3ds Max Is Broken and Buggy (rant)
Added 2018-02-03 19:46:27 +0000 UTCOk, so here it goes.
I finally got my machines running full speed and ready to render. I have some fun ideas and open projects that I can finally finish, just a couple days of work and it should be super fun to work on.
After days / MONTHS of tweaking, coding, pre-rendering, server building everything is set they way I like it, with ease of use and productivity in mind. I make coffee, build a scene, go to the material editor to tweak the character's skin.
NO DICE.
The material I've prepared is carefully crafted web of textures, modifiers and controllers. You tweak one value, some things change accordingly. Let's say you want to change the skin tone and the amount of makeup. I had one simple float controller named "Makeup Amount" that I could just tweak. And now, after importing the material or a new character to the scene, all of them are either gone or are ALL NAMED "Controller"!! Which means that they are absolutely unusable for any human being!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H07zYvkNYL8
You know what's best? After a bit of googling I found that there's no solution for this particular issue and the bug is present since at least 2010. That's 7, almost 8 years of fixes, updates, new versions, subscriptions and Autodesk promising wonders when they still can't deliver basic stuff.
This makes me want to get drunk and cry, since there's no fix for my workflow on which I was working since mid-2016. Blame me for hoping that Max won't be a son of a bitch for once.
OK, so the only solution is to hard-code the material controllers into my Character plugin. Nothing kills creativity more than bugs and issues that nobody can be arsed to resolve in an expensive, long-running suite of "professional" 3D apps. Screw Autodesk.
