Thinking of switching from 3DSMax. Maya or Blender?
polycounter lvl 6
Been using MAX for 5 years. Archi Rendering and Professional Game Design. I'm getting sick of it however, it's extremely dated and relies too heavily on plugins. Still no way to make a circle without scripts.
Would you guys switch to Maya or Blender?
Would you guys switch to Maya or Blender?
Replies
Blender was my first software, then i switched to Maya and used it for 5 years, in the meantime i tried out basically all the main packages out there and now i have been using Maya LT for about 1 year and i'm evaluating Houdini Indie.
So this is my opinion on the 3 softwares ( i decided to add Houdini to the list ):
Blender: A good software that grew a lot. I used the 2.8 for some time but exactly like years ago i don't like the workflow.
The pros:
- Evee is good, it's like having Marmoset inside the software but a little more complicated.
- Free
- A lot of good plugins at an affordable price ( usually not more than 40 € )
- Procedural stack deformer
- Modern UI that feel fresh
- Sculpting is good and has dyntopo ( like Sculptris Pro of Zbrush )
The cons:
- The move, rotate, scale tools are "weird" and i don't really like them, i feel that i'm not precise enough for some reason.
- UV Mapping is inferior to Maya and feels very "classic".
- Dynamics department
- Tend to crash with a lot of modifier stacked or with heavy scenes
- If you don't like or can't remember hotkeys you are in for a bad ride...you can use the classic drop down menu like Cinema 4D but it's very slow to model like that
Maya: The only software that, despite all the hate around the web, "clicked" something in my brain when i first opened it and the one with i started enjoying 3D after leaving Blender.
The pros:
- Free student version ( all the features but for non commercial use ) and cheap Maya LT version that is the one i use every day and it has everything you need for modeling and animation. It doesn't have the dynamics and rendering department.
- 3 different styles of modeling, hotkeys, drop down menus and hotbox+quick menus ( the one i use )
- One of the best UV Mapping tools out there without considering external softwares/plugins
- Arnold
- Interface organized based on what you want to do ( modeling toolset, animation etc. )
- Construction history that you can still change parameters ( like bevel width ) even after some time
- Great viewport performance
- The new auto retopo features ( polyRemesh and polyRetopo ) that you can use to fuse boolean meshes together and retopologize a mesh with 1 click making all quads ( still need some manual retouching )
The cons:
- Price of the full version and rental only
- Sometimes you get normals or mesh errors after exporting and you don't know why
- History slow down Maya after some time and you must delete it
- Tend to crash if you don't use windows certified driver for the GPU ( at least in my case, i must use the Nvidia drivers that are downloaded automatically with windows update )
- Lacks of some modeling tools like array ( duplicate special is not the same and MASH is long to setup ), make bevel from curve and so on that you must "fix" with plugins ( usually free mel scripts )
Houdini FX: It has become a decent software for direct modeling, the indie version is very cheap and has all the features of the normal version and it's the king of proceduralism as well as dynamics.
The pros:
- Free non commercial version and cheapest indie version out there that has all the features of the full version for only 200 $ per year ( with the 2 years subscription )
- SideFX...
- You can create anything using nodes
- Houdini engine for games
- Vellum with cloth simulation and sewing like Marvelous Designer and other good stuff
- Revamped modeling toolkit from the 16 version
- Dat boolean+VDB workflow
The cons:
- VERY technical and logic heavy for procedural stuff
- Direct modeling it's still slow
- Some features are less intuitive then other software
- Still not used for direct modeling so you will find only a bunch of tutorials for that ( but tons for creating procedural assets )
At the end of the day to answer your question if i have to choose between Maya and Blender i choose Maya.
But as i said it's a matter of preference so you should try them out and see what you like the most.
In my case i'm using Maya LT+some plugins ( Ninja Dojo, DcBoolManager and Duplicate Along Path ) for creating assets and environments for real time rendering and it's perfect. The only downside it's the price that compared to Houdini Indie is high and Houdini has all the features like cloth.
