Why is Maya the industry standard?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
41

In my field (graphic design) Blender is perfect – for me, using Maya would be like hitting a nail with a cruise ship. Like many of you here, I’ve used just about every 3D program you can name and probably some that you’ve never heard of (remember Raydream Designer?), so I consider myself knowledgeable enough to say that Blender can hold its own against the big boys, and it keeps getting better all the time.

I used Lightwave for a lot of years and I still visit the LW forums every now and then to see what’s going on over there – every time there’s a discussion about what LW lacks or needs to do, Blender gets mentioned – a lot. Blender has far surpassed LW in my opinion, so we’re setting our sights on passing the next one. Believe me when I say, the paid 3d programs are looking in their rear-view mirror and seeing that orange “B” logo gaining on them.

42

Honestly, the fellow animators I’ve met so far have had no problem switching over to the “local” software - they’ve bitched about it for sure, but they went and learnt it and found that it was not so bad. One came from XSI to Maya and was quite disappointed - another came from Maya to 3dsmax and found it was a hassle to work with - as did I. But in the end we adapted, and that’s what matters - even though it makes the job a little les smooth.

I think asknarin has summed up the situation quite well, even though I don’t completely agree on the fact the Maya is surpassed in all aspects of rigging by Blender (some things you just can’t do with Blender, but that’s a subject in and of itself).

43

iam use both blender and maya and for me maya looks better
1)arnold renderer >cycles
2)maya tool organization absolutely destroy blender
3)maya rigging and costraints its more powerfull than blender
4)i thing everyone will agree maya its the industry standard on animation
5)hair,smoke ,cloths,fluid,particles maya its better than blender
the only field blender win maya its in the modelling workflow
but that doesnt mean maya modeling tools its suck its also pretty good
in the end maya will be always better than blender autodesk its a massive company that spent million of dolars on rnd,
blender for what it is its really a amazing program but it will never be a industry standard

2 Likes
44

Hey ! Another one of ( … these … ) threads.

There is a quite simple answer I think and it just needs historical context.

Maya was originally created and designed right from the get go to cater for animation and VFX studio pipelines and workflows. This was the main priority and they answered a big need at the time. Maya is and always has been the ultimate studio pipeline king. It’s less an app and more like a system and infrastructure that can be customized for individual tasks and users and easily plugged into multiple other things.

The confusion comes when people are talking about 3D apps and what works best from an individual user experience. Maya has never been the most intuitive or nimble user experience as an app. It’s mostly been designed for people working in a studio system and keeping to individual disciplines and tasks for the most part. When used by a single person in a more generalist ( all round artist user capacity ) it’s quite often a nightmare to work with. But it was never really designed with that in mind. It’s funny that it is so many peoples first experience of a 3D app while at collage because there are so many ways where it could be seen as unsuitable as a beginner educational app. Especially for a typical stand alone student project.
So Maya got there first as the ultimate pipeline king. Softimage although it started out as the original top 3D animation software, was left playing catch up a bit. In the end it morphed into the quite lovely XSI. But then that’s another story I guess. But by that time Maya had already become deeply embedded into so many studio pipelines. So it never really made up the lost ground.

But it never used to just be all about Maya of course. Lightwave was always traditionally tops for quick turn around high quality TV VFX work and was greatly loved by small studios and individuals. 3DS Max was always the most popular in video games and also TV and architectural viz and is also… or at least was … the most popular generalist 3D app out there. 3DS Max was my first 3D app and by far my favorite for working in a generalist capacity until I got more deeply into using Blender. I did so many jobs in 3DS Max that just would never have been possible in Maya in the time.
Another thing about Maya to bare in mind is it’s always been incredibly unforgiving. If you make a little mistake somewhere down the pipe then it can come back to bite you later big time and often be very hard to fix. Which is quite a problem when working in a generalist capacity. Especially when up against time pressures. 3DS Max and Lightwave and now Blender have always been incredibly flexible and forgiving in that regard.

