Moving Maya files into Blender for Rendering

Hey Everyone,

I work in Maya for modeling, texturing, and animation but the Rendering systems within Maya are all solely CPU based and slow. Even external renderers like Renderman are CPU based and it takes far too long to render out entire scenes at the pace I like to work at without an optimized renderer. 

Once I discovered that Blender has a hybrid, CPU & GPU renderer I got pretty excited. My desktop build has an i7 4790K processor and dual 4gig. NVIDIA graphics cards so I'd be excited to try it out. 

1. Does anyone know the best way (if possible) to move Maya files into Blender? And is there a way to keep your assets like textures or animations with the file?

My dream would be to move the file from Maya into Blender, open up the hybrid renderer, set preferences and render out an entire scene. Would anyone know how I can make that dream come true? Thanks everyone

P.S: If blender ever makes Cycles its on entity rendering system, that would be awesome

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Other Software”

To get from Maya to Blender, you’re going to have to export to some exchange format (likely FBX). Some data will be lost in transit and you’ll have to re-link or re-create it once you have your data in Blender.

And…

P.S: If blender ever makes Cycles its on entity rendering system, that would be awesome

Cycles is a stand-alone renderer. Only a few applications have integrated it, though.

Use of obj, fbx, abc, dae… can make it happen.

Also, there are RedShift, Iray (hybrid, 3months free), Furryball… all GPU render engines for Maya.

& Cycles is on it’s own. If you’re able (got the means) you can make it work with Maya. As Insydium did for Cinema4D > Cycles4D

Don’t count on switching programs to make things “faster” (you aren’t giving much of an indication of what you’re doing now, how much time it takes, and how much of an improvement you’re looking for).

Depending on your scene and video cards, assuming they’ll work (dual 4 GB cards are not the same as one 8 GB) you may still not get the improvements you’re looking for without tweaking of scenes and render settings for best performance.