Why is 3DS Max so dominant in arch-vis?

[Rich O]

Firstly, I'm a Maya user, though I do have rudimentary knowledge of Max.

 

I'm just wondering why Max has achieved dominance despite being, from what I can tell, no easier or harder overall for a visualisation workflow? What caused it to achieve the feedback-loop critical mass of plugins, models, tutorials and users?

 

I can understand people using Houdini for particle fx, Maya for rigging and animation, etc etc, but in a field where all things appear to be equal between the two stablemates (Max and Maya) it's something I've always wondered (and chafed over due to having to muck around to get assets designed for Max into Maya!)

[salvador]

It's probably the all-purpose agenda Max has always been written on. Max was first issued by a company called Discreet until Autodesk bought it. AD guys must have seen a great tool in it. And likewise happened with Maya, which recently became part of the Autodesk family. I'm not familiar with Maya at all so I can't tell you where it really excells Max but generally speaking, each application must have a trend of power over it's piers. Maybe Max proved better and grew up faster and became this way more popular.

 

Wonder what other apps AD is planning to merge in.

[Josef Wienerroither]

Salvador - your details about 3ds Max's history are wrong

3ds Max was first issued by Kinetix, and Kinetix was always a 100% Autodesk Company.

Later on Autodesk bought Discreet ( which had products called Edit, Paint and Effect).

After that, Autodesk put all 3ds Max agendas under the Discreet banner.

The discreet name kept living on for some years under Autodesk roof..

 

Maya was bought in 2005 as far i remember, and Softimage XSI in 2008

 

Regarding the strong AD foot in ArchViz:

well, when you have a strong CAD product like AutoCAD it sure helps on the archiviz front , no ?

[heni30]

There were other programs out there like Strata, Impulse's Imagine, Lightwave, Alias Wavefront. Max's tie to AutoCad was a huge advantage. But there's also an urban myth that companies were making it easy (encouraging?) for their software to be copied/pirated so that it would become the de facto standard. If everybody was learning XYZ software then companies were more prone to use it because the work/talent pool consisted mostly of people who knew XYZ. The hiring companies were more scrupulous so the software company still made money.

[Umesh Raut]

Alias wavefront was the company behind Maya its because of them that Maya is Maya...

and rest everything Josef said above is good, just to add that 3D Studio (on dos) was developed by a group called yost group till version 4 (and upto 4.2, if I am correct) before being bought over by the BIG A and transferred to kinetix. just my 2 c.

[Josef Wienerroither]

Umesh:

 

Even the 3ds DOS efforts of the Yost Group was completely an Autodesk endevour. Gary Yost was hired by Autodesk in 1987 to develop 3DS Dos. He (and some of other well known 3ds developers) developed 3d tools for the Atari ST previous this

 

Read more details here:

http://www.maxunderground.com/the_history_of_3d_studio_pt2

 

And the first Part (featuring Tom Hudson)

http://www.maxunderground.com/the_history_of_3d_studio/4

 

@George:

Yes there were many others mostly on the Amiga, like "Turbo Silver" (later "Imagine" ),"Sculpt/Sculpt4D".

But honestly all those Amiga programs were not on the professional level as 3d Studio, not even to think about products like Softimage or later Power Animator by Alias Wavefront. ( Softimage was called "Creative Environment" back then)

 

BTW: In 1995 Wavefront Technologies and Alias merged and became Alias|Wavefront

Edited October 1, 2012 by spacefrog

[Mario De Achadinha]

Hi All, Many years ago I worked for an Autodesk re seller, When we sold autocad we were trained to try sell visualization software too, at that time it was a product called autodesk viz and we had the option to also promote discreet 3dmax. Viz was a toned down version of max that ultimately got transitioned out with the new max-design and 3dmax introduction, though many architects would want max because they reckoned they had amazing animation skills which was really just a waste of money as it cost 3 times more to go for max over viz.. anyway. But I think ultimately what made max dominate the arch-vis industry was autocad and the people selling it who worked for Autodesk? My thoughts anyway:)

[HamburgerTrain]

I'm just wondering why Max has achieved dominance despite being, from what I can tell, no easier or harder overall for a visualisation workflow? What caused it to achieve the feedback-loop critical mass of plugins, models, tutorials and users?

