Maya 2018 - Brief Review

CreativeSheep · Jul 2017

I read what is new in Maya 2018; there are some amazing features with regards to Character Animation. UV editing has some neat features and as for BiFrost not too much and some extras for MASH.

What you personally think of the upgrade is up to you that is my brief review.

Autodesk claims there are 3 million on Subscription for Maya; while there are roughly 13 million using illegal copies of Maya or Max worldwide.

gandhics · Jul 2017

3 million on Subscription for Maya..thats the biggest joke I ever heard. If thats the case, the Maya subscription only would be 2.4 billion annually.

Fansub · Jul 2017

From what i've read here and there, the biggest new feature seems to be a circularize script. Max, Blender and Modo are no longer valid competitors with such a huge innovation

Pirgo · Jul 2017

CreativeSheep said:

I read what is new in Maya 2018;

I'm sorry, but this is your brief review of Maya 2018 "What's New" text, not Maya 2018.

musashidan · Jul 2017

Pirgo said:

CreativeSheep said:

I read what is new in Maya 2018;

I'm sorry, but this is your brief review of Maya 2018 "What's New" text, not Maya 2018.

Exactly what I thought......

Maya has nowhere near 3 mill legit seats.

CreativeSheep · Jul 2017

I did say, brief review; as well what do you think the legit numbers are for Maya ? What I read regarding the real numbers for legit Maya users, sounds reasonable.

From the looks of it Autodesk has simply re-branded Mudbox 2017 at 2018; well I may have to purchase zBrush soon anyhow.

oglu · Jul 2017

yes mudbox 2018 is the same as 2017... but there is a new mudbox manager... there should some progress now...

Zack Maxwell · Jul 2017

I can't even find a list of Maya 2018 new features anywhere

zweek · Jul 2017

http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2018/ENU/?guid=GUID-6E87DC1E-3E18-45DD-834D-E34AAE5DA655

click on the items on the left (What's New in Maya 2018)

my god, shift extrude is back!!!

also

Global symmetry - not what i expected

oglu · Jul 2017

the release notes are online now...
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/sites/default/files/Maya_2018_Readme_enu.htm

radiancef0rge · Jul 2017

I believe this was predominantly a stability release. but I might be wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Zack Maxwell · Jul 2017

radiancef0rge said:

I believe this was predominantly a stability release. but I might be wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It added a large number of nice, relatively small improvements. UV mapping and retopology seem to have gotten a lot.

Hair grooming in particular seems to have gotten the largest improvements, which I don't really care about.

throttlekitty · Jul 2017

Not really a huge omg release in modeling terms, but global symmetry sounds fabulous! Tension deformer is hot shit too! Nice to see more UV love, the MASH scatter and circularize are nice to see natively though we've had scripts for all this. I'm sad to see the legacy viewports gone, but it sounds like VP2 has a lot of improvements. I'm hopeful over the Render Setup fixes, unfortunately I don't see "Renamed Render Setup to..." in the list.

Some stuff cherrypicked from the tasty changelog:

MAYA-76851 Applying bevel to an edge changes UVs in unexpected ways

MAYA-69911 Bevel: Add segments to edge causes Maya to crash ************** yus.

MAYA-72226 Bevel: Double faces created during bevel operation

MAYA-74093 Bevel: Overlapping faces created on decagon n-gons with chamfer OFF and Force parallel ON

MAYA-75238 Snap to vertex is slow

MAYA-49354 Thickness generates mangled mesh

These make me happy

MAYA-81391 Booleans: Redundant vertices generated after running Boolean operations

MAYA-67034 Memory leak while hovering over UVs in UV Editor

MAYA-58351 Memory leak with Preselection Highlighting and UV Editor

O_o very interesting!

MAYA-71853 Isolate UV's does not fully isolate UVs

Can... can we finally...? This is/was a huge annoyance working with a typical environment piece where UVs are all over the place and stacked up going hither and thither.

MAYA-79298 Hypershade hotkeys do not work (and gives errors) when Hypershade panel is docked in a window

This has been bugging me for a while but I haven't looked around much. Except I work with the HS as a window, and the HS hotkeys have never worked since I remapped my viewport number keys, so I can't do the expand/collapse thing. Anyone know the trick here?

beefaroni · Jul 2017

Yay

Harden edges along texture border

You can now easily harden all polygon edges that lie along a texture border via the Soften / Harden Edge command or cut seams along all hard edges by using Auto Seams.

YAAAY

Convert to Contiguous Edges

You can now use the Ctrl + right-click marking menus to convert the current selection to Contiguous Edges. For more information, see Select Contiguous Edges Options.

(why did this take 5 years though

)

I know these were available by scripting but it's nice to have it finally baked into the program.

Zack Maxwell · Jul 2017

It will be amazing for people using Maya LT, though.

Now if only they would integrate GoZ and Houdini Engine, the way they did Substances.

