Migrating to Maya, sigh.

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

I love blender, but i will be going to the Vancouver film school in May, 2010 for
3d animation / FX / and modeling, the program they use is Maya.

I have almost a year to migrate to Maya, looking at it on you-tube, it appears to have some similarity’s, or view navigation, i don’t know,

Anyone who reads this, and has used Maya, just give me some input or your learning experience, how long to start getting a hang of it.

I wont stop using blender, i’ll probably use blender forever, but for now i have to move on to Maya.

#2

I used quite a lot Motion builder, which I guess has similar animation interface to blender 2.5, and it’s great. Regarding modelling, and mainly UV mapping, it’s probably much better in blender.

But you don’t have to be afraid, switching there and back again isn’t that hard, and you can still use blender for a lot of things and use the great importers/ exporters.

#3

Why the long face? Maya rocks… just give it a chance. Initially you will probably have problems of instinctively hitting wrong keys (watch out hitting S… it’s like I in Blender and inserts a key frame) but once you get into it you both Blender and Maya can compliment each other very well… really helps you to see the strengths and weaknesses of each program when you have another point of reference.

#4

Customise the living daylights out of it. By default, Maya only has lousy hotkeys or hotkeys for stuff you never use.

And save often and create backups.

#5

Good luck, I really suck at switching between programs. But I’m sure “I have experience in Maya and Blender” couldn’t be a bad thing to have on resume… unless your applying to be a mascot.

#6

I was using Maya, Max and Blender at one point in my studies. Not ideal, but it is do-able.

http://www.3dbuzz.com/xcart/product.php?productid=32 - Not cheap, but we did project 3 as a class. Covers a fair amount of cool stuff, most (if not all) of which can be replicated in Blender.

Not too familiar with general Maya tuts.

All the best with the overlap!

#7

Maya has more tools and options to offer in many areas.
It comes with a great tool set - so there is plenty to learn.
But since you know Blender you should actually have an easy
start into it.

I would be happy to use Maya and their awesome shading tree system.

#8

In my experience it crashed… a lot, and often for no reason. YMMV though. But like Zwebbie said, save often and make backups!

#9

In my experience its definitely better in this regard than max, but as you said, YMMV,
I’ve crashed 2.5 test builds(obviously alpha) seemingly at random as well. :slight_smile:

#10

IMHO Maya is a great application. It took me two days to be able to animate in Maya, so transfer is not much of a problem. Of course, it will take some time to get used to the change, but once you became familiar with the basics of the app, everything will be relatively simple. Aaaaand… Maya is really customizable - you can change keyboard shortcuts and whatnot. Maya is also immensely powerful and versatile app… you know, there is a reason they made Shrek in Maya…

#11

It’s got things I miss a lot (channel box, command line, nodes for things other than materials, textures and compositing) but a lot of what Blender has makes me super-angry I ever payed money for Maya. Case in point mouse-based Move/Scale/Rotate (as opposed to click-based) is probably why I don’t have carpal tunnel syndrome.

Autodesk also has a hilarious short-coming, which Adobe has as well. In pay-to-use commercial software, such as Maya and Max, they’ll have a bunch of fancy add-on programs they extra charge money for, such as Renderman and MotionBuilder. As a result, five years go by, and the technology has quickly outstripped these tools. However, because Autodesk wants to keep protecting that revenue stream, they never just add it in permanently to their software!

Meanwhile, Blender is free, so the only questions of functionality that need to be asked are “is this technically attainable?” and “does someone feel like doing the work?” So as a result, Blender gets new toys whenever people figure out how to implement them. I haven’t used Maya since 8.5, but even on 8.5 they still charged you extra if you wanted hair and fur. WTF, right?

#12

Oh yeah, and the connection editor. I miss Maya’s connection editor. (But mostly I miss the channel box.)

#13

I wish Autodesk didn’t discontinue their Maya PLE, now it’s only a 30 day trial, which is not enough time to really learn the program.

