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[wallworm]

So Max 2018 has now been released. This means I can now share my thoughts and feelings on this release. I've been one of the beta testers for Max.

First, the obvious downer for many people. Mental Ray and iRay are no longer part of Max. This, by itself, isn't really too bothersome since NVidia is now in charge of MR integration in Max and you can still get it from NVidia. The downer, though, is that network rendering is no longer as affordable as it always has been. You'll now need to pay for a render node for each machine. This happened to Maya last year. Now it's happened to Max. If you use Mental Ray, you can get the installers for 2018 for a standalone machine for free from NVidia. The 2018 Max installers are not currently available. I suspect you'll see them soon.

Note that I did find the MR installers in the Max 2018 download files in \x64\MentalrayPlug . So you may be able to get MR running before NVidia makes a public download.

The upside for the Max community is that Arnold is now the chosen render engine in Max. This is a boost for Film/VFX in Max as it's often considered one of the best renderers. However, Arnold is not really set up for game development--as it does not yet support Render to Texture.

Scanline renderer is still in Max. With Scanline you still get free network rendering. And I'm pretty sure I read during Beta that Scanline was updated to be multithreaded--which means it runs faster if that is true.

On the animation front, the addition of Motion Paths was a big boost. You can now visualize and edit trajectories in the viewport. It's a big boost.

And there are the features that were introduced in 2017.1 : DataChannel and BlendedBoxMap.

Some other changes include UI updates that you can explore in the docs.

Overall, I've enjoyed testing 2018. But I suspect there is going to be some grumbling because the new feature list is not extensive and Autodesk's recent licensing changes cost more than in the past and remove customer options. But I think 2018 is still a good update for Max. DataChannel/BBM and Motion Paths are what I consider the most important for WW users.

WW/WW Pro have already been updated to support 2018.

[jrocket]

Kind of sad that max doesn't get as much love as Maya does these days. I have mostly switched to Maya, except for source engine mapping of course :D

[wallworm]

Thanks for the comment. Autodesk needs to hear more comments as yours. So I'd suggest expressing this opinion directly to AD.

I know that 2018 is weak on new features for people in my circles especially if you don't count DataChannel and BBM as new. But despite the perceived weakness of Max's dev based on today's release, I'm cautiously optimistic about Max's development future. But being under NDA with Autodesk, I'm not able to share any reason for my own personal optimism.

That being said, I've mostly skipped 2017 because of viewport bugs that freeze Max. So hopefully that issue is addressed in 2017/2018 ASAP. I know AD knows of the issue and is taking it seriously, but this is certainly the first time I've gone a whole version with mainly staying in the previous (I'm still mostly tied to Max 2016). The current issues seem to be related to DX 11 Nitrous on Windows 10 and possibly also limited to Geforce cards.