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[wallworm]

When I contacted the support, here was the fun response:

Dear Shawn Olson,

Thank you for contacting the Autodesk eRenewal online store.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, we are unable to
assist you with this product inquiry at the online store. For detailed
product information please contact Autodesk, Inc. eRenewals for
assistance at:

Web: http://www.autodesk.com/support

We appreciate your patience.

You gotta love big companies that love taking money but are really slow to test anything. Or maybe this is the intended run-around.

[wallworm]

Just so all WW users are clear... this does not imply that I believe that AD has dropped Max (as is commonly said on the Net and asked of me tonight). Far from it. I do believe that AD is spending far too much time promoting Maya the last couple of years. But if I had lost faith in Max, I wouldn't bother renewing. I made the video because it was funny AND sad.

There was a thread on the Area where I momentarily got carried away because of some early sneak peak videos of Max 2015. They were pretty lousy videos, and I expect that the actual release will probably be much more enticing than those videos. Thanks to AndraX for calming me down and bringing me back to calm reality... so I removed my micro tirade and replaced it with the more facetious video shared above.

And, I am happy to note, Service Pack 4 is now out for 3ds Max 2014.

Get yours now: LINK REMOVED... SP4 had a critical bug.

(They are now back to being called Service Packs like in the good old days--no longer Product Updates the hippies tried to push on us. Or was that Communists? Dictators....? oh who cares.... :) )

[wallworm]

Just to follow up a little.

First, 3ds Max SP5 is now available.

Second, some very good news for the Max world. After a couple years of limbo (constant Maya promotion, a revolving door with the product manager position, poor general communication), there seems to be some sudden good news from the top. I've been actively following all things Max for many years. One thing that's been obvious is that Autodesk has had some hidden policy to push Maya over Max (and maybe even develop Maya over Max). Word in some industry insiders is that an upper management individual that was the primary impetus behind this alleged policy was booted in the recent past (recent could mean year, months, I don't know).

What is most important to those of us who love 3ds Max is that the recently appointed product manager Eddie Perlberg and the others who are taking the reigns definitely have a different tone and vision. For the last few years Autodesk has used Uservoice for Max users to vote on features they want... and a large number of the most requested features that the masses voted on seemed to go ignored. In the last week, it looks like Perlberg marked several of these items as Under Review... which is the flag that the development team will seriously consider these things. Among these features are better XRef systems (especially regarding animation), fluid simulations without plugins, catmull-clark subdivisions, double precision floats and more. For WW users, adding double precision floats will benefit because rounding errors actually affect a couple WW tools like the VMF importer and the VBSP importer scattering functions.

I have always remained generally constant with Max itself, but have been soured on many of the business decisions Autodesk has been making that affect 3ds Max and us Max users. This is the first time in the last couple of years where I started to feel excited about the direction AD might start taking with Max. Max 2015 will probably come out in the next few weeks, and I know it isn't the result of the current 3ds Max leadership. I'm excited about it but not super expectant. I do look forward to next year's release, though, as I'm pretty confident with the tone of this new crew.

PS. I have no tattoos... but last year I was thinking about getting a Wall Worm tattoo on one shoulder and a 3ds Max logo on the other shoulder. Well the new PM Eddie Perlberg shared in a recent blog post or forum thread that he's had 3ds Max tattoo for some time now. That's the kind of commitment that I can connect with!