So, I discontinued my MAX subscription a while back, because I'm still on 3DSMAX 8 and I had actually gotten 9, 10, and 2009 (11) via my subscription and I don't actually use them because they haven't managed to add anything useful or fix any of the problems that I tend to encounter (I do periodically test to see if things have improved, and they don't). But I like to keep on top of things, so I went to the Autodesk event today to see what was up in the MotionBuilder/Maya/etc. world.

Well, the answer is, really nothing is going on in the 3D layout package space. They are doing the most incremental of changes. It's really pretty sad.

But the real sadness was the 3DSMAX 2009 presentation. The first thing the guy did was kill 3dsmax.exe with the task manager. I shit you not. He opened up 3DSMAX 2009, had a demo file there, and while he was spinning the model around talking about what he was going to do, he selected something and it just locked up and wouldn't repaint. So he had to kill it.

The entirety of the MAX demo lasted about 30 minutes, and during that time, it crashed again. So even in a prescripted demo, on their controlled hardware, they can't get MAX to run for more than 15 minutes without it crashing.

On the plus side, Mudbox 2009 looks great. I was already planning on buying the upgrade, and the demo only confirmed that choice.

If it weren't for Mudbox and Maxwell, 3D would be a very dismal place :)