Autodesk Maya opinions - Environment Art

Fletcher

Hi there!
I wanted to know what are Your opinions on Maya? Mainly if you are having such problems with this software as I have.
For starters I need to say that I really love maya's modeling workflow, tools and my favourite - pie menus. But as I have worked with Maya for about 7 years now I really started to hate Maya...
This software is the most unstable and unreliable piece of crap that I ever worked on. Maya can just crash anytime. Even on empty space with cube, I select face then extrude and it's 50-50. Maybe it will crash maybe not. I need to save before any action because I just don't know what will happen next... So my question is do you also have this sort of problems:
- crashes very often, even on most basic actions like extrude 1 face, undo etc.
- wipes materials from mesh and leave basic green material 
- when I work on uv's, Maya is moving verts on my mesh... Like HOW is that even possible?
- history that is not working and only make thing worse like soft is very slow, need to clear it every few actions, need to clear all garbage that is left in outliner because you never know what maya keeps in those transforms and when it will blow up
- all those stupid situations like you have 2 verts and somehow maya can produce multiple edges between those 2 verts
- blocking half of the tools if maya detects that something is wrong when your mesh is clear, cleanup does nothing and yet maya won't let you do anything
- maya can change setting on it's own. Like disable autosave, change some tool settings etc.
- and so on and so on, I could keep on going forever

I just want to know that is it just me? If I just don't know how to use this software? Those few guys that did not switch to Blender on my company have same problems as I have. I work on Maya since version 2012 and still autodesk did not fix bugs that occur on 2012 version. Probably they were there way earlier. I have no idea why autodesk charges so much $$$ for this buggy software. As for environment art it is garbage.
Before I worked on Modo, 3ds max and blender. None of this programs had so much issues. Right now I am fully switching to Blender as I will never give any money to Autodesk for Maya.
So what is Your story with Maya? I'm just curious.

onionhead_o

I understand your frustrations. unstable absolutely . Empty Space with a cube is a big of exaggeration lol.  But Yeh there are still tons of bugs and stuff that needs to be fixed. I will be learning Blender as well, but completely switching no, I won't be until its a industry standard tool where every studio uses it.

My Gripes

- minimized windows block progress bar, especially annoying when rendering

- switching to expert mode might sometimes crash maya 2018

- face extrude works poorly on complex meshes.

- obj export plugin gets turned off  sometimes

its still a valid tool for creating Environment art tho. Mash for example is a great tool to distribute objects on terrain or surfaces.

- wipes materials from mesh and leave basic green material  - This happens to me too

- when I work on uv's, Maya is moving verts on my mesh... Like HOW is that even possible?  hasn't happen to me since maya 2009 or some earlier versions of maya.

"None of this programs had so much issues" sounds bias a bit no? I used Modo for a bit. There are bugs and annoying things too. I had issue where the custom UI disappear. mesh ops edge split on curve sliced mesh result in instant crash. Shading Tree is  super outdated workflow.

oglu

Could you post your systeme specs please.
I crash maybe once a week and i use maya 8h a day.

There are two things that make maya crashhappy and thats weak hardware and stone old prefs. 

Fletcher

My home PC (I work on it right now since covid stuff)
Ryzen 7 2700
16GB ram 3000mhz
GTX1080

