Why game studios prefer use Max instead Maya?
polycounter lvl 5
I'm an environment and Prop artist and I use Maya for modeling and UV and I don't understand why some studio prefer Max, is just for modeling tools or something else?
Replies
maybe its just our specific bubble, but as a (originally) max house, this certainly changed hard in the past 5-10 years
Poll: Main 3D Modeling Software
But in general its the same answer as with "Why Max/maya more used than others?", it's just the tools and pipeline already in set.
Moving to another package takes artist's time + tools creation time + more error prone, so studios usually stick to what they know/have.
This is going to come across as a bit of a rant but it's my personal experience. 10+ years with 3dsmax (modeling and animating). 5+ years with Maya (animating).
The pricing structure makes supporting Max and Maya a huge headache. So you're forced to pick one or the other and picking the package that can't support a full pipeline means Max isn't likely to get picked. *Plus supporting tools and a pipeline in both is more of a headache than most studios are willing to take on.
If Max is mostly used for modeling and there aren't that many custom tools it might be ok, but if it's any deeper in the pipeline or there are custom tools, not many places will be willing to maintain two sets of tools.
A pipeline can have enough problems with one piece of software, let alone adding more chaos to the mix. A solution that works in Maya, more than likely won't play out the same in Max and even if it did, how you interact with their scripting languages is totally different and they don't talk to each other very well. You can attempt to do a lot of scripting in in a shared language like Python but they both interact with it in different ways and still rely on the underlying scripting structure to actually tell Max or Maya how to behave. So you'll still have to cook up two different solutions for the same problem and then have to work out how they implement that solution.
Animating in 3dsmax is pointless and fucking annoying. I did it for 9 years, I fuckin hate animating in 3dsmax. While I still prefer it for modeling unwrapping and the modifier stack, I can't animate in it. The rigging tools are garbage and haven't been updated in a decade. Working with morphs is a huge complicated mess that forces you to rely on ancient plug-ins just for basic functionality, with no possible hope of ever elevating it to the level that Maya has achieved.
3dsmax is a smoldering pile of garbage when it comes to animation.
3dsmax graph editor is horrible to work with. Out of the box the graph editor is completely broken and disjointed with the most screwed up UI customization scheme ever cooked up by a retarded chimp. How they could consider that "shippable" for so long is kind of amazing. If you're dumb enough to use CAT you'll quickly regret it. Biped was rock solid for a really long time but they've managed to make it completely unworkable. The use of quaternion while admirable in thought when trying to slay the dreaded gimbal lock, in practice it falls apart and makes editing curves a total pain in the ass.
So CAT is garbage, Biped is pretty much garbage, what do you have left? Custom rigs? Well that's another area that 3dmax falls apart. While other tools actually worked on making the rigging process easier and more robust 3dsmax just pointed to biped and CAT as if they could handle it all. Facial animation? Morphs? Mocap transfer and clean up?
The lack of proper file referencing makes managing rigs across a multitude of animation files severely limiting. It is critical that a rig be maintained in a single file and referenced into every animation file of which there can be hundreds. That way the rig can be updated and the changes propagate through all of the animations. The way you have to work around that limitation in max is by loading and saving animations in and out of a single file where your rig resides. Will it load/unload the anims correctly? Will the scene go corrupt? Will you get memory leaks? Will there be several files you have to manage (fbx, bip). With a few different formats making up your animation pipeline it can lead to dozens of problems if they don't fit together which is highly susceptible to scene corruption, another thing max likes to do while you're in the middle of production even if you aren't animating.
It's animation mixer which is just a bastardized version of the ancient character studio tool, is probably one of the easiest ways to screw up your animation, not to mention no where near feature competent.
Anim layers are horrible in 3dsmax, if it doesn't screw up your animation or corrupt your scene it's UI will make you take a spoon to your eye sockets while also slowing production to a snails pace.
The inability to transfer animations between rigs of different hierarchies, is very disappointing.
The viewport playback is another sore spot. Having to render out previews just to see your anim playing at full speed, come on max... It's not the hardware either. So great at pushing a ton of verts around in a scene, can barely push a skinned mesh past 24fps.
*Added a bit about pipeline and supporting two apps
Game developers are likely a very tiny slice of their pie. There could be money there, but I suspect any effort there is more of a way to integrate innovation, which ultimately benefits archviz. That's just my guess though.