamworks seem to require strong Maya skills. Sucks IMO, that they could not teach a person the software, if they have strong artistic skills in various other 3D packages.

maybe it would cost them too much money to teach you what buttons to press and in what order to press them, to animate and rigg your characters…I dunno, but learning Maya in school can’t be cheap, either.

I think if one had strong programming and scripting skills coupled with their CG art skills, their are companies out there that would teach you the software they use, if not, that would suck.

I still feel this will happen one day, a major motion picture or “MTV” video will be done mostly in Blender… Imagine, after spending a small fortune learning Maya/Max in school(great I’m sure), then at an interview with Dreamworks, they tell you that they require strong skills in…Blender…lol.

I mean, visually, Elephants Dream was impressive. What if the Orange team had half the budget that Shreik had?

I don’t think that the CG industry is going to corner the market with just a couple of 3d packages… that would be like the music industry cornering the market with a couple of Multi-recording packages.

Sorry, if I had 4000 + bucks to blow on 3D authoring environments and Max/Maya classes, I’d make a big donation to Blender, and buy Houdini Escape for 1900 bucks…Which blows Max/ Maya out of the water.

If I did not know that Open sourced Blender is less than 10 years old, it would boggle my mind as to why a Blender-made Hollywood movie is not out yet. The Toxic Avenger is still rolling in cash, and that could easily be done in Blender’s VSE, let alone the particles, dynamics and 3d authoring tools.

35

Recently (two days ago), some people came into my 3D Animation class to recruit people to make a game. There are three 3D classes going on in my school, and they visited each one. My class had no second year students, and the other classes did. I happened to have Blender open at the time, with my 3D Dalek up. One of them noticed it, and said, quote: “Wow, did you make that?” I told them I did, and I showed them the model in edit mode. They said that that was one of the best models they had seen from all three of the classes :).

However, they are strictly using 3DS Max to make the game, and I told them I couldn’t make quite as good stuff in Max as I could Blender, or at least not as quickly. They said that was fine, as long as I could either get the model in Max, so they could get it in .3ds form. I showed them that Blender exported to .3ds by itself, and they seemed quite impressed.

In other words, I may be able to help make a professional quality game alongside 3DS Max uses, with Blender! But it definitely helps knowing both, because I know there will be things that I will need to do in Max, such as material editing. So, take the time to learn 3DS Max, even though it is a crappy program (interface-wise). That way, you can smuggle Blender into your workflow, and possibly make some converts.

Also, while I was in Blender another day, one of the other students was watching me, and said: “That looks easier to use than Max.” So, the myth that Blender is hard to learn is BS. And this person had previously only been exposed to Max, too. So he isn’t biased towards it.

36

I’m not going to lie…I used to LOVE Max and dislike blender because it was one of the “crappy” “free” apps…and I couldn’t get the interface down…

I absolutely love blender now…and I would never go back to max…unless being paid large sums of money to do it…

but I would still suggest learning max. It IS powerful…and it is even more powerful than blender in some(even if very few) ways. The interface is just really slow…which annoyed the heck out of me…

If I was you though…I would stick with it…max has very pretty light simulation…

Its just nice to be able to tell companies that you have experience in as many applications as possible…

-Chris

37

You have to realise, though, that even if lots of high quality art was coming out of Blender, people would still go with Max and other programs. Why? Because they know it. Max is a very well known and trusted application, and people aren’t about to stop using it in favour of a relatively new, free application.

And yes, free does make a difference. When it comes to software, people usually associate free with tacky. Unfortunate, but true. Personally, though, I would try to make my teacher understand that it doesn’t matter how you do something, just as long as it gets done and is good. When people are hiring, say, freelance artists, it doesn’t matter if you use Max. Sure, it will help to make people think you’re good, but that doesn’t really matter so much just as long as the work is good.

What Blender really needs right now is a high profile artist to start using it very loudly.

38

The thing is that you probably never find all of the gimmicks you come to like in your workflow personally in one Software. Blender has its flaws Max has its flaws and so does every other 3D application in some ways.
If you are producing renderings and not working for example with a game engine where you are simply bound to Max or Maya Plugins for some reason you are really free to use any program out there because the results will after learning the basics (and some little more knowledge) be the same in the final image only limited by what you can imagine, most probably.

for ME I’d prefer Blender for modeling and Cinema4D for Materials and Composition and Rendering. From the point of modeling and UVlayout I would use Blender,aswell. I’m effectively using Max for it, though. But that’s just because I’ve been working with it for some time now and am familiar with the tools and know the things to avoid and have alle the export plugins. At some point you just can’t come up with the time to learn new tools over and over again. As was stated - it’s more important what you can come up with than what you are using, today.
I’ve come to see that Blender may very well be the most underestimated 3D software from a professional point of view, right now.

39

I have changed my max license to blender.
It’s is my choice, because on mac max don’t run and mondeling with max is really hard.

For modeling : wings 3d !!!

40

CyaNn, you are soo awesome, you could probably model the Matrix gear monster, from a cube in Wings 3D, with your eyes closed.