 

Maya was not really and still isn't targeted at the Arch-Viz industry and never will be, it's animation/game/film/motion gfx orientated and always will be. But having said that, there's no one out there saying you can't use it in the Arch-Viz industry because you can and undertneath it all, it's still just a 3D package but it has shortcomings that Arch-Viz projects can require. Off the top of my head compared to Max:

 

Max has better modelling tools, no doubt about this. Maya is one the worst modellers in 3D at the moment with only minor additions over the last couple of years, the loft tools haven't been updated since the 90's, creating roads on terrain is nearly impossible if not for manually intersecting roads (no drape mesh like in Max), the booleans don't work on anything but watertight, clean meshes, the extrude along path tool breaks on hard edges unless you have an insane amount of polygons, the linear workflow is half implemented in most renderers, the scattering tools that have been on with Max are now just available this year, there are no native 3D arch-viz libraries that exist for Maya, no instant roof plugins, no instant floorboard generators, no random color generators, no IES prieviews in the viewport, It was only a few years ago that V-Ray for Maya did not exist and users had to put up with mental ray for Maya (which if you have used, you will understand), etc.. etc...just off the top of my head.

 

That being said, I make a living out of Maya for Arch Viz and it is easy once you write your own tools and get an effecient pipeline going! I try and model most stuff in SketchUp as it wipes the floor with Maya when it comes to modelling, Maya, however, is much better than SketchUp at texturing, adding details and handling huge amounts of data. I only chose Maya due to learning it.

 

On the other hand I I think it would be annoying to use Max and rely heavily so much on plugins, upgrading them all every year must be a pain. One plus is that with Maya, it's easy enough to write Tools, library managers, importers whatever you want. A bit more work, but it's nice conforming it to how you work.

 

PS I was about to post saying no way AD bought Maya in 2005, but there you go! Seems like it was much more recent than that!

[John Dollus]

Autodesk has always had a visualization tie with their architectural products even going back to AutoShade and AutoFlix with Animtor Pro before 3D Studio Dos came out. None of the others apps had such a strong link/support network with the drafting software so market saturation was streamlined to say the least. Alias|Wavefront had a pretty strong engineering tie back in the day but it wasn't anywhere near the volume of the architectural side and getting info to/from was always problematic. Lambsoft's Movetools was phenomenal at getting data back and forth but they went under and the interoperability went with them for quite some time.

[Frosty]

John may be partially correct, at least for the North American market, but I think ease of piracy was a HUGE factor - for AutoCAD too. I don't want to say it caused critical mass in North America, but it sure didn't hurt. The same way Sketchup took off because its free.

 

Back in the 90's/00's many offices and most students alike were using bootleg copies either to save money or to get their feet wet. I was one of the few people at my school doing 3D without use of Autodesk software. I used FormZ and Cinema 4D because inexpensive student licenses were available. I used to pay $100/yr for FormZ and Maxon twice gave me a free copy of C4D. That's a sweet deal on a student budget. At the time, there were no such deals from Autodesk at my school.

 

But back to John's point about the link with AutoCAD being so important - why then has Max taken off in Europe as well? AutoCAD does not have the penetration there that it enjoys in North America. I think in Europe, ArchiCAD, MicroStation and Vectorworks have long been more popular.

 

I have never wanted to use Max. I find the interface clumsy, difficult and slow. However, almost ever day I wish for a C4D plugin that is readily available for Max.

[Scott Schroeder]

Mental Ray for Maya, in past versions, was a complete nightmare. Modeling tools in Maya have stagnated for a long time. They finally integrated MJ Poly Tools into Maya to make it a little more like Max. Maya always needed some under the hood work to get it going, which is why many games and film studios adopted it. They could create their unique pipeline around Maya. However, many arch viz places wanted the "make pretty render button" pipeline which they saw Max had little more of. Max was always a little more out of the box ready than Maya.

 

Vray being only Max for a long time certainly helped cement Max as the industry go-to program. A lot of Universities, including where I went to, taught Max because they were on Autodesk bulk licensing. We all had AutoCAD in every lab so they would throw in Max just for kicks, this was before Autodesk bought Maya.

