3ds max user learning MAYA

cw

Hello folks,

I want to become more conversant with maya. I love max, though slightly less nowadays thanks to a ever laggier interface and sometimes 'quirky' tools. We are getting more maya guys on the character team here than max guys at the moment and they extoll the virtues of this and that thing in MAYA every so often. I am interested in seeing if we can go app agnostic to at least some extent in our pipeline. The snag is I should really learn maya before diving feet first into that.

I'm noodling away on my own the way I would learn a new program normally, so far seems fine, but I just thought it would be good to ask the community for tips, tricks, and equivalents for various things which a max user might be used to. I might miss the wood for the trees otherwise.

First impressions, maya feels *much* zippier. Lack of a stack is surprisingly disruptive, though I can't put my finger on why. The history is kind of like a stack anyway, right? Marking menus seem great. I use quads a lot so it is similar. Just need to find where all the tools live.

Also, is there any go-to scripts I should get before starting to make anything proper? I know of NEX for retopo, but anything else?

My hit list:

1) basics
2) poly modelling
3) uvs
4) skinning
4) materials.

I'm on 1-2 at the moment, so any gotchas or tricks for the others would be awesome.

cheers,

cw

Grimm_Wrecking

When Mistery got his jerb a good while back I dropped a list of hotkeys

Da Post

Only thing I've changed since then is I use bridge constantly now. It works fine as long as you don't try to create a fully enclosed bridge. Vimeo of showing my workaround that I use now.

Alot of good scripts here.

I personally couldn't exist without Funky's Image Plane Generator. There are some obsolete flags but it still works perfectly.

Personally I'd suggest turning off the shelf and learning things via marking menu and hotbox as they're infinitely faster.

Good luck with the learning man.

Edit: Maih UV Marking Menu for mirroring uvs or rather shifting them. There are tons of options tho, just depends on how you work.

McGreed

I got a .doc here with all the shortcuts, which I made when I was trying to learn maya. It's for easy printing: http://www.mcgreed.dk/downloads/quick_reference/Maya_Quick_Referance_Card.doc

cw

thanks chaps, I shall digest the goodness over the weekend!

Mark Dygert

They roughly do the same stuff. It's great that you're learning both, I think more people need to get out of their camps and learn both. A lot of awesome tools get created because someone said "yea but in XYZ you can do it like this..." sometimes something better than what both apps have natively gets created.

I cut my teeth on Maya then learned Max which I found easier to learn, probably because I worked out a lot of the generic noobish mistakes in Maya. I've tried to keep up with maya over the years and I could switch back to using it but I prefer max, mostly because we use it at work.

cw wrote: »

The history is kind of like a stack anyway, right? Marking menus seem great. I use quads a lot so it is similar. Just need to find where all the tools live.

In max it's a bit more flexible, you can reorder the Modifier Stack, copy and paste modifiers and travel up and down the stack making non-destructive changes on any level. The Modifier Stack is really handy if you're the type of person to use modifiers like bend, melt, taper, twist, symmetry, morpher, skin, noise bla bla bla then its probably more useful. Typically character guys don't bother too much with that those types of workflows, but environment guys can relay heavily on it.

One thing that bugged me when I went from Maya to Max to Maya again and then back to max, heh. Was how Maya recalculates the triangulation of the hidden edges. It makes making a model perfectly symmetrical really hard. Hopefully they've come up with a way around the forced tri stripping in more recent releases...

The one Major advantage Maya has that I've run into, is Dual Quaternion skin weighting. It's beautiful... seriously brings a tear to my eye. Oh and outliner, but there's a maxscript for that, oh and hotbox/marking menus those rock too. The quad menu is largely ignored in max by man uses and for good reasons.

Maya's spline tools are kind of wonky, converting a spline to geometry is a pain and they sometimes twist and knot up requiring weird fixes. I think MoP created a mel script that makes it as easy as working with splines in max. If you use splines for geometry like trim, wires, piping, its super helpful.

Maya recently got a major upgrade to its skin weighting tools, which is great.

I really really like how the UV editor in maya isn't dependent on a modifier.

Max's modeling tools rock even as disjointed as they are (broken up across modifiers and in ribbons). Supposedly Maya was working on that but I haven't fully checked them out since 2009, when they where still pretty crappy.

They both still suffer from bloat and UI inconsistency.

cw

Hey thanks Mark, that's a great summary. I'll keep my eyes peeled for the triangulation.

We're not officially planning to change over at work or anything currently, I just think it is a good idea to view the world from the other side and all that.

