[ QUOTE ]
Well, its natural that Vassago doesnt care how easy things are for the programmers.
[/ QUOTE ]
Nah, doesn't seem very natural to me really. As PaK says, making a videogame is teamwork. As anyone who's ever made one knows it requires very good cross discipline communication with, civility and respect for your fellow team members. If you don't care how hard their working lives are, they aint likely to be inspired to make tools to make your life easier are they?! If you approach it with an attitude of 'I'm allright Jack, fuck everyone else' then that's fine. But I sure as hell don't want you on my team.
In all seriousness I can't imagine a Max/Maya hybrid product ,and nor do I think it's viable. It blows me away that Mayas usage has grown considerably in the games development market over the last couple of years. EA are Alias' biggest client for instance, and yet still Alias have done little to gear it toward making realtime content. Christ they'd have fixed alpha sorting in the fucking viewport by now If they did care. Max's extensibility isn't there as SouL says, so I wouldn't want to switch to Max. It needs a core re-write to compete on an extensibility level with Maya. I dunno. If I could convince our studio to use XSI I would. I'm so sick to my back teeth of hearing the Maya V Max argument. If we all switched to the one good and reaonably priced app. that is XSI then everyones a winner! Still, it sure will be interesting to see what Autodesk's longterm plan is.
Maybe one of the reasons was because of the developers switch. But now also. Who wants to bet that Mayas prices will slowly rise to match Max again (another reason developers switched).
Hopefully Character Studio will get integrated into motion builder, then phased out. However, when Alias bought Motionbuilder, version 6 was a buggy release with terrible improvements, and v7 was prey much just a bug fix release.
Daz, Im curious why you think a Max/Maya hybrid wouldn't be viable? I would think that it would be more costly for a company to be simultaneously developing two pieces of software, rather than consolidating.
Because of the absurd software rivalry and loyalty. People that use Max seem to detest Maya with outspoken venom. And I know plenty of Maya gurus that see Max as a buggy joke. Shit you should have seen the hatred when this news hit our ea wordwide artists mailgroup today. That's many hundreds of people. Spamtastic. A hybrid product?! It would confuse the hell out of folks. Noone would know what its pedigree was. Would they ditch mel? In doing so you alienate all the film fx studios and many more people besides. It takes time to learn new languages. One sweet ass thing about XSI is you can write in it in Perl, Java, pretty much whatever language you want. For Autodesk to make a kickass all purpose 3D app. they'd have to start from scratch and it would have to bear no obvious relation to either product. So they'd better damn well start coding!
Im thinking if they get ride of 1 of the products it will be max . Maya has a strong user base in the game industry and movie industry . Max is used mostly for games and has such a spotty stability record I doubt any movie houses would switch over . I don't think Maya users have anything to worry about myself .
[ QUOTE ]
Honestly, I don't care one iota about how easy the app is for a programmer. I'm the one making assests with it, not them. It's their job to make tools for the app I use, and allow me to do my job. Period.
[/ QUOTE ]
True the artists are the ones using the program to create the assets. But it's the programmers that link your raw asset into the game.
I don't know about you, but after having known what it's like to have a silky smooth pipeline, it's hard to work on anything less. There's a lot of frustration involved when you have to touch a handful of different tools just to export an object from an app to the game engine.
A clumsy pipeline ruins the artist's iteration rate. Which is so important in acheiving high-quality visuals in a short period of time. The less time I have to eat up using different tools, the more time I have to improve my work. The quicker I can get my work finished, the less likely I'll have to stay late.
I'm all about having a harmonious relationship with the programmers. Because they have an influence on the overall timeframe it takes to get my work done.
The importance of good communications lines between all the different disciplines in a developement team was never clear to me 'till I started working on a 44 man team. We had a universal, highly modifiable outside tool that did everything, every artist on the team needed it to do. In conjunction with that, our programmers and technical artist set up Maya to interact flawlessly with that tool. Having that stable platform to work off of, artists were able to make requests regarding pipeline issues that the programmers would tackle.
Even the most simple things would help out.
Artist: "Hey, is there a way we can have the mesh/texture(s) auto-update and auto-load as we do our work in Maya/Photoshop? It would save us a lot of time to have all that automated rather than having to manually update."
Programmer: "Alright, I can plug that in."
We had a fast and establised pipeline for our game. But even as we progressed through the game, our programmer would still give us support to refine/tweak the pipeline.
As far as what application to choose when starting a game... I honestly feel it's the people with the most influence will be the programmers and the technical artist(s). Since they'll be the group of guys that will interact with the technical side of the program. An Art Director or Lead Artist could have some say, but at the end of the day, they, too, need to realise that program preferences will have to be set aside if they want to achieve a pipeline that'll allow them to maximise their time spent creating assets. The grunt artists would have little to no say in the matter.
The only way you're going to get an entire dev team to switch aps is if you can present the benefits of how one app will affect the project pipeline over the other. It's ease of use, customization, and integration needs to be of importance above all else.
