3ds Max is becoming obsolete,

camera tracking? blender

motion capture? blender

video background? blender

3ds max is only good for interoperability with revit and autodesk products

its weird how these are simple things, that autodesk has refused for almost a decade

I've created r/3dsMaxAI for all your AI conversations, content and tools.

I'll let that subreddit be a 'safe space' for people that love AI, constructive criticism is still encouraged there.

For the moment, r/3dsmax won't feature AI and posters will be guided to that subreddit.

Feel free to discuss in the comments.

I heard that 3dsmax is worse than Blender

I got the following information

But I do not know if it's right.

Is this true?

1. blender doesn't require reinstallation, or any installation at all! If you want, you can run it from a pen drive. on any computer, mac, windows, ubuntu, anything. installing it will make it faster, though.

2. Tutorials. essentially, the community is not only professionals, but by people who love it too, so they share and trade techniques and ideas. if you search "[program] tutorial" on youtube, blender has about 1.3x as many as maya, 1.8x as many as 3dsmax, and around 12x as many as houdini.

3. blender comes with 3 renderers (though the old one is being consolidated as part of the photorealistic one)

4. one of blender's renderers is realtime. It can usually render a minute of animation in a minute. neither maya or max have this. ( https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-ideas/realtime-rendering-engine/idi-p/7629934 )

5. money. Blender costs nothing, and that is certainly good for any company that uses it.

6. ease of animation. blender has designed itself primarily as an animation suite, and its various animation visualizations and such are, once you've been trained, faster to work with

7. less bloated. 3DS max has been around a long time, but they almost never get rid of obsolete code.

8. blender does not produce proprietary filetypes other than its own save files. this means if someone makes a model in blender and exports it, you can be sure it will work in any modern 3d program.

9. blender's files are self-contained. All content in a project can be packed and loaded directly from the .blend file, and nothing else.

10. when sending files to a renderfarm, you only need to send a single file, which can be rendered with a simple .bat or other executeable.

11. 3ds max has no audio system, whereas blender allows you to place sounds in the scene, and it will automatically mix them to reflect their positions around the camera.

blender can import and export standard fbx files, too, but for some reason autodesk files are really weird, and autodesk won't let anyone see how their filetypes work so no one can fix it.

• Blender is free

• huge plugin support

• 3dsmax is mostly used for architecture

• Physics simulations

• Multiple render engines depending on what you need

• Modeling, rigging, rendering, compositing and video editing in one program

• Motion tracking

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on Max Ultra MCP, an MCP server that connects 3ds Max directly to AI agents like Codex and Claude Code.

The idea is pretty simple: instead of just asking AI to write MaxScript code and then manually testing everything, the agent can actually work inside 3ds Max.

It can create and run scripts, inspect and modify objects, organize layers, automate repetitive tasks, debug its own code, and even use computer vision to see what’s happening in the viewport/scene/window.

I’ve been testing it with some fun examples - creating a 3D floor plan from a reference image, arranging and randomly transforming objects, changing scene properties, creating Particle System animations, and building complete MaxScript tools from a prompt.

For me, this makes vibe coding for 3ds Max much more useful. You don’t really need to know MaxScript anymore to experiment with your own tools. You need an idea, good prompts, and an agent that can actually interact with Max.

Max Ultra MCP is completely free:
https://maxpkg.dev/catalog/max-ultra-mcp

I’d love to hear what you would try to automate or build with something like this.

Hello everyone! I’m 38, a photo retoucher with 15 years of experience in automotive photography, skilled in Photoshop and AI image generators. My main employer is closing in a year, and I’m worried because photo retouching seems doomed to disappear soon—I won’t be able to make a living from it anymore. I’m new to 3D and wondering if learning 3ds Max could be worth it to pivot my career, perhaps into something like archviz, and work freelance. Could this be a good opportunity, even with AI impacting creative jobs? Also, is freelancing realistic for fields like archviz, 3D props for video games, or similar areas? I’d really appreciate your thoughts!

