Is Maya becoming the industry standard? Advice on retraining in Maya also needed.
Hey my fellow green tooths,
Got a bit of a query for everyone,
I keep hearing this rumour floating around that Maya is to become the games industry standard and Max is to become more architectural software that it is already used for and I was wondering if anyone had knowledge or any thoughts on this?
While Im on the topic I was also wondering if people have any suggestions on the best way to move from Max to Maya? Ive been looking into signing up to a monthly subscription website to learn Maya and also enhance my skills and Ive been looking at 3Dmotive and digital tutors(just to name two) would this be a good rout to take and if so what website would people?
Advice is greatly appreciated XD
Got a bit of a query for everyone,
I keep hearing this rumour floating around that Maya is to become the games industry standard and Max is to become more architectural software that it is already used for and I was wondering if anyone had knowledge or any thoughts on this?
While Im on the topic I was also wondering if people have any suggestions on the best way to move from Max to Maya? Ive been looking into signing up to a monthly subscription website to learn Maya and also enhance my skills and Ive been looking at 3Dmotive and digital tutors(just to name two) would this be a good rout to take and if so what website would people?
Advice is greatly appreciated XD
Replies
A lot of modeling seems to be done more and more in zbrush with retopo, rigging and animation done in another package. Even with modeling done in Max or Maya there seems to be enough overlap and easy file sharing between the apps that at the early stages of the pipeline it doesn't matter what program is used. Once you get a little deeper into the pipeline it starts to matter a bit more.
I don't think it will hurt you to branch out and learn Maya, I'm just not sure you can write off max just yet. I would keep up on it max even if you switch entirely to Maya.
I switched from Maya to Max for work too! Again, it took me only a few nights of the same 3D buzz, and digital tutors tutorials. Its pretty straight forward and in hindsight learning both just encourages more opportunity!
I'd prefer to have softimage be the standard myself, and a couple companies do use it, but not having it available doesn't change the fact that it's still just step one in a pipeline that's growing to require modeling+sculpting+baking tools from multiple sources regardless.
For all other things said, I can say more and more character artists are using Maya as a primary package these days than studio max. But will any get phased out like anyone else has commented so far? No, I definitely don't think so. As it can be brought to light that studios in Japan like Kojima still use XSI(Softimage) as their primary package.
I think most studios in general will leave it an open option to you by standard when you come to work. Just as long as your work can end up where its package app desired by other departments and such.
"We think you know too much, if you would please come with us, sir. And please don't try to resist."
Seriously, both Maya and Max are industry standard. We work with many big studios all around the world and there's still plenty of Max projects.
What I suspect will happen in the future is that either Autodesk will sell one off so they don't have to maintain two competing products, or they'll port a lot of the Max polymodeling tools and the Max UI (as an option) to Maya and just roll with one package under the hood, but with two choices of appearance and interface for the artist.
I might pull a trigger on it to be honest. Was going to upgrade max but I'm not so sure anymore.
If your proficient with one, it won't take you long to learn the fundamentals of the other. Its only a tool :P.
I also started in Maya, modeling and switched to Max because at the time it was more widely adopted in the local studios and mod communities, it also had way better modeling tools. I landed a job doing environment work, using max and then started to transition to animation and I find myself wanting to switch back to Maya, but not for modeling. I still think Max has the Superior tool set for modeling even if the UI is a little disjointed, its not like Maya's UI is all that much better...
With the way Maya is structured (nodes) it makes rigging from scratch a whole lot easier, but max has pre-made rigs that shortcut all of that and with some scripting the rigging in max can be just as easy as in Maya but the viewport is most often slower, but max has started to close the gap and its mostly tolerable now if you get a decent video card and switch to nitrous.
It also seems to make max more stable (at the moment) and Maya seems to be quite a bit more buggy, but that's probably because max focused on stability for a few releases and has been blasted by user criticism that they aren't doing anything new. While Maya has been focusing on cramming new features and has stayed pretty buggy, maybe even gotten a bit worse. The Maya team will probably focus on stability soon and the Max team will add some new features and users will belly ache that max is leaving Maya in the dust... like they did when Max incorporated polyboost.
Oh woe to the republic... heh.
Engines that work with FBX/Alembic/etc become pretty agnostic to the 3D application used to generate them. So long as the 3D app can export files that contain the information the engine wants/needs, that is.
Although, artists passing complex assets back and forth would likely need to have the same app
e.g. it's likely that any animations would all be done in the one program across the board - but for standalone props or static items, it's not that big an issue.
Whereas studios whose engines use proprietary formats tend to stick to one app because it means less exporting tools to maintain. Especially if previous versions of the engine/tools have to be kept on as legacy.
There is the issue of application specific tools that sometimes get written.
Maintaining those across multiple 3D apps is a real nightmare, not just for the people writting two sets of tools but for the users also. People can use their package of choice for 95% of the work then switch to take advantage of the tools or to export but that's a pain and not always financially feasible for the studio, they have to maintain two seats of software where another artist only requires one.
Not to mention that studios get fairly significant discounts for buying licenses in bulk and maintaining one or two seats of software at full price can be a fairly significant burden. It might be the difference in buying the entire team some 3rd party specialty software or not.
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