About a month ago now after coming up against some really poor issues with animation in blender (dreaded rvk’s), I decided to start looking at Maya.
Well I’m now a month on down the track and I’ve got to say from an animation point of view, Maya is truly amazing because it’ll do just about anything for you.
But here’s the thing. For all those dollars that it takes to purchase Maya it is really, really lacking in the modelling facilities that I have taken for granted with Blender.
In my point of view, Blender out ranks Maya’s modelling capabilities - by far. For a start, Maya doesn’t even have a separate 3D cursor, which makes it hard whenever you want to do anything fancy. Also the way Blender highlights part of the edge whenever you select a vertex is very handy when selecting the correct vertice from a hundred others (Maya doesn’t have this). Also the hide commend (key H in Blender) is very wishy-washy in Maya (try inverting your selection while some verts are hidden, and suddenly even the hidden ones are inverted too - now that’s crazy). And Maya doesn’t even have a “to-sphere” function, which is something I constantly use.
I know they’re all little things, but it all adds up - especially if you gonna pay US$7000.00 for Maya!
Oh and here’s a real big one. Whenever you select a vertex in Maya you then have to tumble around to make sure that you haven’t inadvertantly selected something on the other side, regardless of whether you’re in wire or solid mode.
Granted, I’m still new to Maya so I may be missing something.
But what I think I’ll do is to continue modelling in Blender and then import/export as an obj file to Maya. By sticking to level 0 vertices in Maya subd, I think I can go between the two applications without losing any modelling details.
Well that’s my thoughts at the moment. I’d be interested if anyone else has come across this situation when crossing over to another package.
about the seperate 3D cursor, just group your object to itself and add a locator to that group, you can make as many extra cursors as you like! Make a mel button for it if it takes to long
try inverting your selection while some verts are hidden, and suddenly even the hidden ones are inverted too
yeah that’s pretty irritating.
What do you mean with a ‘to-sphere’ funtion? I think what you mean is the soft modification tool in maya…
If you don’t want to select the other side of the model but only want to select what the camera sees, you can turn on backface culling by going to display- custom polygon display.
I agree. Maya is great for animation, but rather tedious for modelling. Although since blender 2.40 came out, blender meets my needs on the animation side as well.
Job- thanks for the tip on backface culling. That will be most handy
I’ve never tried maya, but i will be getting lightwave soon. from what i’ve read here’s what most people think. (I also included the type of person i think it would be :D. (Remember, these are just my opinions, plz don’t take offence.))
Maya= best animation (Popular Football Jock)
Lightwave= best modeling (Smart, nice, but lacking great looks.)
Blender= Med-High in all (Not always accepted at first, but a friend once you get to know them.)
I have used maya for years and…i have to say that, Blender cannot be compared with maya, especially the material editor of blender is too bad.
Hope 2.42 will have some things some one call “node” .
When Blender have a material editor like maya (node based material), and an rib exporter, then i’ll happy all days with it.
I used Maya for a project I did for Boeing, and I honestly didn’t like it. The interface is simply not well designed. A good interface has the common stuff at the surface, and the advanced not-used-so-much stuff buried a bit more. Maya just pukes it all on the screen. Everything is on the same level… or, if anything, the common stuff is buried deeper than the advanced stuff. It’s impossible to find anything.
And there are so many unexpected behaviors, too. I accidentally hit caps-lock once and spent a full two hours trying to figure out why my hotkeys were broken (caps-lock is interpreted as a held-down shift in Maya, as if it were a text editor).
Also, you can select other objects even when you’re in vertex/edge/face mode. This makes editing meshes problematic at best. Better hope you don’t accidentally grab that object behind the vertex you’re trying to select.
And don’t get me started about setting up render passes. They have a great concept, but the interface makes it a horrible pain, so it takes forever. I needed to do a ground-shadow pass, and I had to individually turn off the primary visibility for every single object. And there were over a hundred of them. I couldn’t just select them all at once and toggle the primary visibility check box. No, I had to it individually for each object.
And the animation system… bad interface. Their animation curves editor is really annoying (although Blender’s is worse, IMO). And the NLA system, although generalized to all objects (which is great), is terribly messy to deal with.
And its UV editor isn’t even as good as Blender’s (which itself is currently behind Max and XSI).
And its poly modeling tools are also behind XSI’s. And Wings3D, for that matter. And in some respects even behind Blender’s.
I could go on and on. I haven’t had many good experiences with Maya. Good ideas, bad implementation and interfaces. The hallmark of Maya.
However, there were two things I definitely liked about Maya:
Mel script (I like Blender’s Python better except that Mel has better access to program internals, so you can do more with it).
HyperShader (Maya’s marketing term for node based shading).
All in all, I prefer XSI.
I think Blender can learn a lot from Maya. In particular how not to do things. And honestly, I do see some nasty similarities between Maya and Blender. Blender’s interface (as many have pointed out before) could definitely use some work.