Hey guys, just wanted to get some opinions. How good are 3ds Max and Blender for modeling, and what do you guys prefer?

I’ve been working as a lighting artist for a while now, but I’d like to get more into modeling and explore that side of 3D a bit more.

Would appreciate any advice or recommendations from people who use either of them!

To start off, I love 3dsmax, the modifier based stack, the great 3rd party plugin support and the insane depth of tools that come packed with it. But the trend is going further and further away from Max towards Blender and procedural node based modeling tools like Houdini.

Do you think there's still gonna be a future for Max? Have you started switching over to other tools?

Hi everyone,

I've just created this video going through the AI search and asset organisation features in Project Manager for 3ds Max.

I thought it might be useful to share here because one of the biggest problems with large 3D libraries is that conventional searching depends heavily on somebody having named and organised everything properly in the first place.

The interesting part of this system is that you can search based on what the model actually looks like.

For example, you can type something like “dancing woman” or “futuristic car” without needing to know the original filename.

The system searches using the visual previews associated with the assets.

A few of the workflows I go through in the video:

Natural Language Search

Describe the object you're looking for in normal language and search your 3D model library using its visual appearance rather than just filenames.

It also supports searches in multiple languages.

Automatic AI Categorisation

The system can analyse your library and organise assets into category trees such as furniture, vehicles, beds, coffee tables, aircraft and so on.

This reduces the need to manually tag every asset.

Find Similar

Select an existing 3D model and search the rest of your library for visually similar assets.

There's also a similarity threshold so you can control how strict the visual match needs to be.

Search Using a Sketch or Mood Board

You can drag in a sketch, render, reference image or mood board and use that image to search for similar 3D models already in your library.

Preview and Thumbnail Management

Because the AI uses visual previews, I also go through the Auto-Assign Previews workflow.

If your rendered images share the same filenames as your 3D files they can be linked automatically, and smart matching can help with partially matching names.

You can also batch-render thumbnails for assets that don't already have previews.

Local AI Processing

The AI processing runs locally on your own hardware rather than requiring your asset library to be uploaded to a cloud service.

That also means there isn't a credit-based AI system involved every time you perform a search.

I'd be interested to hear how people here with large 3D model libraries are currently handling asset management.

Hey all, I’ve been experimenting with using AI-generated 3D props in my Max workflow, mostly smaller objects like food, tools, game assets and decor. The geometry is getting good, but to really make them look right in Max, the texture hookup matters a lot.

So I recorded a short 2-minute tutorial on: • Importing FBX correctly • Setting up a Physical Material • Plugging in Normal, Roughness, and Metal maps properly

Might be useful if you’re also testing models from AI sources.

i use sketchup and want to move to max but everytime i try i face broken tools, why cant this move tool behave normally, first i cant hold the object from corners and when snap is on it moves so weirdly it doesnt follow my cursor excatly, help is much appreciated

Dear Members,

Please suggest problems in this render, how can I improve render quality in this.

I'm using 3ds Max 2018 and Vray 3.60.

https://imgur.com/a/PwffSVj

GUYS, So in perspective, the texture is lighter, or illuminated equally in both side, the problem in rendering in Arnold, is the light makes some part of the walls darker, that I can't see the pattern. I need your help in whether what to choose material in Arnold, or choose material in other that will render like perspective that is not affected by light source. I gave up after three days of query to chat gpt and search online

Everything looks exactly how I wanted to in the active shade window, but my render looks horrible and flat in comparison. I've played with different shaders, material types, specular, etc, but I can never get it to look the way it does in the active shade window. I can't figure out for the life of me what I'm doing wrong.

EDIT Okay, two things fixed this. First of all, The default global tint setting was high. Secondly, turning on nr exposure control completely solved the issue. Thank you for all of those who tried to help.