#14

There is nothing wrong with learning more then one 3D package. It helps give you a broader view of 3D in general. I also use Maya, Blender, Houdini, RealFlow, and in the past worked with 3ds Max and Lightwave so in the past decade I have had to learn multiple applications for multiple reasons and there was always a few bumps in the road. Nothing comes without a learning cover. No 2 programs are identical so just accepting that some things are done completely different at times, even if it doesn’t make sense. Your first week or so may or may not be pleasant. It may take time to start getting used to Maya but you just have to practice patience. Additionally the director of Durian is an SCAD who had to use Maya for his studies. So you aren’t alone in your position.

What cekuhnen mentioned about about the shading networks is wort looking into. In fact the node based workflow is so powerful in which you can connect just about any attribute of any type of node into another to create a desired effect is probably one of the strengths of Maya. VFS is a good school, I know one of the instructors up there. He beta-tests some software for my company.

#15

Yeah you’ll be fine. I use Maya at work and Blender at home. What I do a lot now is model and UV in Blender and then take stuff across by exporting as an FBX from Blender. It’s working great for me so far.

One of the main maya advantages at the moment is the bundling of Mental Ray in the package. The external renderers Blender has available are all really promising but mental ray has quite a few years of development time over them.

Also, Autodesk combined both versions of maya into one version when they released the latest version (2010) so as long as your school keeps their maya licenses upto date, you’ll be playing with the fur, muscles, fluids and other goodies that were only in the past available in the expensive version.

#16

You guys ROCK, i sighed because i love blender, not dislike Maya. I might see myself trying to make Maya into blender via shortcut key edits, but i will try to learn it as is; i just need to re-do my computer so i have a stable platform to learn on.

One thing i like about Maya and max etc. is that it seems auto-desk provides, (by charge) a network rendering solution, i find it impossible to get a render farm going in blender, so i hope it fulfills me there, and nodes, i always use nodes now, so this will be a pretty sweet transition.

Thanks for your feedback, i will post work from VFS, and see if i can rout blender into my work flow.

#17

hey,
I took a computer animation class and had to use Maya. I know maya users hate blender’s interface, but it’s just as bad going the other way. I really REALLY missed having a hotkey for extrude, so I’d have to agree with the bit about changing all the hotkeys asap. No sculpt built-in either. Having to render particles with software and everything else with hardware was annoying too.
The best workaround I found was to keep a copy of Blender handy for modeling and just use Maya for rigging, animation, etc, although that may not be the path you want to choose. That being said, muscles, fur, fluids, and physics are all cool things that seem to work slightly better in Maya so it’s not all bad.
Also, Maya has Python scripting, but it’s not that great because most of it is just RunMELCommand(“a MEL command”,“FirstParameter=1stparam”…). So, I found it was better just to go ahead and learn MEL directly.
That’s all that pops into my head immediately. In any case, I wish you the best of luck in film school, and I’m sure you’ll find plenty of opportunities to come back to Blender now and again nonetheless. :wink:

#18

I might have to learn Maya soon too :frowning:
I’m in the same boat as you!

I’m having problems finding what the equivalent features are called in Maya. What is the Action editor called in Maya. The NLA editor is called Trax and the IPO Editor is called Graph Editor but whats the Action editor called?

Oh found it, its called the Dope Sheet!

#19

there’s no multires sculpt, true, but there is a brush-interface called artisan. found under mesh->sculpt geometry.

i hear you about the hotkeys, but then again, at least maya has always allowed you to assign your own hotkeys, so the blender->maya transition is smoothed somewhat. for anyone going the other way (until 2.5 of course), you were stuck, so the transition from anything->blender was always gonna be a little harder.

#20

You really shouldn’t be despondent about this, here’s why:

  1. The Vancouver film school is awesome.
  2. Having experience of multiple apps only strengthens your cv.
  3. Maya is a pretty awesome package.
  4. Blender will still be there for you, any time you wish to use it.