CreativeSheep · Jul 2017

@Olgu - Mudbox manager ?

CreativeSheep · Jul 2017

@oglu
Mudbox manager ?

oglu · Jul 2017

yes jill ramsay is the new product manager of mudbox. there is an update 1 in the making with some bugfixes and a second one with some new features.

zweek · Jul 2017

Global symmetry is not what i expected. I was hoping it would be similar to Modo where you can create a sphere for example, and see another sphere on the other side? symmetry modeling on an object level would be much faster than at a component level

Joopson · Jul 2017

zweek said:

I was hoping it would be similar to Modo where you can create a sphere for example, and see another sphere on the other side? symmetry modeling on an object level would be much faster than at a component level

Is this different than just creating an instance of the object, and scaling it to -1 across an axis? Sounds the same.

zweek · Jul 2017

Joopson said:

zweek said:

I was hoping it would be similar to Modo where you can create a sphere for example, and see another sphere on the other side? symmetry modeling on an object level would be much faster than at a component level

Is this different than just creating an instance of the object, and scaling it to -1 across an axis? Sounds the same.

yes, for me, the extra steps of doing that for each mesh is a pain. i have scripts to speed up the process but you cant just move the objects around, you need to go into a component mode to move the object around and see it on the other side, messing up your pivots.

thomasp · Jul 2017

gandhics said:

3 million on Subscription for Maya..thats the biggest joke I ever heard. If thats the case, the Maya subscription only would be 2.4 billion annually.

i would guess that this number includes all sorts of license types other than commercial? probably also all the old customers on traditional subscription for good measure? then throw in any installations that come as part of some bundle and perhaps they get to that number?

sounds like a huge user base if true, considering how niche 3D/CG seems to be in general and that they tell us that it's not maya that has the archivz, CAD and design markets cornered.

gandhics · Jul 2017

thomasp said:

gandhics said:

3 million on Subscription for Maya..thats the biggest joke I ever heard. If thats the case, the Maya subscription only would be 2.4 billion annually.

i would guess that this number includes all sorts of license types other than commercial? probably also all the old customers on traditional subscription for good measure? then throw in any installations that come as part of some bundle and perhaps they get to that number?

sounds like a huge user base if true, considering how niche 3D/CG seems to be in general and that they tell us that it's not maya that has the archivz, CAD and design markets cornered.

Maya is not bundled only with max. while max is bundled in all suites.
As you mentioned, Maya may rule feature vfx world. That market is peanut compare to other markets.
3mil active maya lic? no way.

thomasp · Jul 2017

i was thinking of student licenses probably being included in that number, that should boost the number of seats to great extent but hardly make a dent at the bottom line. they're surely trying everything to sell subscription as a great success so as to not get laughed at like adobe a few fiscal quarters ago.

throttlekitty · Jul 2017

zweek said:

Global symmetry is not what i expected. I was hoping it would be similar to Modo where you can create a sphere for example, and see another sphere on the other side? symmetry modeling on an object level would be much faster than at a component level

I looked again, they do state that "Symmetry is now respected across all tools." In the past few updates they've been adding symmetry features to modeling tools, which I assume this also refers to. I was hoping for that modo-style symmetry too.

Any of you got a source on that 3 million number? Asking for a friend.

CreativeSheep · Jul 2017

Here is the source. Remember 3 million isn't alot, one could say it's realistic numbers. We all should know that AutoCAD is Autodesk main source of income; surely not M&E.

Adobe Creative Cloud is doing well and I must admit, from reading pirating recent versions of Adobe software has become impossible; that also means that Adobe prices are a bit high. Autodesk taps into Adobe secret and no more pirate copy of Maya or Max will be floating around.

Pirgo · Jul 2017

CreativeSheep said:

Autodesk claims there are 3 million on Subscription for Maya; while there are roughly 13 million using illegal copies of Maya or Max worldwide.

Autodesk said total subscriptions grew to nearly 3 million. "Total" as in "total subscriptions", not Maya alone.

CreativeSheep · Jul 2017

I can say there are 2 Million Maya subscribers; as I was informed first hand by Autodesk Maya tech support.

oglu · Jul 2017

this article is old... carl brass is not the ceo of autodesk anymore...

throttlekitty · Jul 2017

I came across this looking while up some symmetry stuff, it should be a good tutorial/example of using the new Dash script despite the age. (apparently it got added in 2017 but i skipped that release)

gandhics · Jul 2017

CreativeSheep said:

I can say there are 2 Million Maya subscribers; as I was informed first hand by Autodesk Maya tech support.

it is pretty simple math. Let's say 1 subscription = $1000/year. Then 2 mil would be 2 billion/year,
M&E 1 year revenue is around $160mil last year.
Maya never have made more than 3dsMax.
So.. the best base could be around around $60mill per year.
Thats 60,000 subscripbers.