Ah… that felt good. Ranting about Maya always feels good…
i never said maya is easy to handle but you all also have to understand what maya is. it is not a toy and yes it requires some knowledge. but at least with maya i know that i can do everything the way i want to.
Yes,maya doesn’t have a great interface,but is a very good suite which lacks in texturing(uveditor)and polymodelling,but it’s very good in animation,rigging,and shading(but without mental ray the render it’s not
such good)and particles.
Where maya is absolutely great is in its internal design,node based.
You can do all you want,connecting nodes(all functions are nodes),or with mel,a thing not possible in blender.
The blender approach to scripts in my opinion is completely wrong,not because python it’s not good,but because all the time you must do yourself a series of programming task which make even the more easy stuff tedious,you must make small programs(and not small scripts).
Let’s say I want to control che rotation of an object with another object(or with a custom attribute),an easy task.
In maya(in xsi is much the same thing)or I connect the 2 node using the connection editor,or I make an expression or a mel script(mel expressions are really similar to melscript).
The expression is simpli:
bla.rotateZ=johndoo.rotateX,a line of code.
But if I try to make the same thing in Blender with python I need more than one line of code,but severals.For one object it’s not a problem,but try to control a rig with expressions(with several bones),ten line of code(maya)became 100 or more(Blender),rigging from python became a tedious task.
Scripting(or creating expression) it’s not real programming,but it has more to do with automation,it should help making your work faster not more complex.
XSI is not a toy either, but it has a far better interface than Maya. The guy I worked with on the Boeing project even went so far as to say that Maya doesn’t have an interface, and the user is pretty much required to build it for themselves (which we did, to some degree). The user shouldn’t have to do that (though the option to do so is always good).
I don’t buy into the idea that being a powerful application necessitates an obfuscated interface. That’s just an excuse. “Well, our app is super powerful, so obviously that means it’s impossible for it to have a clear, well organized GUI.” It’s ridiculous. In fact, I would argue that the more powerful and complex an application is, the more important it is to carefully and meticulously design a good GUI.
Eh… you did read my post, didn’t you? If you want a longer list, I’d be happy to extend it.
In any case, I’m not arguing over how powerful Maya is. It is powerful. I have yet to see evidence of it being particularly more powerful than some of the other apps out there, but it is powerful.
The issue is that even if it were leaps and bounds ahead of the other apps, that still wouldn’t excuse its interface.
renderdemon: I’m not arguing that Blender is better than Maya. I agree that Maya’s animation, shading, and particles are better than Blender’s. But there are other apps out there.
This is not a “unexpected behaviors”, Cessen, it’s just a …feature that you didn’t known
Actually we can tell maya do what we want automatically, just use mel.
Belive me, i have tried XSI, 3dMax, and back to maya because, it UI make my like easy. I mean when you familar with something, then your life is easy. And i familar with maya UI.
The first time i play with blender’s IPO curve, i just killed it and i thought “ok, forget this App”, but i tried one more, and familar, familar…
I like Blender because it’s free, small, and power. But there are some feature of maya that i wish blender will have is Blendshape (if you don’t use maya, then blendshape is morphing, meaning, you creat one obj, duplicate it, modify the duplicated, and create blendshape, then the first obj will transform to the second, very usefull in facial expression), and maya have a very strong bone, joint system.
I don’t try blender much, especially animation, but blender’s bone seem doesn’t have “orientation” ( don’t know to explan)
As I said before, Mel is one of the things I did like about Maya. However, you shouldn’t have to write scripts just to do something as simple as toggling primary visibility for a group of objects. In other words: it’s important to have powerful sripting available, but you shouldn’t have to use it to do basic things.
Same goes for a customizable interface. It’s important for it to be customizable, but the default should still be clean and well organized.
That’s a very good point. People tend to be more comfortable with what they’re used to. I’m comfortable with Blender, for instance.
However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of room for the UI to be improved. It just means I’m used to its particular combination of shortcomings and benefits.
I’ve been using Blender for about seven years, and I’ve only been using XSI for about one year. Blender is by far what I am more used to. But I still think XSI’s animation curves editor is significantly better than Blender’s. And Maya’s is better as well, for that matter.
Hey, I noticed that you wanted to export from blender into maya. Im looking foward to the full release of verse (http://blender3d.org/cms/Verse-Blender.verse_blender.0.html), although I havent really seen much news on it lately (and have been too busy to really look), though I have heard they are getting close to a full release.
Once fully released, multiple computers over a LAN or WAN will be able to work on the one scene at once, in multiple programs like blender, 3ds, maya etc. I had a go at the fixed exe for blender, and got it running over a LAN but not a WAN, but that may have been to do with the crappy router I have.
I’m not sure what your setup is, but if you are working on the one computer, you could just start blender and maya, and model in blender, at the same time having the models developing in maya
Iv’e only used maya in passing, but I thought it had something called ‘selection masks’ and ‘filters’ that could be used to prevent this sort of thing from happening?
i can’t imagine how you survived that whole time without backface culling though :o
don’t know to explan)