Where this would relate to Blender as I guess this is what this might all be about, is that Blender came together with different goals in mind. It has traditionally followed a very different path to the others to some extent. But more recently Blender has been shaping up to be a very serious and capable option. Especially for individual creators and small studio production’s.
The main pipeline draw back’s in the last few places I was working at regarding Blender integration are Python 2 integration and Alembic support. So it’s been a little hard and not obvious for an average small to medium studio to build a pipeline around up till now. But this will change very soon. And the Blender Institute are even building their own studio pipeline system around the newly launched Blender Animation Studio. This time it seems to be the aim that it will be a pipeline system that can be easily used and adopted by everyone. Blender’s progress recently has been so incredibly rapid. So I guess it can seem a bit confusing as in … Why is it not used more professionally ?

When Maya 1.0 was first developed they created a sort of open movie style project alongside to help test the software’s pipeline and tools called ‘ Bingo.’ It’s quite interesting now to look back and compare this to some of the Blender Institute open movies. Everything is always moving and always in flux. Especially in this industry and creative field.

Another interesting conversation might be … Why were nurbs patches in character animation a thing ?

45

wish I knew, I started on Auto cad, moved to Max, then Blender, Zbrush, and even some Cinema4D. Learned all easily and use / love them all. Maya being such an industry standard I’ve tried to pick up multiple times only to spend my whole day failing to do the easiest of functions and failing to do anything outside of uvwmaps. It’s full of counter intuitive actions and buggy systems that you’re suppose to just know not to use all seemingly there just to take up space and cause pitfalls in production. I don’t know how people get any modeling done in that junker of a program.

1 Like
46

Speaking of industry standards is it really necessary to have to ‘create an account’ on each and every forum just to leave a single solitary comment?

That said, Softimage was the better software hands down. Just look at the power of ICE.
Still using it and it now has blender cycles ported over so I don’t have to deal with the antlogic of it’s
in my opinion deliberately sabotaged interface. Not one of my many colleagues can understand how something so powerful and free can have such a poor interface and workflow.

In fact, from a 25 year veteran of CGI there’s no real decent software. Maya, lol is a joke from a development point of view…90’s code before multicore yeah lets just bolt on a few more pieces of junk onto ol frankenmaya and charge for the ‘upgrades’.

In case you haven’t noticed Autodesk develops squat. They buy competition and if they can’t make cash from it it’s dead. See Softimage. If they don’t understand it…it’s dead.

Case in point…Mudbox. Oh what it could really be with real development.

I’m waiting and so are many people I know in industry for a modern robust piece of software with a smooth logical workflow.

As far as independent software goes Cinema4D is like a retarded Softimage. It can’t even handle dense scenes like Softimage or Maya can.

In the early days of the power PCs development was small and independent like today’s Redshift and their awesome team and software moved forward much quicker…now it’s a monopolized mega corporation holding everyone hostage and development has slowed to a crawl as far as flagship software is concerned.

Just very frustrating to fight ancient technical maladies more than actually working.
Come on how many of you have wasted a day in front of Maya and basically got nothing done because it’s old ancient garbage? When Maya came out we joked it was the long awaited animation plug-in for Alias/Wavefront. At that time Softimage was way ahead of the game as far as character animation was concerned. Maya was released just before Softimage’s rewrite to XSI and so studios dove in because Maya was new and was better than most anything at the time. I know many who loved it when it came out but hate it now because of what Maya has become and what Autodesk did to it.

Come on Autodesk write a new flagship software for today’s computer hardware…no no I mean develop it in house…no buying something from an independent developer…what’s that, can’t do it?
Just what I thought…the Commodore of the 3D world.

If by some miracle someone does decide to code something new, look me up for development. Why, because I want to help make a great piece of software everyone can use and be proud of.

1 Like
47

remember turbo silver, sculpt animate 4d, Aladdin, Imagine on the Amiga?

