Hiya, just wondering if anyone knew if max2010 had reliable referencing, I haven't any max refs but remeber hearing bad things about it in older versions of Max compared to refrencing in Maya, which I have used and which worked well!

I've only played around with it, it seems a little more stable but has a bunch of new features that look handy but I've been holding off until someone I know gives them the thumbs up.

At work no one is using them because they've been so buggy in the past.

We use Scene Xref constantly here, as Max is our level editor. Works OK. Haven't tested it extensively in 2010, but it works great in 2008.

They added the new Containers functionality, which is very similar to Xrefs, except someone else can have the Container source file open, make a change, save it, and you'll see it update live in your scene. Not so useful though if you're using Perforce or some other source control, where you save files to a server and people don't constantly update their local copies.

Containers are also pretty new, only added in 2009 (but only exposed by default in 2010). You can't use a Container as a reference or anything, can't change materials on your local copy without affecting the master, etc.

Nowhere near as good as Maya's referencing.

they are still in bad shape, they totally scared away most people with their xRef system because it was basically not usable in its first releases.
There are still many bugs in them (like animation frames syncing,..). In booth cases I also wonder what kind of objects and or plugins are supported. Because if you work with 3rd party plugins like for example CAT it might fail syncing or merging stuff if you have different versions and or someone has not the plugin. I don't know how smart it can fall back and I think this complexity is the reason why its not stable.

rumor has it they rewrote stuff completely or about to, at least that's my interpretation of ken's blog entry on "revolutionary working with data" or so

We don't touch the internals of an Xref, since that is fairly fragile in Max. Like, not for a rig. We use them for static meshes and for animated meshes that aren't connected to anything else in the main scene.

I did talk to an Autodesk guy who said they are working on better referencing, so we'll see. Apparently Containers are just a first step.

Thanks guys, sounds like its worth a try.