To improve the modeling experience in Houdini there is a plugin called DM: https://gumroad.com/alexeyvanzhula
People say that is good but there is not a demo version and dumping 100 $ only to try it out it's too risky.
It seems that Maya wins out, I think at this moment, 3DSMAX is similar enough to Maya that it is not worth relearning the software at this stage. MAX does a pretty good job with UV's, it's bone and animation tools are garbage but I find direct modelling quite easy.
Houdini seems promising, but as you said, if Direct Modelling is hard then it defeats the purpose somewhat, it's important for me to jump into a software and just start pushing and pulling Verts. I see it has plugin support, but then you fall into the same issue of dealing with not officially supported, potentially buggy software.
I might just wait for now, my hope is that Unity builds its own 3D modelling program.
You have 2 menus: Desktop menus that are the equivalent of the group menu set in Maya that change the shelf tools ( modeling, animation etc. ) by default you have the "Build" desktop that contains everything.
Than you have the circular menu preset.
Ex. Modeling: You change the desktop menu to "modeling" so only the tools for modeling shows up in the shelf and also change automatically the circular menu to the modeling preset.
After that you press the C key to bring up the circular menu with modeling preset and simply choose the tools from that. You can also press the X key for circular menu containg snap tools ( snap to grid, to vertex etc. ) and V key for the views, shading and selection modes.
For UV Mapping is also very good, both manual and auto. Manual uv is very fast, you choose the "UV Flatten" tool ( or node if you put it down in the node editor ) and start selecting your seams---> houdini will automatically straighten them where possible ( if the box is checked ) and then click "repack" to layout--> done.
Some images:
Video ( not mine ) that shows the modeling process with a custom radial menu for modeling: https://youtu.be/-t3LD-pVKyY
However as i said before, many people say that DM plugin is a must for fast modeling because it's hotkey based+menu if you want and also have some neat features like fusing booleans etc. ( achievable with vanilla Houdini using the VDB workflow ).
I only had the first version of DM and i didn't like it but it was very different. It was circular menu based.
Compared to max its a terrible modelling tool but it does work (mostly) and it's very extensible.
Blender will not achieve penetration in large studios - largely because of licensing issues.
Houdini is very expensive and offers basically fuck all benefit in terms of modelling over software that costs a third of the price.
And if you think Houdini has "fuck all" benefit for modeling, go create three hundred unique rock meshes and come back to me. I wouldn't recommend it as a total replacement for Max, but it has a very, very valuable niche.
The only limitation is that you can make a max of 100k $ per year.
Also the apprentice version is free for non commercial use.
The only cheapest solution out there is Blender that is free and compared to like Maya LT that is 320 € per year for a limited software, it's a very good deal.
I don't do a large volume of direct modeling, but I've never felt stymied with Mayas workflow. I wonder then if the difference in modeling like poopipe describes is one of those things you'll only realize after many years of experience. For instance, some guys at gun store talking about MOA accuracy of this rifle or that. I don't care though, because my user error accuracy margin is always going to be larger. So for me it's not a consideraton.
It usually seems like I can work as fast or faster than my peers. Maybe different for haedsurface workflows though. In any case, most the time I can model as fast as I can think and rarely have to do things that seem excessively tedious.
Mayas marking menus really work for me and usually workflow seems direct and intuitive. I done a bit of max tutorials and it always feel abstract, like I am doing marking a layout to build a house. Maya feels more like I got my hands in the viewport and am working visually.
As I am not trying to work for big company, maybe I ought to try blender. But one time I did I couldn't intuitively make a frikin selection, so I just said nope and haven't touched it again.
Houdini Indie being cheap means nothing if you're a commercial studio where it's $3k for a license or $7k if you want the fully featured version - indie is also limited to 3 licenses per studio.
Maya on the other hand is $1500 per year - which one would you buy for modellers if it was your business?