1) The curve editor drastically affects viewport playback speed. You have to either close it, or deselect everything which you are constantly having to do each time you play your animation. Or you forget to do that and then suddenly are reminded when it drops to -10fps, you stop, close it or deselect and then hit play again. Doing that a few hundred times a day will have beating your monitor with your keyboard.
I have, it works great for max objects but biped still causes it to chug. One of these days I'll get around to making a rig from scratch. One of these days.
Honestly, if it is for games, i am very surprised no one mentioned Maya LT. It is a great starting point for any new-commer. For one it will allow you to go ahead and learn Maya at a much more reasonable cost. (big bonus for the budget minded). It also prepares you for the big time. I love every 3d app as each one brings something unique to the table. Modo, 3DS Max, blender and even lightwave for that matter all have their special little something that they do best... But where it really matters (putting bread on the table) knowing Maya / Maya LT is your most wise choice. If i were to do it all over again, I would learn Maya LT then as allowable by my budget learn others for fun / their specialty.
yeah it always seems when talking to animators insisting that max is so particularly bad for animation, they are either thinking of their experiences with character studio/biped from years back (surely no one is using THAT anymore???) - or they are merely passing on hearsay.
btw. on the maya side of things - is the skinning still so unusably slow that everyone just segments their meshes and links them to bones to have any sort of realtime playback in the viewport? that would be MY maya stoneage experience that i fondly remember.
Mark, you forgot the whole if you press shift in max, it crashes... at least, while animating.. you can't shift select controls or bones.... in my experience with CAT, at least. and that is EVERY time. not just once in a while. And since you shift click on keys to duplicate, it can cause some issues when you press it by accident.
the graph editor is indeed chuggy as hell, and if you`re zoomed out at all in it, if you go to drag select keys, what appears to be in your selection doesnt always get selected.
the whole thing just chugs a lot when animating. doesnt matter how good your comp is.
Mark, you forgot the whole if you press shift in max, it crashes... at least, while animating.. you can't shift select controls or bones.... in my experience with CAT, at least. and that is EVERY time. not just once in a while.
It's possible to select multiple controls using the 'cntrl' key. Shift doesn't doesn't appear to do anything in 2011. Tried to recreate the crash, using the shift key.. but no luck here.
And since you shift click on keys to duplicate, it can cause some issues when you press it by accident.
the graph editor is indeed chuggy as hell, and if you`re zoomed out at all in it, if you go to drag select keys, what appears to be in your selection doesnt always get selected.
the whole thing just chugs a lot when animating. doesnt matter how good your comp is.
My pc was built in 2003. Winxp 64/ a single 2.01ghz, w/1 gig of ram.
Seems speedy enough to animate the bulk of characters i've been given.
Is it possible that there's a driver conflict on your machine?
Although at the moment that sounds about right, things might change now with Maya LT.
I don't animate personally but I know an animator who worked on Darkfall and uses CAT all the time, says its awesome. Didn't know about the lag though XO
Mark, you forgot the whole if you press shift in max, it crashes... at least, while animating.. you can't shift select controls or bones.... in my experience with CAT, at least. and that is EVERY time. not just once in a while. And since you shift click on keys to duplicate, it can cause some issues when you press it by accident.
the graph editor is indeed chuggy as hell, and if you`re zoomed out at all in it, if you go to drag select keys, what appears to be in your selection doesnt always get selected.
the whole thing just chugs a lot when animating. doesn't matter how good your comp is.
My sympathies for any animator forced to use CAT since autodesk bought it and stuffed it inside of max. If someone can get a stable version of it to work as advertised I think they should stick with it. On the surface it seems great and it was before they tried to integrate it. They broke the rig re-sizer early on and just keep ham-handily smashing the square peg into the round hole.
We hit so many bugs and crashes with it that we stopped using it for production. We're on subscription and the next version of max should be coming out in April sometime, I really hope they worked on the issues with CAT, I do like animating with it, when it doesn't break.
I prefer Maya navigation, its what almost all 3D applications use so switching back and forth is easier when it all works the same. But the implementation inside of max really makes a mess out of selecting. They also didn't account for maya nav in any of the brush tools so you can't use any of the brush shortcuts if you're set to maya nav. I've gone back to max nav until they figure out what the hell they are doing.