My work PC
i7 8700k
32GB ram
GTX1070

Both Windows 10 Pro

prefs have maybe 1 - 1,5 year.
And I am also using it for 8h a day for 7 years now. I think I developed quite good habits with Maya. I clear all history, clear all trash in outliner, try to work as clean as possible, when something bad happen I often export all to .obj if it is possible and import to fresh scene. But I am tired by all this. I can have like one week without any problem and them bam 3 days constant crashing without any reason, then it works fine again for few days. This makes this software very unreliable for me as I have no idea what maya will decide to do next. Turn off autosaves? Crash on move tool? Explode all my uvs when hit undo? No idea. And yeah 3ds max, Modo and Blender all have their problems but I never felt that they are unreliable. If they crash it would be me pushing too far in most cases. And maya lately crashed when i moved uv shell... After that it crashed after clicking on viewport... Then Maya worked for 6 hours straight without any problem. All work was done on 1 same file. People on my company have same problems like me and most of them work on Blender now. We had like 15 enviro artists working - 12 on maya, 3 on Blender. It was like 4-5 years ago. Now we have 12 working on Blender and 3 on Maya including me. 
I hate how autodesk is ignoring stuff. Like for them Maya is perfection. They didn't improve much since 2012. Biggest one was overhaul of uv editor. Besides that nothing really changed, I have same bugs, same behaviours. Sure thay added some new tools here and there but nothing impressive. Sometimes I think it's abandonware... Like they deployed one whole service pack and on release notes biggest change was "fixes of .fbx exporter in Japanese" Or when people started having trouble with fbx export because maya somehow would revert all uv changes. People figured it out and asked autodesk on their forum when they will fix it and Autodesk replied - "but you know how to workaround this problem, just don't use this function and use workaround".

jRocket

I can confirm that Maya runs better on newer hardware. I had a lot of issues before I updated to a modern rig. That being said, you should still send in the crash report thing that comes up when it crashes. Also, if you can consistently reproduce an issue, definitely send in a bug report. Maya costs a lot of money and you should not be having the kinds of issues you are having, but they are not going to fix them unless people report them as bugs.

Fletcher

jRocket said:

I can confirm that Maya runs better on newer hardware. I had a lot of issues before I updated to a modern rig. That being said, you should still send in the crash report thing that comes up when it crashes. Also, if you can consistently reproduce an issue, definitely send in a bug report. Maya costs a lot of money and you should not be having the kinds of issues you are having, but they are not going to fix them unless people report them as bugs.

Oh I sent them countless bug reports. But lately I have ton of crashes that looks like this: Use some function, Maya freezes for couple seconds, Maya disappears, no crash log, no bug report window, nothing.

Fletcher

Worst thing is randomness of Maya. Sometimes I have 100% reproduce on crash while doing something that normally is working smooth for example bevel an edge. So it looks like it is something wrong with my file or setup. But in 99% of cases you go to object mode, add box, combine it with crashing mesh, delete box in edit mode and in 99% of cases it will be fine after that. I have no idea why but it is like maya would storage some info about mesh that would crash software. Normal clear history does nothing but when I will combine it with a primitive and then clear history Maya clears that data and everything runs smooth until another problem. And for all I know it is super random because like I said earlier it can happen on fresh scene with just one box in it.

oglu

Mmm thats really random, strange. Are you on 2019.3 or 2020.1?

Fletcher

2020.1, but most of problems described earlier were on all versions starting with 2012. I skipped 2019 tho as they changed some stuff with selecting polygons/edges/verts.

oglu

Are you using old assets? 

Alex_J

I am using for 3 years and not had any issues like described. I'd troubleshoot the machine, not the software. Especially if empty scenes are having issues.

Fletcher

No old assets in use besides textures. And I doubt it is machine as those problems also occurred on many workstations where I work. And I have those problems as long as I work on Maya soo... I probably won't go back to Maya and will stick to Blender for now.
I only wanted to know if others have similar problems and thoughts abut this software. I love it but it through all those years I started to hate it. And in Blender already I have emulated all pie menus and modeling is as fast as in maya minus the crashing part. 

oglu

If you feel fine with Blender go for it. 

Joopson

I've been using Maya since.... Maya 6.5. And for me, it crashes once every two weeks, and my hardware's pretty old.

Not sure what would cause such frequent crashing, but it's not inherent to Maya; could be hardware, could be workflow, could be any number of things.

neilberard

Your situation sounds unique. Are you using any external plugins / scripts or shaders with Maya. Can you reproduce the issues on a fresh install and a fresh prefs folder? Also, are you deleting history as you model, especially when you combine and separate meshes?
-edit-
Also, Autodesk has a tendency to push bad builds out the door, have you downloaded the latest hot fixes?

throttlekitty

Joopson said:

I've been using Maya since.... Maya 6.5. And for me, it crashes once every two weeks, and my hardware's pretty old.