 

The biggest factor was the Max was always under the Autodesk umbrella, so when AutoCAD users were starting to get into the visualization side they were pushed to Max/Viz. It was just far easier to stay inside Autodesk's product line. Add into the equation that the architecture industry moves like a dinosaur and rejects outright any notion of change, they would never think to look outside of their own little box.

 

I don't think piracy had anything, or at least a significant role, to do with it. Alias Maya was just as easy to pirate as Max was back in the day. Not that I did it, I heard it from a friend of a friend.

[salvador]

Salvador - your details about 3ds Max's history are wrong

3ds Max was first issued by Kinetix, and Kinetix was always a 100% Autodesk Company.

Later on Autodesk bought Discreet ( which had products called Edit, Paint and Effect).

After that, Autodesk put all 3ds Max agendas under the Discreet banner.

The discreet name kept living on for some years under Autodesk roof..

 

Maya was bought in 2005 as far i remember, and Softimage XSI in 2008

 

Regarding the strong AD foot in ArchViz:

well, when you have a strong CAD product like AutoCAD it sure helps on the archiviz front , no ?

 

I stand corrected.

 

This is becoming an interesting thread to read.

[prakashsharma]

3DS Max is simply the best by far . I started with Maya when I entered the world of animations . I thought , theres nothing better than Maya untill I came across max . and there was no looking back thereafter.The Biggest advantage of max being the plethora of options for modeling as compared to maya . Alignment and measuring tools . Lighting , Materials . everything is so straightforward unlike Maya .

But I love dynamics in Maya .

[Rich O]

^Can you detail some of the tools you mentioned? I was actually trying to avoid any blanket "x app is the best app" statements.

 

Maya was not really and still isn't targeted at the Arch-Viz industry and never will be, it's animation/game/film/motion gfx orientated and always will be. But having said that, there's no one out there saying you can't use it in the Arch-Viz industry because you can and undertneath it all, it's still just a 3D package but it has shortcomings that Arch-Viz projects can require. Off the top of my head compared to Max:

 

Max has better modelling tools, no doubt about this. Maya is one the worst modellers in 3D at the moment with only minor additions over the last couple of years, the loft tools haven't been updated since the 90's, creating roads on terrain is nearly impossible if not for manually intersecting roads (no drape mesh like in Max), the booleans don't work on anything but watertight, clean meshes, the extrude along path tool breaks on hard edges unless you have an insane amount of polygons, the linear workflow is half implemented in most renderers, the scattering tools that have been on with Max are now just available this year, there are no native 3D arch-viz libraries that exist for Maya, no instant roof plugins, no instant floorboard generators, no random color generators, no IES prieviews in the viewport, It was only a few years ago that V-Ray for Maya did not exist and users had to put up with mental ray for Maya (which if you have used, you will understand), etc.. etc...just off the top of my head.

 

That being said, I make a living out of Maya for Arch Viz and it is easy once you write your own tools and get an effecient pipeline going! I try and model most stuff in SketchUp as it wipes the floor with Maya when it comes to modelling, Maya, however, is much better than SketchUp at texturing, adding details and handling huge amounts of data. I only chose Maya due to learning it.

 

On the other hand I I think it would be annoying to use Max and rely heavily so much on plugins, upgrading them all every year must be a pain. One plus is that with Maya, it's easy enough to write Tools, library managers, importers whatever you want. A bit more work, but it's nice conforming it to how you work.

 

PS I was about to post saying no way AD bought Maya in 2005, but there you go! Seems like it was much more recent than that!

 

I'm currently using Maya for arch-viz (again, because I learnt it. VFX-oriented school). I find that the shading abilities are amazing but yes, have been looking for a faster modelling package. I never even considered Sketchup! But I think I shall after reading this. Then just model the details in Maya.

 

(are you Hamburger from CGociety forums?)

Edited October 2, 2012 by Richard7666

[Nils Norgren]

Maya always needed some under the hood work to get it going, which is why many games and film studios adopted it. They could create their unique pipeline around Maya. However, many arch viz places wanted the "make pretty render button" pipeline which they saw Max had little more of. Max was always a little more out of the box ready than Maya.

