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[wallworm]

So I've gotten to use 3ds Max 2012 for over a week now and I have to say that I have mixed feelings about this release. I shared some on the Area forums... but I didn't feel like going into a lot of detail there for a couple of reasons: namely, I didn't want to fall into the crowd of people that seem hysterical.

I am going to start with the disappointing things about this release.

1) CAT is still broken
2) MAXScript is broken in a way that also makes WWMT nearly unusable (at the initial release of 2012)
3) Viewport performance is not as awesome as advertised
4) Unwrap UVW is unusably laggy

Just reviewing the Area forums will expose other problems. These are the issues that are near-and-dear to me personally, though.

I know that software development is not always pretty. Bugs happen. I'm personally familiar with releasing new versions of WWMT only to find that I broke something... so I understand how it happens.

But there is one glaring difference between small fries like me releasing a program with bugs and a company like Autodesk... I have extremely limited resources (in time, equipment, personnel and money) and Autodesk has, relatively speaking, no limit. The other extremely obvious difference is that I am not getting paid to build WWMT... but Autodesk is selling their software at a hefty price!

So it is more than a little unsettling to have a major version release that has so many broken features.

Enough of the new features are good enough that I expect 3ds Max 2012 to be one of the best versions ever. But the problem is that it was released in a state where it is essentially unusable (kind of like the initial release of WWMT :) )... and again, I need to point out that no one pays for WWMT!

Because of the flaws in 2012's release, many people clamor for a longer development cycle. I disagree... I think it should be faster, more dynamic. The problems may be that there are not enough people in the current development team... Having too few people trying to do too much in the timeframe is likely a cause... so add more people.

I think that Autodesk should release more regular updates... even weekly ones. They may simply be minor updates (like "This week we made the Blobmesh tool window for Selecting Particle Flow events work again.") When each new fix has been made, we should be able to access it and use it right away... instead of waiting for weeks/months for batches of updates.

An argument against that is that weekly releases of little updates doesn't give anyone time to test the updates. But my immediate reaction is that the long, drawn-out release cycles obviously doesn't provide enough in-house testing either, as it is (or else we wouldn't have the problems that are in this release). Since the release of 2012 makes all the users feel like Beta testers anyway, why not release regular, weekly updates that we can choose to run the minute they fix a problem we want to fix?

If the goal is to have the Max users be the quality control testers after launch, you might as well integrate us more in real-time.

So that's my sour side of this launch.

There are a lot of bright spots, though. The conform additions to the Graphite Modeling tool are nice; the Unwrap UVW interface (despite being laggy) is long overdue; the viewport performance is generally better in Nitrous than pre-Nitrous (with exceptions). And, from what I've read on the Area forums by Ken Pimentel, many issues are being addressed at the moment (including, finally, some attention to CAT).

So despite my initial frustration with 3ds 2012, I do have hopes that 3ds Max 2012 will be the best Max yet when it is released (see, if you change your perspective... you can just say that the initial release was a pre-release and the the first patch is the actual release...) In a perfect world you might not have to do that... but this is the world we live in.

Fix 2012, and most Max users will be happy. But please be more careful in the future, Autodesk! For those of us who love Max, this episode gives us nightmares.

[Infidel]

Well stated as usual. I personally found the whole thing hard to use and understand.... oh yeah, thats cause I know nothing about Max in general. Nevermind. Shutting up

[StefanC]

Hey,

I got 3ds max 2012 as well and it is a big improvement I do say, I do not agree about what you said about the new viewport renderer nitrious, if you look at this video for example : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz6bOU4JX1w I'm experiencing the same thing as that guy, the viewport is wonderful. I also like the new features in the Unwrap UVW modifier but they definitely F#$@ed the Scale fucntion as u can now only scale horizontal or vertical at a time but not at the same time which is very annoying when you have to scale something down, however I do feel that the uvw window is very slow because it tends to freeze up and crash. all in all I do think its a big improvement compared to 2011 and 2010.

[wallworm]

Hey,

I got 3ds max 2012 as well and it is a big improvement I do say, I do not agree about what you said about the new viewport renderer nitrious, if you look at this video for example : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz6bOU4JX1w I'm experiencing the same thing as that guy, the viewport is wonderful. I also like the new features in the Unwrap UVW modifier but they definitely F#$@ed the Scale fucntion as u can now only scale horizontal or vertical at a time but not at the same time which is very annoying when you have to scale something down, however I do feel that the uvw window is very slow because it tends to freeze up and crash. all in all I do think its a big improvement compared to 2011 and 2010.

Stefan,

Unfortunately, my server crashed a week or two back and the only backup I did of the forum database was from many months ago. So there are additions to this thread that were lost. My post was when Max 2012 first came out. There were several following that discussed more.

I love 2012. I think it's the best release yet. The Service Packs that came out have addressed almost every single issue that I've had. If you install SP2 you should no longer have the Unwrap UVW scaling problem... and the Unwrap UVW is faster after the SPs.