Need to vent

[niston]

3ds Max has got to be the most convoluted, complicated and unintuitive piece of software ever made, with the most convoluted, complicated and unintuitive UI ever invented.

Why do things the standard way when you can cook up your own, brain damaged little UI system!

 

I absolutely hate this garbage.

[South8028]

The power of 3d max is in huge educational knowledge base. Tens thousands of educational articles and videos. Sometimes people just don't like certain product subjectively. They could easily master something, but preconceived attitude gets in the way. Obviously, with your engineering mindset, you can easily master something as simple as 3D Max if you decide to approach problem with an open mind and gradually. You need to remember the most commonly used modifiers and learn how to model from primitives. Gradually, max will become intuitive for you.

[SKKmods]

Although crap UX is crap UX no matter how much education a user takes.

 

Antidote: bauhaus > rams > ive ... less is good, form follows function ... the SKK way :wink:

[pepperman35]

I haven't used the newest version of Max but I wonder if the UI remains the same or did it evolve over time. As 2013 version is required for FO4 compatibility it may be a legacy of the era. I recall when Microsoft changed their UI on the Office product suite. Some liked it others did not. I remember trying to use Max 5 to mod for Star Trek Armada. It was foreign to me but to be fair it took a while to wrap my head around the three dimensional (3D) thing.

[RaidersClamoring]

[EDIT: Unnecessarily harsh comment about Autodesk]

I'll just say I'm not a huge fan.

[DiodeLadder]

If you are trying to learn 3d modeling, I'd recommend doing that in Blender instead, and use Max for exporting to the final .nif files.

 

To make Blender compatible when exporting FBX to Max :

 

1) Units must be set to "Metric", Unit Scale to 0.01, Length to "Centimeters". This will perfectly match the unit scale of 3ds Max and Creation Kit, 1:1.

2) Orientation is always Y Forward and Z Up, importing to, or exporting from Blender.

(Except when importing FBX exported from Creation Kit, in which case you need to set it as -Y Forward and -Z Up, since this FBX type has a rotation modifier meant for 3ds Max. FBX export from CK, press F2, is a very useful feature if you are creating a custom settlement border mesh, for example. Using this will require understanding of object parent-child hierarchy in 3d software.)

 

3) Smoothed face normals won't be imported into 3ds Max properly most of the time, because that software has a weird system called "Smoothing Groups" which is proprietary to them. To ensure the export from Blender would be compatible, you need to use "Edge Split" modifier (set it by angle if you have auto smooth, otherwise split by sharp edges).

 

All the parenting and use of dummy (I use Plain Axis) in Blender created FBX will be imported properly in 3ds Max. Meaning, you can do almost all the work in Blender.

 

(Changing unit scale in Blender will break its physics engine. So, if you are using cloth simulation, you need to temporarily change the Unit System setting to "None", and change it back after the process is done.)

[DiodeLadder]

I completely forgot to mention this :

 

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/outliner?page=1

 

This Max addon Outliner is cleaner and works much better than the 3ds Max 2013 scene explorer. The download link is actually in the comment section, look for the attachment in one guy's comment (that's the only good download link on the net - other ones didn't work for me).