Chris Johnson

Writing a plugin to something like Max and then making the plugin portable to another 3D Platform is harder than writing base package that is itself cross platform compatible. I don't know what that I'm interested in a plugin per se. But I don't know, a modo plugin could be a fun place to start. What do you mean by LWCAD style plugin?

Having worked for almost 2 decades with old software in the architectural DCC field I'm totally burned out on existing applications. I find almost all the solutions to be old, and have old ideas. Personally I'm interested and plenty able to put together a new platform for architectural DCC. I just need to know what people want? So a few questions: 1. How important is the platform OS? (Windows, Mac or LInux or all of the above) 2. Any need to use a touchscreen for creation? 3. Integration with mobile platforms. Any use for this? 4. Residential construction? 5. Or commercial construction? 6. Ease of use? 7. Would you like it to be more generic like max, maya? 8. Or more specific like revit? Would love to have a discussion here on this subject.

No, I was still at Autodesk at that time. It was an Ikea thing.

Is the current state of the 3D arch/vis industry where you would have expected it to be? After all max/maya and softimage are over 20+ years old (I remember when they were pretty new). There are a few new-comers that are slightly younger, and perhaps a few 3D packages that are starting up currently. I myself would have expected that the 3D packages available for arch/viz would have evolved much further than they have now. Having worked in the industry for a long time, I saw the severe detriments of maintaining mountain ranges of old C (and bad C++) code. The software industry has advanced quite far since the early 1990's. But a lot of software has not kept up with the times. It seems renderers have continued to evolve quite well, but those are in a way independent of any UI environment and platform. Does it feel like 3D content creation applications are still rooted in the old paradigm of the Windows 32 desktop apps? If so what are your expectations now for 2016?

I wouldn't consider the new scene explorer a waste of time. I was the one who did UI improvements for the scene explorer, to update it's look and feel. I also was the one who took out that old nasty beast, the old layer manager. And hardly ever did work bring me such pleasure as ripping out that old piece of crap where the business logic was all mixed together with the UI logic. The layer code now follows a real MVC pattern, which makes it very extensible. The new layer explorer allows you to group layers. The API was changed to so any layer can be a parent to any other layer. Which allows you to group layers arbitrarily. However I was not the only one who worked on it. It was a group effort, so I was not responsible for what actions were added or removed. So if you have complaints about that, talk to support, or script up a work around. But I'll tell you another thing. There used to be a performance bug that would occur when creating thousands of layers. It used to take about 35 minutes to create 1000 layers. I fixed that bug. Now it takes a few seconds. That bug would probably also occur when loading a file with thousands of layers in it. I fixed it on my last day at Autodesk, putting in a lot of overtime to do it. That was the day before they laid off a bunch of devs (myself included with zero explanation) and almost the entire docs team. I know of only one person there now who is willing to put in the extra time to fix those old bugs anymore. Max was fun to work during those 9 years, but it's now so old. I would never go back to it: I've lost all faith in the management there.

I look at the crashes for 3dsmax as they come in to our computers, and I can confirm that going to 64 bit does significantly reduce the amount of out of memory crashes to a very small number.

Hi Guys I haven't been out of the 'rendering' business for about 5 years now, since I joined Autodesk... but: I got an email from some guy trying to drum up business for himself. I had no idea what he did, or who he was, so I checked out his website that was listed on his email. And lo and behold his website contains my renderings! That he never paid for and that he never even asked to use! In essence, they are stolen: The renderings are the ones on the left: http://www.dymonddesignonline.com I never gave any rights to any of my former clients, to convey usage rights to other parties. My contracts I used in the past, were pretty iron clad. So I emailed him about it, and he thinks it's fine that he has the right to use them. What a PRICK! What else can I do, besides threatening him with a Lawyer? Chris Johnson

Did someone mention my name? I posted the source to this tool 4 years ago, before I joined Autodesk at: http://www.idigitalhouse/tech/dh_tech.html But I'm pretty sure some guy at maxplugins.de took the source code and compiled it for future versions of max. {edit} yep, go here: http://www.maxplugins.de/max2010_32.php This site I linked above looks like a really good place to look for plugins by the way. I'm way behind on making my old personal projects public, and in updating them. Sheesh, I've worked on and basically completed my second version of my old layer manager (Fangorn2... stupid name by the way), (rewritten from the ground up), but I've no time to manage it much anymore.

Also your repro steps for what you are doing inside of max make it completely impossible for us to know how to help you. Bad Example: "Help max is crashing on me when I create a teapot" Good Example: 1. start max 2. active create command panel 3. Press teapot button 4. move mouse over left viewport 5. left mouse button down 6. move 7. release mouse button RESULT: *crash*

Brian I just bought a 1 terrabyte hard drive last night for 135 bucks: That's cheap! But more importantly, three years ago I fixed autoback up, so that it saves only if your scene is dirty. And I bumped up the maximum number of autoback up files from 9 to 99. So you should combine the two, and get a big hard-drive, and maximize your autoback number to a really high number (i.e. max?) Chris J.

I put in all nighters because I want to do (comp-sci) research, not because I have to. I'm on a different path though, since I'm always studying the source code (for max), and doing different things relating to feature work for 3ds max. I was in the Architectural business though years ago. For me competition wasn't so bad actually. My best friend was a fellow 3d guy doing architectural renderings, so we were directly competing against each other. But we were best friends, and still are, though I'm not in the business anymore. For those of you who are: 1. Protect yourself by IRONCLAD contracts with your clients. They so much don't even sneeze at you without paying for it. 2. No work until a deposit is made. 3. Send very low res work, or piecemeal renderings until you get payment in full. 4. If you charge less, they may respect you less. 5. I had one client who I did work for who only payed after work was delivered. I had a different philosophy, and so we didn't do work with each other anymore.

Well that is not surprising. In case you didn't know, computers can NOT store all Real numbers. Even floating point numbers cannot all be represented in a computer with finite memory: Wikipedia says this about floating point numbers: "The floating-point format needs slightly more storage (to encode the position of the radix point), so when stored in the same space, floating-point numbers achieve their greater range at the expense of slightly less precision." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point As for the crash, if you can reliably reproduce it a clean copy of max I would definitely be interested in fixing it. Remember a reproducible scenario is NOT like this: " make a box and snap something over there and here and it will crash" It needs to be something like this: 1. Start 3dsmax 2. create a box near 1000, 1000 (x,y coordinates). 3. turn on 2.5D snaps 4. turn on vertex snaps, turn off ALL others. 5. bla bla bla. 6. click (Left mouse down) 7. drag (bla bla bla - don't release mouse button) 8. release left mouse button over bla bla bla. RESULT: crash with CER. Thanks everyone: Chris Johnson

I would be interested in contributing a chapter on maxscript. Let me know the topic, and I'd be glad to help. Chris Johnson P.S. Send me a PM, and I'll give you my email. Or, if Jeff is reading this, he can give you my contact info too.

guys guys guys. Don't add an extrude modifier to your nice beautiful splines. Just add an edit poly modifier or an edit mesh modifier. It will significantly reduce your poly count in the 3dsmax scene. However be careful you don't render the object from the back because the back side of it will be invisible. But in my scenes, I always made sure that never happened. Chris Johnson

If you are doing big scenes in your renderer, I would definitely buy more ram. My recommendation now is 4 gigs of ram. I have another recommendation too to make good use of your memory: 1. Before you render a scene, restart Max. Please, trust me on this. However let me add that Max 10 will have significant improvements in this regard. 2. Get SP 2 for Max 9. It has a fix for a memory leak, that while small leaked a bunch of times. Chris Johnson