I'm pretty excited about many of the features in the announced 3ds Max 2016. For those of you on Subscription, it's going to be available on the 16th. To get you all excited, I'm embedding a few of the new videos along with some others shared in the last newsletter and other places. Here was the Announcement post: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/max/introducing-3ds-max-2016
The videos released on that page may not mean much to those who aren't deep into 3ds Max, but are worth watching. But to inspire ya'll here are some other videos on recent usage of Max in the film/game industry:
This first one won't embed... you'll have to click the link to watch.
http://vimeo.com/123062504
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT0pmnDAr3Q
Installing Max 2016 now. Woot!
I'll be exporting my first Teapot model any minute now :D
Not enough time yet to give an opinion. But I did make sure that WW does indeed work with 3ds Max 2016. So far I've tested WWMT and exporting models, CorVex, Detailer and Carver. Those all work fine. I'll test more throughout the week.
While WW does support Max 2016, there is currently a major performance bug if your scene has many Groups or Nested Groups (http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-3ds-max-design-general/max-2016-groups-cause-viewport-slowdown/td-p/5608200). My guess is that it will be fixed in SP1.
Help the cause by reporting this bug to Autodesk. (http://download.autodesk.com/us/support/report_a_bug.html?SelProduct=3dsMax)
3ds Max 2016 SP1 (http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/downloads/caas/downloads/content/autodesk-3ds-max-2016-service-pack-1.html) is now out for everyone. And for subscription customers, Extension 1 for 2016 is now available in your Autodesk subscription center.
NOTE: The EXT 1 Release Notes say that SP1 comes with the EXT 1 installer. It's not true. You need to install the SP1 (separately) first.
So it turns out there is another major bug in Max 2016. This bug is really bad: many users (me included) are noticing a memory leak where Max ends up consuming all of your system RAM.
Please submit a defect report now (http://download.autodesk.com/us/support/report_a_bug.html?SelProduct=3dsMax) and link to the thread on the Area (http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-3ds-max-design-general/shadowmapsizelimit-bug-in-2016-sp1/td-p/5795387) in your report.
I was in the middle of migrating most of my time to 2016 but this bug was a two-by-four to the skull. So hopefully a hotfix gets issued soon.
3ds Max 2016 SP2 is now available along with Extension 2 for those on Subscription (http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/max/3ds-max-2016-extension-2).
I'm installing it tonight but won't test until tomorrow. I'll share feedback after I've tested it.
Warning: Make sure you install SP2 before installing Extension 2 especially if your extension 2 file is only a couple MB in size.
3ds Max 2016 SP3 is now available. (https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/downloads/caas/downloads/content/3ds-max-2016-service-pack-3.html)