But the implementation inside of max really makes a mess out of selecting.
Hah, yes. That was one of the most half-assed attempts at integrating a new feature that I've ever been witness to. Tried it for a grand total of 4 minutes before switching back, head bowed.
I have, it works great for max objects but biped still causes it to chug. One of these days I'll get around to making a rig from scratch. One of these days.
THIS WORKS! but only if I turn off stats(7). Xview causes a similar amount of lag and the few people that have had issues with that have improved it by updating video drivers, which I'm off to do right now.
Thanks for the script! It was working great for non-biped stuff and now it's working great for biped too, as long as I turn off stats. I'll probably add a toggle to the script that turns off/on viewport stats if it's running.
ya, max navigation is terrible. So buggy too. Again, it could just be CAT, but I feel the nav is Max. Zooming it on a far object tends to make the zoom increments so small that you cant do anything. or you go to zoom out a tiny bit and each roll-click of the mouse wheel will zoom WAAAAY out so that you cant see anything anymore. Rotating around, having to select a control to spin around it is rediculous. If you dont select anything, it thinks the pivot is on the other side of the virtual world. Why wouldnt it be set to, oh, i dont know.... THE ORIGIN!?
Playback is just horrendous. So many graphical glitches. Rigs appearing to be exploding on playback, even though they arent. models turning on some weird back face culling type of thing that you cant get rid of.
The only thing ive liked in my experience with max is the anim layers when working with mocap. Though, i think maya has those too. i just havent tried them yet.
I use mousewheel for macro scrolling and ctrl+alt+middleclick+drag for fine tuning.
Max navigation has become second nature to me, it's practically just an extension of my brain now. I recall being the same with Maya but I've forgotten how to use it over the years.
Basically people in the industry prefer 3DSMAX not because it is better but just that there are more people out there who learn the program and therefore can work at those places.
Maya has strong points as does 3DSMAX, personally I learnt using Maya.
Maya is more expensive than 3DSMAX, but now since Autodesk owns 3DSMAX and Maya its not really about that anymore. The profits still go to the same company, so the two suites are not in competition with eachother. It just means users have a choice in software from the one provider.
Seriously, you get used to not having the modifier stack. It's not that big of a deal.
I very, very rarely leave modifiers on objects. I work flat and obsessively collapse things.
I just can't get used to Maya's polymodeling toolset, what little of it there is. I used to add csPolyTools and Meshtools to Max, but that stopped being necessary around Max 6 or so. Maya still didn't have a straight-across parallel to that workflow in Maya 2009. o_O
I first learned by using 3ds Max, but my job has me using Maya. It almost seems like Maya is a dumbed down version of Max in some regards. The organization is really wacky and chaotic and the fact you have 3 different viewport renderers really threw me off this week. Couldn't get something to look the same across two different Maya files. I felt 3ds Max was friendlier to beginners, but hey, I'm biased.
I would recommend BradleyWascher's tutorials though, they really got me over the initial learning curve and I still reference them almost daily.
The Max UI is more intuitive and 75% of what you need is somewhere on the right hand side of your screen, whereas in Maya it's off into the jungle of sub-menus and alternate shelf layouts and tap-dancing between toolbars.
This doesn't really matter much at all if you are experienced because you are going to be using hotkeys and custom shelves anyway. For most beginners however I can imagine Max to feel more intuitive.
I prefer the way Maya handles turbosmoothing, soft/hard edges, materials
I also like the fact that everything has a material and is an editable poly by default.
Max has a few nifty modeling tools and seems more efficient for certain tasks but so far they seem pretty even to me, its just a case of knowing the quirks of each.
The only thing that is irredeemably awful about Maya is the vanilla UV tools. Plug-ins like UV deluxe/Nightshade make it usable but it is still clunky and only semi-predictable.
I started learning Max again after many years of using Maya, (started on max but transitioned to maya during uni.) I wanted to check it out for the modeling tools and stuff like rappa tools. The ui and modeling toolset are so good. Don't really get the complaints about the ui or functionality. Maya definitely owns max in the animation department, but modeling wise Max just seems way more powerful.
Quick question: Which version of Maya is the most used in the game industry? At least I've heard that people recommend to use 3ds Max 2012. For example, the Xoliul viewport shader works with that version of Max, because of the shading is broken in its predecessors (2013 and 2014). So, what is the situation with Maya? I haven't heard many opinions about that.