Thanks a lot for all your help so far guys, I totally agree with the notion that people sometimes are bogged down in their respective favourite app - I'm sure there's good on both sides!

m4dcow

Mark Dygert wrote: »

One thing that bugged me when I went from Maya to Max to Maya again and then back to max, heh. Was how Maya recalculates the triangulation of the hidden edges. It makes making a model perfectly symmetrical really hard. Hopefully they've come up with a way around the forced tri stripping in more recent releases...

I've never run into this myself and I've been using Maya since version 7, although I haven't been looking for this type of thing.

I just tested with 2011, a few different methods and everything was symmetrical after triangulation, so I guess it might be solved

Mark Dygert

So the hidden edges form a V along the center seam and face the opposite direction on the mirrored side? And it's that when you click on another mesh and come back to it?

Or a different test would be you can flip hidden edges and they stay flipped without having to define them?

I'll grab the demo of 2012 when I get home and test it out. The last time I messed around with it (maya 2009 I think) it still had that issue. It would be awesome if it didn't complain about tri-stripping when importing meshes from max that had flipped hidden edges... this could be some really good news

I searched around and I found this old thread that detailed the problem... but I haven't found anything that says the problem is fixed.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=41011

Grimm_Wrecking

When you mirror they do flip to form a V now in most cases and will stay that way, however, to flip edges they still need to be manually defined though that's not to say I didn't miss a setting somewhere.

But if you triangulate a mesh automatically and need to flip edges around there is a flip edge setting that rotates it 90* (at least on square quads) and you can flip it til it faces the correct direction. So if you neeeded to flip a number of edges in the same direction you could select them all and flip and then press G till it faces the right direction.

Also if you manually tweak geometry there is still a threshold that you can move an opposing vert at which maya will automatically flip the invisible triangle.

m4dcow

Most of my tests stayed symmetrical throughout, there was the case where I created a cube with sub divisions where it would not be symmetrical (triangle wise) at first, but as soon as I start moving verts but keeing it symmetrical the invisible edges would become symmetrical, on the non planar edges.

So then I tried exporting a cube that was symmetrical, but with hand made loops placed and re-imported it to see how it would strip and it was still symmetrical.

However if I did try to define an edge with the split tool that was different than the invisible edge and then delete it, it would pop back to how it was pre split.

From what I can see Maya seems to assign particular invisible edges based on the planarity (is that even a word?) of the surrounding polygons.

Also apart from creating primitives that happen to be symmetrical, when objects are exported as obj then re-imported they have the same invisible edges as when they were exported, so there is some sort of data (be it vert order or whatever) that defines where those edges occur.

cw

Right I'm going in with both feet. At home I am not going to use 3dsmax until I finish this current project in maya. It might be tough but I will do it, and it will be fun. I can post screens here and so on and hopefully after that I will be set.

brandoom

Not to hijack,

but with the newer versions of Maya, is there a button or option to switch all the controls to that of Max?

ie, middle mouse button to zoom, pan, and tumble?

cw

Pah, what do you take me for? A beginner? . I can handle the defaults. If it was like max where would be the challenge! :d

Warheart

Good luck cw. I think the frustrations are worth it in the end going in either direction between Max and Maya. The more bilingual people the better imo

Wrath

Mark Dygert wrote: »

They roughly do the same stuff. It's great that you're learning both, I think more people need to get out of their camps and learn both. A lot of awesome tools get created because someone said "yea but in XYZ you can do it like this..." sometimes something better than what both apps have natively gets created.

I worked exclusively with Max since it's release and know it pretty well, inside and out. I had to switch over to Maya for about a year and found it very alien at first. The biggest issue was just not having a true understanding of what Max was actually doing under all the fancy modifiers, dials, and buttons. Maya is much more transparent, modular, and unified. I like to say that Max is a more polished tool, while Maya is a more universal tool-box. If you know Max, can think in the Max way and work in the Max way, it's a great package. If not, it's a bit trickier than Maya to really dig in and figure out how to change it up.

Maya taught me to think about 3D elements in different ways, what a node was, how parameters could connect to each other. After working with it for a while and going back to Max, I pretty much had to start digging into scripting just get regain some of that control and flexibility. That, has opened up a world of options for me. Turns out, max treats these things very similiarly...but it's all just buried under scripts. Pretty much everything you can do in Max is a script, most of which can be accessed through your own scripts or done in a completely different way. I took hooking things up in Maya for a while for me personally to get that concept.

So it's good to branch out and look at other pacakges if for no other reason than to give yourself a different perspective on what you're actually doing in your favorite software.