 

Scott hit on a fundamental reason Max is dominant in this industry, in the beginning (way back in the mid 90's) Max was one of many 3d packages fighting around the edges, Softimage and Alias/wavefront (later Maya) were the big boys, with Houdini and a few others on the top, one thing the big expensive packages did, was they didn't include everything you needed, no network rendering, no high-quality built in renderer (it was well known that you would never use the built-in renderer in softimage or alias for finished rendering).

 

Back in the days of the first Jurrasic Park there was Alias/Wavefront for modeling, Softimage for animation, and Renderman for rendering, all with proprietary tools/scripts to make them all work together. That was not a solution for a small 1-4 person studio that wanted to make stills and short videos of architecture projects.

 

There were also very few file-formats importer built into the expensive packages (they expected studios to write their own pipeline if they received data from different sources), they would take an OBJ, or IGES file, but that was about it. Max always had many options for importing (not that they always worked perfectly) one fundamental one was DWG (later on). Max always attempted to be a whole-studio solution in one package.

 

Max also allowed as many render instances as needed for free, with one license of the software. This made it an easy choice if one has a render farm. Also, once the momentum of an industry is with a certain package, if you don't use that package it is hard(er) to find artists.

 

When we started we used Form Z for modeling and Electricimage for lighting/shaders/animation/rendering we were entirely Mac based, we didn't switch over to PCs until Lightscape became cheap, then we had to switch over and soon started using 3ds Max, we had used it at our previous employer so it was a relatively easy transition.

 

 

-Nils

[tassosringas]

 

Vray being only Max for a long time certainly helped cement Max as the industry go-to program.

 

 

This is the main reason, IMHO.

 

For many years Vray was only available for Max, and Vray turned out to be perhaps the best rendering engine, apart form proprietary ones or RMAN.

 

Now that Vray is also available for Maya, one can use whatever he likes, although I have started having thoughts about switching to Maya: the reason is that Maya is better integrated with Nuke, which is another must-use recently. I can foresee Maya-Vray-Nuke workflows will be the standard thing in a couple of years.

 

My 2 cents,

 

Tassos Ringas

[RyderSK]

Nuke being a must-use ?

 

Interesting how even small field gets affected by fashion. Nuke for Archviz, next will be facade texturing in Mari I guess.

[tassosringas]

Well, you could do post in Photoshop, but when using multichannel half-float EXRs for extra control and less re-rendering, then Nuke is maybe the only solution.

 

And yes, facade texturing in Mari might make sense if using PTEX, instead of spending long hours laying UVs.

 

BTW, your work is amazing...

Edited October 21, 2012 by tassosringas

[Scott Schroeder]

You use the post software that you are comfortable with. It is NOT the software that makes the image, it's the user. If you need all sorts of tricks and extra channels, maybe you should look again at your render workflow rather than the software it is going to. I've never needed anything more than my standard RGBA channels and a few render elements. Again, Nuke can't make the image any better than Microsoft Paint can. It comes down the to user. If you know and are comfortable with Nuke, then that's awesome. But if someone uses After Effects that doesn't mean that their image can't be as good or better than you.

 

Besides, Nuke isn't that important to our industry as Revit, SketchUp, and AutoCAD interoperability is. Which Max has all the support for. Max 2013's scene states, as wonky as they can be at the moment, have a direct line into After Effects and Photoshop.

 

When Alex Roman burst onto the scene a few years back, he really brought the Magic Bullet looks into the forefront in Arch Viz. Everyone started to use it, but very few could imitate his work. Why? It wasn't Magic Bullet that made him so great, it was him as an artist and understanding everything that goes into a composition.

 

For most arch viz, Mari is complete overkill which is what Juraj was hinting at, at least that's how I took it. Since most of our work generally has to be the squeaky clean never been touched by a human look we can get away with box mapping or loft mapping. At least for your general client work, they don't want to see it as it would really look. A lot of our personal work tends to be a more realistic as far as grime goes.

 

That's just my 1 cent.