I couldn't even find out what version Naughty Dog is using...
Replies
Have you tried this:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=131320
btw. on the maya side of things - is the skinning still so unusably slow that everyone just segments their meshes and links them to bones to have any sort of realtime playback in the viewport? that would be MY maya stoneage experience that i fondly remember.
the graph editor is indeed chuggy as hell, and if you`re zoomed out at all in it, if you go to drag select keys, what appears to be in your selection doesnt always get selected.
the whole thing just chugs a lot when animating. doesnt matter how good your comp is.
My pc was built in 2003. Winxp 64/ a single 2.01ghz, w/1 gig of ram.
Seems speedy enough to animate the bulk of characters i've been given.
Is it possible that there's a driver conflict on your machine?
They did, on the first page
I don't animate personally but I know an animator who worked on Darkfall and uses CAT all the time, says its awesome. Didn't know about the lag though XO
We hit so many bugs and crashes with it that we stopped using it for production. We're on subscription and the next version of max should be coming out in April sometime, I really hope they worked on the issues with CAT, I do like animating with it, when it doesn't break.
I prefer Maya navigation, its what almost all 3D applications use so switching back and forth is easier when it all works the same. But the implementation inside of max really makes a mess out of selecting. They also didn't account for maya nav in any of the brush tools so you can't use any of the brush shortcuts if you're set to maya nav. I've gone back to max nav until they figure out what the hell they are doing.
Hah, yes. That was one of the most half-assed attempts at integrating a new feature that I've ever been witness to. Tried it for a grand total of 4 minutes before switching back, head bowed.
Thanks for the script! It was working great for non-biped stuff and now it's working great for biped too, as long as I turn off stats. I'll probably add a toggle to the script that turns off/on viewport stats if it's running.
They really need to include this script in max...
Playback is just horrendous. So many graphical glitches. Rigs appearing to be exploding on playback, even though they arent. models turning on some weird back face culling type of thing that you cant get rid of.
The only thing ive liked in my experience with max is the anim layers when working with mocap. Though, i think maya has those too. i just havent tried them yet.
Max navigation has become second nature to me, it's practically just an extension of my brain now. I recall being the same with Maya but I've forgotten how to use it over the years.
Maya has strong points as does 3DSMAX, personally I learnt using Maya.
Maya is more expensive than 3DSMAX, but now since Autodesk owns 3DSMAX and Maya its not really about that anymore. The profits still go to the same company, so the two suites are not in competition with eachother. It just means users have a choice in software from the one provider.
I think i know maybe 3 companies in canada that still use 3dsmax...
Edit:: Gameloft, WarnerBros, Rockstar and Piranha Games... and Relic...
I very, very rarely leave modifiers on objects. I work flat and obsessively collapse things.
I just can't get used to Maya's polymodeling toolset, what little of it there is. I used to add csPolyTools and Meshtools to Max, but that stopped being necessary around Max 6 or so. Maya still didn't have a straight-across parallel to that workflow in Maya 2009. o_O
It looks like they both cost exactly the same. http://www.autodesk.com/store/all-products
I guess he's looking at the entertainment suite? I remember when Maya was below $2,000 :P
I would recommend BradleyWascher's tutorials though, they really got me over the initial learning curve and I still reference them almost daily.
The Max UI is more intuitive and 75% of what you need is somewhere on the right hand side of your screen, whereas in Maya it's off into the jungle of sub-menus and alternate shelf layouts and tap-dancing between toolbars.
This doesn't really matter much at all if you are experienced because you are going to be using hotkeys and custom shelves anyway. For most beginners however I can imagine Max to feel more intuitive.
I prefer the way Maya handles turbosmoothing, soft/hard edges, materials
I also like the fact that everything has a material and is an editable poly by default.
Max has a few nifty modeling tools and seems more efficient for certain tasks but so far they seem pretty even to me, its just a case of knowing the quirks of each.
The only thing that is irredeemably awful about Maya is the vanilla UV tools. Plug-ins like UV deluxe/Nightshade make it usable but it is still clunky and only semi-predictable.
I couldn't even find out what version Naughty Dog is using...
Max :
Every other 3D Application :