1 Like
48

I do yes. I tried to render the scene with the checkerboard floor and the metal ball in Sculpt4D and it would have taken days. I had an Amiga 1000 with 1MB of RAM and I thought that was a lot.

49

Oh boy … another zombie thread.

“[Maya] is an industry standard” in part for the same reason that COBOL – though invented in 1959 – is(!) still a viable computer-programming language: (1) because it does the job reliably; (2) because you have a staff that knows how to use it productively; (3) for known-good compatibility with your existing workflow; and (4) because you’ve accumulated a massive and very valuable inventory of assets which successfully use it.

(COBOL, by the way, performs like a sonofabeech …) :smiley: But, I digress.

Today, Blender is also “an industry standard” for the same reasons, and plenty of companies have chosen it to support their workflow. (P.S. They didn’t do so “because it is free.” Nothing’s free.)

But – no tool – be it Maya or 3DS or even Blender – is typically displaced. There simply isn’t a “return on investment (ROI)” there, and nothing to counter the very real “business risk.” You adopt the tool(s) that you use, integrate them into an overall successful workflow that admittedly looks like a very strange garden of vines, and you make money(!) with it. All is well. :slight_smile:

50

So I suppose you’re an old hat at this? And of course the almighty video toaster and kikki stockhammer
with het lollipop and later wil wheaton pimping lightwave! Wow what a lifetime ago!
Me I cut my teeth professionally on Mainframe’s Reboot in Vancouver.
Still the best 3D job experience I ever had.
I was in university in the late 80’s when I got an Amiga, DCtV, a genlock and sound sampler.
Made good beer/pot money in University with that. Was in school for Aeronautics, but when Jurassic Park was released later on I said fuck that’s what I want to do, so I busted my ass and did it!
I love this so it’s never work.

51

You worked on THAT!?! They produced some of my favorite works, even with today’s capabilities.

52

Amiga? Still got one. Original(!) Macintosh? Got one. Original Apple-1 Motherboard? Don’t ask me where I hid it, or where I live. :smiley: (Along with a scattering of other electronic goodies that cost-too-much at the time.)

"Yes, I was there too." And I know that I was very privileged to be so. Yes, I still make my living from [one of] my hobby[ies]. “How lucky is that?”

Nonetheless: "really, it’s all software." And it’s really important that none of us forget that. At the end of the day, every one of us has to continue(!) to satisfy customers who just want to buy magic. Computer software is “the means to the end.” Never more nor less. And, while we are all, always, mindful of “the next truly astonishing technical development” (knowing full well that we’d very soon be dead-meat if we didn’t …), we also have contracts to fulfill. “So It Goes.™”

All that having been said: “it’s a balancing act, never an either/or choice.” Every good tool-box contains more than one good tool. And that’s what these things are: tools for the job.

Full Disclosure: I’m one of those people who “standardized on Blender” when it was :face_vomiting: " (Okay, I think that I can say that now, and I daresay you’d agree.) Still there. Being thoroughly familiar with “the proprietary software model,” and judging it neither as wrong nor right, I am very glad to have pitched my coin with open source.

53

Even older still

VU 3D on the Sinclair Spectrum :slight_smile:

image
image1280×665 283 KB

1 Like
54

Money, in one word. They made sure that their software was in Uni’s and colleges, they made sure that as many people were using it as possible.

Dont forget Industry Standard does not mean best, Houdini is hands down far better than Maya and indeed Blender in my opinion.

Maybe with 2.8 this will begin to change at a pace. Thing is big houses have invested a lot of time, money and training in Maya and will not walk away from that easily.

Also the Maya that MPC and the like use is not the version you will be using unless you work for them. Its a highly altered and enhanced version, thats why they employ software engineers who know MELScript, C++ and Python. Any tool they dont have they make.

1 Like
55

Oh yeah…dont forget the quantal or BoschFGS-4000 CGI system. Money for Nothin Dir Straits…Ian and Gavin animated for that…later the def leppard video lets get rocked, the kid was a test for Reboot if I remember correctly.

