and it was called Autodesk 123D.
http://www.123dapp.com/aboutFor all intents and purposes, I'd say this is the spiritual successor to Gmax, because it's totally free. It's also a nice simplification from Max.
Some positives:
Max has tons of buttons all over so it immediately looks daunting, where as we have 2 main tool bars and some sub menus here.
It carries over the View Cube and several of the viewing options from Max 2009 and simplifies them. They also seem to have ripped the file menu from MS Office.
The sub menu tree when you right click or pick from a tool bar menu item, gives you a octagonal menu from there so you don't have to go far.
It operates much like Sketchup, in that you draw 2D shapes then can modify them in many ways to create 3D part meshes.
The snap to system seems more streamlined than Sketchup though, so you can create a bit quicker...
A nice touch for newbies, is that if you hover over anything long enough, in some cases it'll give you an example video with the explanation
of what it does.
Some negatives:
This was designed not for gamers or the 3D world at large I think, as much as the CnC and 3D printing crowd for rapid production... as
such it's import and export options are limited. Less so than when Sketchup came out, (this accepts skp's too) but your main import is probably
going to be OBJ, and exporting to STL... depending if you've got something that can accept what else it produces. I imagine that newer versions
of Max already do or will support the 123D format soon.
The program starts up a lot faster than Max, but whatever code system it has under the hood seems to lag when you want to select a whole series of
objects at once. This is a beta release, so there's room for improvement.
I've hardly done anything with it, but the materials system seems very stripped down. You get a lot of presets, but with the file formats as they are, most of that
will be lost. I've not located a UV mapper either yet. So really this is more of a strict modeler, then you go into something else for finishing.
Again the exporting ability is the real drawback, I imagine if there were enough people yelling for .Max, .3ds, or .dae support, they'd probably add it in.
Right now some of the exported formats won't open in Max 2009 due to file type version differences, in some of the ones that do, it doesn't export shapes (though
it warns you of this) so you really need to remember to make "meshes" not shapes, or you might end up exporting a file missing lots of pieces.
Overall I feel this is a good starting point for someone wanting to get into Max, without torrenting it. It feels a lot easier to approach and has a lot of the updated
Max features for getting around. Essentially it's a bridge, Sketchup's ease of drawing and mostly Max's guts. Hey it's free, it's in beta so it's bound to improve... so
can't hurt to give it a shot.