There's still a bit of Max out there. Mostly because a lot of dev teams are comfortable with what they can get out of it. And also because there's a lot of "new" tech built on top of old tech that was supported and built to interact with Max. The further into the life-cycle of that old tech you get, the more difficult in becomes to switch applications. Switching over to a new app more or less guarantees a lot of data that needs to be re-written. And we all know that takes a lot of expensive R&D time.
Programmers are cool. And it's very interesting the kinds of things they talk/bitch about. A lot of the things they talk about relates to issues that artists have to deal with, too.
I'm currently on a much larger team, on a different project. The pipeline is a nightmare. And there's little anyone can do because everything has already been established long, LONG ago. Changing it now would destroy so much of the work that's been put into it and our game. Haha 'doh!
[ QUOTE ]
Friend of mine mentioned something interesting. Maybe the reason this news coincides with the release of XSI's Maya migration tools is because either Avid (Softimage XSI) was tipped off early of the plans, or maybe Autodesk also tried to buy Avid as well. That's a scary thought.
[/ QUOTE ]
even if it was true, who would go out and transfer all his pipeline, all his knowledge to yet another 3d app? sounds like a stupid way of burning money. it's not like max or maya suddendly stopped to function.
besides, it seems entirely logical that avid is on the buyout list as well - they have a 3d app and their hi-end video editing suites are competing with discreet smoke and fire. so how safe are you with such a switch anyway?
soul: the kind of customization you describe has been done in more apps than just maya. nothing special, in fact. some companies are even running their game engine preview in a max viewport.
most of the major tools should work well in a pipeline. but max was initially the choice of small studios without the need for real pipelines. no wonder the early adopters didn't saw a need until recently.
as for autodesk starting a new app from scratch: i bet development is already under way. however, that will take years to become a useful replacement. if you want to see how good a progress autodesk has made in bringing a completeley new product to the market, check out their toxik compositing-system, that's supposed to rival shake. quite an expensive joke right now.
You should never piss off a tool programmer. Remember, programmers think the interface for Emacs is completely logical and intuitive. They'd give your next tool a command line interface with at least fifty parameters or turn the GUI into Blender. And maybe remove a few error checkers so if you do something wrong your entire app goes down.
I don't see why both couldn't live together as they usually did, as Daz said, some peeps just hate the softwares they don't use, mostly for just little features, but this prevent them to buy a software and if people fear a merge etween maya and max, they will most likely switch to a third program, like xsi.
though as stated before, Autodesk is a big company, doing more than just 3dsmax it's more likely they will feed that competition between the two apps.
As for programmers , SouL is right, they are the ones making the import tools to the game, if he wrote the exporter for a certain software, this is faster - pipeline-wise - to use that software, though now tools like deep explorer are helping a lot to convert files.
So, it's better to force your entire art staff to use an application they are slower in, because it's faster for the programmer? I don't see logic in that. Like I said, our current engine uses 3dsmax, and you hit a single button to get assests into the game. No outside apps. Can't be more simple than that. Wether you use max or maya, it should be the artist's choice, not the programmers.
[ QUOTE ]
art staff to use an application they are slower in
[/ QUOTE ]
I think artists will be slow for a week or so and pick things up. I know if I had to switch to Max fulltime. I'd be back slow at first but I'd ramp up quickly. I think it's easier to ask artists to switch then force something on programmers. I'd actually love to use Max fulltime for 3 years. Be nice to get to the level I know Maya with.
That's my point, though. If you've been using one app for 5+ years, and are forced to switch to something else, it'll take months to get anywhere near as efficient as they were with the other application. They have to learn new terms, account for the app's shortcomings, and so on. Surely, I'd love to learn Maya. But at MY pace, on MY time. Being forced into a new app, and expected to turn out the same quality work in the same timeframe is unreasonable, imo.
Joking.. i hope Max dont be affected very much with the inlfuence of that ugly and crappy interface of Maya. If the resulting program of autodesk and alias is something i dislike i will use as now Xsi, with no doubt is one of the greatest 3d apps right now. Modo also .
Modo is an example of an app well programmed, very fast but with a lack of tools.
# Autodesk purchases Alias for $182 million cash
# The deal will take 4-6 months to finalize
# *Business as usual while merger is finalized*
# Focus on integrating workflow and interoperability between the products
# No immediate plans to cull any product lines, but continue them as per normal
# Both companies to continue normally with mutually exclusive product releases as planned
# Alias to leverage Autodesks massive distribution and marketing channels
obviously no merge between the two softwares planned yet
A clumsy pipeline ruins the artist's iteration rate. Which is so important in acheiving high-quality visuals in a short period of time. The less time I have to eat up using different tools, the more time I have to improve my work. The quicker I can get my work finished, the less likely I'll have to stay late.
[/ QUOTE ]
I want to write a paper with this as my thesis, as it's been going thru my mind ever since i finished my last paper. Well said SouL.
[ QUOTE ]
The grunt artists would have little to no say in the matter.