56

Yes, I did and it was a hell of a ride. We just made it up as we went along.
Long live ‘guided extrude’, lol.
I did both character animation and much design on the show as well.
In modeling we had the script and a model sheet and no art to go on
except the look and feel of the show. So we really had lots of latitude.

We were just kids really and you can see that youthful vibrance in the show.

Sometime it was difficult as we became better modellers to not make things
too good as it would offset the design style. Same went for the animators.

It’s really a pity what happened to the show and Mainframe in general.
If I remember correctly Rainmaker bought it and a psycho CEO there deleted all
the data.

57

Don’t get me wrong I understand the complexity of todays software and what it takes to integrate so many things to create a comprehensive package. I’m annoyed that development isn’t still going as strong as it was in the 90’s. After autodesk bought all they could the development cycle on relevant things slowed and development on useless things 'the turn table ’ took over…kinda like the windows 10 failure.
It’s an operating system, not a colorful cosmetic box. So again instead of fixing real issues and stabilizing windows 7 they made ‘bridge capital’ windows8 and put more effort on aesthetics instead of usability.

That’s why a new software is necessary for todays architecture… For now I still use Softimage because honestly there’s nothing to compare…still, to this day. Maya clusterfrack, C4d great but yesteryear in so many ways, houdini amazing but requires rocket science to do the simpliest tasks, 3DsMax yesteryear again.
Blender great it’s free but the interface from a pro viewpoint seems purposefully crippled/sabotaged. Maybe a backdoor deal with the paid companies to make sure it didn’t ever sink them? Possibly? I just can’t see how that illogical messy interface could get any approval from anyone.

And well we all know how human sheep love change even for the better.

1 Like
58

Have to agree with you. However 2.8 is going, be it slowly in the right direction. I always thought that Blender just went out of its way to do it differently to everyone else.

The old right click was one, but now we have collection, WTF is that all about, everyone calls them layers, its also pretty much an industry standard and has been long before Blender came about.

I really do not like change for change sake and if they really want to get more people to switch who are using other software then they still have a ways to go.

I am hopeful that Blender 2.8 is a wakeup call to the industry about costs, licences and maintenance costs. I am however not so sure there will be such a massive take up from the big studios that many Blender users think. Not because its not worthy, its just such a big change and they have big investments in their current software as far as pipeline, training, and software engineers.

59

Some names are arbitrary, the concept of layers in Photoshop, for example, makes spatial sense, one on top of the other in 2d space, whereas in Blender less so as it is a labels groupings of objects within a 3d space, not layered one on top of the other, so group or collection makes more sense to me as a naming convention. It’s a bit like using a stiffy icon for save…

60

Here’s my personal 2 cents about it.

Collections make much more sense than layers from the data model point of view. You can put a collection inside any hierarchy, but a layer is always a flat list that can not be nested. Collections as a concept are a much more powerful of an idea. The old layer system of clicking tiny buttons was pretty awkward anyways. There’s no point in supporting a clearly inferior concept even if it’s an industry standard. Collections are a superset of layers and thus if users want, can easily implement a layer system which then only becomes a user interface issue.

Plus I don’t think the industry is going to wake up. Autodesk and its stockholders won’t approve of lower margins. They will simply target some other source of revenue. None of these software packages are mass market products and the prices reflect that. Income = number of sales times the price of the product, put simply. Which is why there’s this boom of subscription scheme everywhere. A way to fleece more money from the limited number of users. There’s a limited demand for artistic creations, thus there are limited number of jobs that can be created. And the power law applies.

Is there a measure to see how many good jobs there are in the field of animated movies and shows, plus visual effects? It would be interesting to see if the number of professional artists working on it (who can justify paying more for their tools) has increased as the size of the industry has grown. Video games are a new field so it would be a lot more difficult to measure.

http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/16/power-laws-reveal-pattern-for-distribution-of-artistic-talent/

https://medium.com/@michaeltauberg/power-law-in-popular-media-7d7efef3fb7c