Not sure what would cause such frequent crashing, but it's not inherent to Maya; could be hardware, could be workflow, could be any number of things.

Same here. I've done a lot of troubleshooting with people over the years, and it's usually down to long history chains. Sometimes gpu/driver, or just plain doing something weird. I also think it's a bit weird that after seven years to suddenly complain about construction history or call marking menus pie menus, but maybe I'm just reading into this thread differently.

Fletcher

I have one external script for detaching faces, it auto clear history so I don't have to do it manually.
Oh I complained about construction history in Maya since day one I started working on it   And pie menus are my thing. I always call marking menus pie menus because it sounds better for me, it is just better name.

So I booted Maya today first time since last thursday and always uv editor window with uv toolkit attached poped up when opened Maya. Today first time in few weeks it didn't... When I opened uv editor window the toolkit was gone. This is what I am talking about all the time. This randomness of this software. I did nothing yet maya throw out uv toolkit and whole uv editor window. Why? Because she can You can never be sure what will happen and when it will happen in Maya. 

All this bad emotions towards this software was growing on me for past few years. I'll repeat - I love Maya and her modeling workflow. Implementing new uv editor was huge update for me but that would be it. Almost nothing changes for me as enviro artist. Plus all those problems I have makes this software very unreliable. I won't believe it's my machine because I worked on several PC's over those years and problems persisted. My coworkers on theirs PC's over those years had same issues. So probably my workflow is somehow bad because I cannot come up with any other reason Yet still I have no idea what I am doing wrong as my meshes aren't overly complicated (stuff for gamedev) - mostly have less than few thousand triangles. For materials I use simple blinn. I try to keep my scene tidy and clean, clear history, freeze transforms, clear all trash from outliner, keep stuff on its layers, everything is as good as it possible can be. And it still happens. Like todays stuff with uv editor. Nothing changed yet maya started to behave differently.

throttlekitty

I totally get the frustration, I have a mountain of it myself, just gotta keep a level head about it, no software is that amazing or perfect.

I don't like the UV Toolkit, I miss Nightshade. I keep it docked with my Channel Box/AE to keep it from popping up. In your case, I'm going to guess it popped up offscreen, maybe you had it on a different display last time.

Joopson

When you open Maya, how do you usually do it?

1. Open Maya. 2. File>open to open your scene

or do you double click on a scene file in explorer?

Fletcher

@throttlekitty you are right, every software have flaws yet look how nicely Modo is developing, Blender got whole overhaul, one of the best realtime renderer and what Maya got? For me it was that one update with uv editor. Maybe MASH as well but I cannot use it fully as it often crashes or very heavily slows down whole Maya. And I always have uv editor on second screen. Just Always.

@Joopson 98% of times it is by open Maya -> open file/open recent

In general I tried to work on Maya once again (nice Stockholm syndrome here ) And 0 crashes... And on thursday I had crash every 3 clicks no matter what I tried or how many times I rebooted PC. But it started to slow down like hell. Going from faces to verts selection took 3-5 seconds. Again same file this whole time #randomMaya. This time Maya went from dx11 to OpenGL by itself. Or maybe someone hacked into my pc and is trolling me because I swear I have no idea what is going on. And it didn't want to go back to dx11. It would stay at openGL after maya reboot. Oh and frame selection by "F" key started to zoom out rater than zoom and fit to screen #randomAF So I took every advice you gave me, deleted whole prefs to start fresh, did clean reinstall with steps provided by autodesk. Only thing that I could do more was windows reinstall but I installed it like 3 weeks ago so nothing bad shouldn't be happening. Anyway I booted up freshly installed Maya, go to settings and... Error I even took screenshot.
So Window -> Settings/Preferences -> Preferences window is now opening 2nd time I try to open it ^^ Did I mention Maya randomness? But now it stays at dx11 and performance is good. So I had 10 hours today of joy of working with Maya I'm not even mad anymore, it's not funny either. I think I am entering void or something. Well, I surely am interested what Maya will come up tomorrow. I'll keep You posted!

If anyone want to know, this time I installed maya by best app on earth - Autodesk Desktop App. What a brilliant piece of software!