Rhino or Maya/Max for product design (High Poly version)?

3D4Eva

I'm running into a bit of a dilemma for product design. Maya and 3DS MAX is what I've used for the most part and I only touched 3DS MAX awhile back due to a new project, but now I'm on product design and I need to do some texturing work in Painter. I would really like to avoid polygon modeling for the high poly version and I was thinking of just doing it in Rhino then using Maya for the retopology stage and baking in Painter then texturing.

I'm not aware of Maya's strengths for surfaces though as I really need to have no pinching and access to boolean operations without pinching. All smooth corners, then a nice bevel/chamfer after. Since this is only for the high poly I don't mind taking the CAD approach, but I'm unsure if I should just use Rhino for this or if Maya or even 3DS MAX is enough for such a task? Prior I would be using a mixture of polygon modeling in Maya and zBrush for the boolean work which is time consuming for the high poly.

The low poly will be done in Maya either way using quad draw.

poopipe

I can't imagine any situation where I'd prefer Maya to Max for dealing with CAD data - max is capable of importing live cad data with parameters etc. And Maya fucks up the conversion to a mesh.

Both Max and Maya have very rudimentary nurbs tools - they basically stopped developing them last century when it became apparent that nurbs weren't the answer. Maya definitely beats max in terms of user experience but it's a bit like comparing being kicked in the taint to being kicked in the teeth - life is just better if you avoid both.
If you need to work with solids then use a proper tool - be it rhino, fusion, moi, autocad- whatever

I will always advise going with Max if you require any sort of precision or there will be any interaction with CAD data. Maya will absolutely ruin your life in these situations whereas max is designed for it.

If you need to get the models into polygon form I'd suggest going full traditional Autodesk - you can import autocad/fusion/inventor stuff into max natively, adjust mesh density, convert to geometry and even bake directly from it. 

sacboi

Fusion to Moi, for I do seems to work just from a small test project I'm running atm.

3D4Eva

I haven't looked into Fusion. My only experience with CAD is with SolidWorks which was awhile back. I was considering Rhino as an option.

For Maya I would only use it to do the retopo work then bring it into Painter for baking and texturing, as the low doesn't need to be 100% accurate for what I'm doing as this version is just for graphical purposes. I still have access to 3DS Max so converting wont be a problem. I just need that smooth result you get with surfaces that are a pain with polygons and I want to avoid pinching as much as possible. The amount of time it would take to do a CAD approach then retopo is for me would be faster but I wasn't sure if Maya or Max was the right choice for the high version.

Would Fusion be a better option than Rhino? I'm not familiar with Autodesk's CAD products.

sacboi

"Would Fusion be a better option than Rhino? I'm not familiar with Autodesk's CAD products."

In my opinion either option would do and fyi, the guy that wrote Moi also authored Rhino.

3D4Eva

sacboi said:

"Would Fusion be a better option than Rhino? I'm not familiar with Autodesk's CAD products."

In my opinion either option would do and fyi, the guy that wrote Moi also authored Rhino.

My employer has us on SoildWorks so I was thankfully able to get back into some older software I used before but I couldn't get a clean version out on an STL or STEP for the High to bake down from as there was smoothing issues. I have access to Moi3D and when I loaded my STEP file in and exported the OBJ it was extremely clean and smooth! Is this one of the only applications that can produce such a clean export? I couldn't get it with Maya and MAX. I searched all over online can it seems to be a common issue for CAD when going over to polygons.

If there are other ways to get a clean result please let me know. For now I'll use Moi3D for the STEP to OBJ process.

poopipe

As said, max can load cad data natively via a special object type, allow you to adjust parameters and generate a clean mesh. 
Unfortunately I don't believe it can read stp files natively

Anything else will attempt to mesh the data on import which is basically the same as exporting an fbx  and is therefore shit.
If you're getting good results from MOI just buy it, it'll pay for itself in a day