Now, I have nothing against Maya, and i understand that it’s more advanced than blender in many ways, but from my initial test…
memory usage:
1.4 Million Face model, smoothed solid view
Maya: ~600mb (Private RAM)
Blender: 250mb (Private RAM)
draw rate:
Maya: ~3.2 fps
Blender: ~4.3 fps
Startup (empty) memory usage:
Maya: 145mb
Blender: 30mb
nuff said… Flame away professional CGers :eyebrowlift2:
That’s just like comparing Trillian and Gaim.
Blender is built from the ground up for performance and speed. 'nuff said.
and maya is suppose to be build for what…? compatibility? I know it’s not exactly a fair comparison, but the high memory usage alone is enough to deter semi-profesisonals to use maya for their work.
Memory is cheap. If you are to use Maya, you should invest in decent amount of memory.
what happens if blender’s viewport coding had an overhaul and could handle say 5 million polygons in realtime, would you still think the same way. Maya would use a hell of a lot more memory than blender with this poly count…and i dont think maya could handle this much in real time on a semi-professional machine…or the average joe kind of machine…
anyway both are good apps…but i like blender more!
You brought up a good point, in comparison to a game engine, the OpenGL viewport in Blender is very slow… any decent graphic engine can pump out 5million quad at 10fps on my PC, while blender struggles with 1million, why?
you could do worse than blender or maya.
Check out post # 631 on this page … I rendered about 20 million polygons and maya used about 600 MEG RAM. cinema 4d would maybe do about one million and use all my 2 GIG of RAM.
Blender handles RAM quite well (for my projects)
i’m pretty sure maya was built for a professionals, who can actually afford to have renderfarms in their basements and stuff like that. 
while blender is designed for the average cg joe to able to use it no problem.
Cause blender’s OGL code is stuck at 1.1. This is a problem. Anyway, check this out for a better explanation. 
Now, I have Blender, Maya, 3ds, and Form Z (I’m not mega-rich; I just work at a museum design firm ), and memory usage isnt that big an issue for me. Obviously, each of these are quite different, but I just love Blender the most, mainly because of it’s interface, which allows me to work much faster than in Maya for example (although form z is unmatched for architectural design). In Blender, every thing you need is hotkeyed or in a contextual menu, and you can access almost anything extremely quickly. In Maya, one must remember where
all those damned buttons are which clutter up the sides of the screen. Maya is a very powerful program, but when I am doing a project for fun I always use Blender.
*hugs yew
i like you fella:p
In my opinion Maya is really good for animation - if your TD set up nice rigs. Doing almost anything else sucks!
They tried to make it too flexible - you can do anything because you have to program it yourself… for their particle systems, if you want the size of the particles to be varied you have to write a script to do it. AND you have to add the variable that controls the birth size yourself - it doesn’t even default to having the variable!
Sorry, I use Maya at work and whenever I’m not just animating I want to kill myself.