3ds Max for the autodidact -the learning never stops…
Posted in: News - Monday, March 29 2010
Once upon a time people would learn a trade or skill, then employ that skill in their business and over time become progressively better at it. For example, someone that made shoes would have learned these skills as an apprentice and when the learning stage was finished, go on to start their own shoe-making business. Constantly repeating the same actions over time, they would eventually master their craft.
But for anyone like me who works with computers in the animation, graphics and video production industries the learning never stops. Each time a new version of software appears I am overcome with a mixture of anticipation and frustration. Sure, I look forward to new features which enable me to work quicker, do more and produce better quality work. Sometimes these features are enhancements to an existing set of tools and are easy to understand. It could be a tool that does something in minutes that once took hours. Great. But often you are given a completely new set of tools that require you to study tutorials, learn new terms, understand the theory of, or go and spend money on a course. This eats into your productive time but you do it anyway because it gives you an edge. Maybe it enables you to provide a new service that you weren’t able to before. It’s a continuous learning curve.
One of the major bits of software I use is 3ds Max. Over the 18 years I’ve been using 3ds Max, it has grown into to a huge monster of a program. When I first started out the program was a hundred times simpler and I knew every nook and cranny of it, inside and out. Nowadays I challenge anyone to say that they know how to use every single feature in 3ds Max.
Back in the nineties, I did a 3-day course with a well known Canadian writer of 3ds Max “how-to” books, Michele Bousquet. She had come on a trip to Australia to hold a series of training workshops. Back then the program was called 3D Studio and it ran under DOS (this was before Windows). I had taught myself everything until then, from the very well-written manuals that came with the software. A new feature I had just learned from the manuals was the ability to show a fully shaded 3D object in a pop-up window in real-time! Commonplace now, this ability had just been available. In the training course, we were making a 3D character in a wireframe viewport and when we were finished Michele told us we were to render it -which in those days meant you might as well go to lunch. A simple low poly count render was taking 20 minutes. I popped up the new real-time shaded viewport and when Michele came and looked at my screen, her jaw dropped and she said “how did you do that?”. I explained to her the new plugin, which she immediately instructed the class to try and there were gasps of amazement as everyone realised what a powerful new tool this was. I was incredulous, here I was paying a fortune to be doing a course when I knew more than the teacher! I’ve got nothing against Michele, she is a lovely person and has written a bunch of books on 3ds Max but it was at that moment I realised the value of being an autodidact (a person that is mostly self-taught).
The internet is the perfect environment for an autodidact. There are both written tutorials and videos on virtually every subject. Even 3ds Max no longer comes with printed manuals, the help files and tutorials are online. It does save a few trees I guess, but I do miss curling up in bed with the manuals and having a good read. I just find having a laptop in bed is so much less convenient, but then I am a bit old school.
Max has gotten so big that recently it was split into two slightly different programs, 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design. Both are exactly the same, except 3ds Max has the ability for users to write their own software for the program with SDK, whereas 3ds Max Design loses this ability in favour of additional high-end lighting tools more suited to Architects and Designers. What frustrates me is that this divergence may be the thin end of the wedge. Users had to make a choice last year whether to continue with one or the other. I chose 3ds Max Design because it was better suited to the work I do. I have no interest in writing software code and I can still do everything in 3ds Max Design that 3d Max can do, including character animation. What concerns me is that Autodesk, the company that makes this software, may start taking out features like character animation tools until users like me who do both Design and Entertainment projects end up having to fork out the cash to buy both programs. The fragmentation of software into specialised, separate entities is something that Autodesk seems to do continuously. They have a bewildering array of products, many which appear to be very similar. It seems to me that many of these fragmentation decisions are motivated by the desire to make more money. Why sell one product that does everything when you can sell two that complement each other? Perhaps Autodesk would argue that the programming code becomes unwieldy and inefficient once a program gets to a certain size. In their defense however, I will say that I have made a pretty good living out of Autodesk (and Adobe) products and I do enjoy using their wares. Plus the tax deductions on software purchases soften the blow.
The learning never stops, and neither does the forking out of the cash. Now don’t get me started on hardware, I’ll leave that for another blog!