[/ QUOTE ]
Can't agree there. It's the grunts 'using' the pipeline. They can give you the best feedback as they are the ones with the most practical expierence with the tools. the tools are 'for' them.
Right. We have a programmer who created a custom web application to drive our entire business, but was "too busy" many times to listen to the suggestions of photographers & customer service, so now we have a clumsy, buggy incomplete application that does its job, albeit poorly. We are now having to completely re-start from scratch for our POS 2.0...
I don't see Max an Maya merging into one app at all. That'll just piss people off. If they continue developing for both they get all those users!! money money money! They wouldn't want to fuck that up. All I see is that integration between the two apps will be better. Max will probably get a few better animation tools and Maya will get some better modeling tools. It wouldn't suprise me if the material editors start looking and working the same. Also it just may be that autodesk will have MAX be primarily for games and have Maya focus more on movies (like its suppose to be).
[ QUOTE ]
That's my point, though. If you've been using one app for 5+ years, and are forced to switch to something else, it'll take months to get anywhere near as efficient as they were with the other application. They have to learn new terms, account for the app's shortcomings, and so on. Surely, I'd love to learn Maya. But at MY pace, on MY time. Being forced into a new app, and expected to turn out the same quality work in the same timeframe is unreasonable, imo.
[/ QUOTE ]
It is unreasonable... if that's happening then clearly you have management that doesn't understand how things work. Of course people will expect you to slug through the first couple of weeks. I've been close to a month on Max and I've hardly been given any "demanding" tasks.
Game developers who can't adapt to a new tool are gunna get replaced by those who are more than willing to make the switch, like me
I am learning Maya soon. I find the modeling tools that are out of the box less than ideal for the tasks I see myself doing everyday, even if I do get proficeint with them. In the long run we're talking about every coding task by my tools dept cut in half. I have heard learning Melscript will be much easier than Maxscript...so i welcome the change regardless of the growing pains.
Half is alot.
If the programmers could make a choice that could cut my asset production in half, i would hope they'd make the same descion.
I'm sure by the time we're knee deep in the next project I'll forget all about max.
Soul, I don't have the luxory of working for EA, or some similarly HUGE studio. I have to create every scrap of artwork for levels and props. This includes designing, modeling, texturing, layout and lighting. Everything. So no, my comments are not unresonable in my case. If a new app was forced onto me, it would cripple asset production completely.
If I had a sub-staff of working artists, who aided me, it'd be a differant story. I'd actually have the time to learn. Like I said, I'm NOT unwilling to learn something new. It's simply that I don't have the time to do so.
From what I've read, most of the Maya community is not happy. Many of them have most likely experienced Max's poor customer support and lack of interest in it's communitys needs. Many are coming to realize that Maya may infact be a burden on Autodesk's deal, where the importance was with other Alias products. Those Maya users would have little difficulty making the switch to XSI. Many feel right at home, where it's nearly impossible for Max users to do the same. This event also coicides with XSI's 3D Love Tour. Which I've already registered for. Hope to hear some good news from them.
I've been around max and maya since I started college back in 2000. This didn't even come as a remote shock to me. There really hasn't been alot of competition on maya's side since they closed their one R&D department a couple years back. Max has continued to grow substantially since . With the additions of next gen renderers, improvements in poly modeling, particle systems, and the latest addition of cloth and hair the reasons that max wasn't considered a high end option have dissapeared.
Its not that the competition will end it is just going to shift focus. XSI will start grabbing up maya loyalists and don't forget there is still lightwave for the people who are on a budget and don't need their app to do everything. New improvements in to Modo 2.0 and the fact that it models beautifully will help it grab some market share and new competitors will arise.
Hopefully we (max users) can look forward to some decent nurbs and animation tools and maybe even some linux support (for those microsoft haters). And maya users can look forward to some decent poly-modeling tools (ever hear of soft selection its great only been out for a gazillion years), and some decent uvw editing tools.
As for people who have never touched other apps I would say that wass rather short sited of you and this should be a lesson to all of us not to make the same mistake. We work in a constantly evolving industry and animals that don't evolve die off. Autodesk could seriously butcher this and a competitor could snatch up the industry. Getting an eval version of modo or any other app might not be a bad idea so that you can at least get your feet wet just in case.
Tell the truth Soul, your just upset because you found the magic "make good art" MEL script, and now you'll actually have to exert effort to do your job!
Seriously though, there is a lot of potential for this to swing either way. Awesome or horrible. I'm excited to see what comes of this 1-2 years down the road.
Replies
Well, its natural that Vassago doesnt care how easy things are for the programmers.
[/ QUOTE ]
Nah, doesn't seem very natural to me really. As PaK says, making a videogame is teamwork. As anyone who's ever made one knows it requires very good cross discipline communication with, civility and respect for your fellow team members. If you don't care how hard their working lives are, they aint likely to be inspired to make tools to make your life easier are they?! If you approach it with an attitude of 'I'm allright Jack, fuck everyone else' then that's fine. But I sure as hell don't want you on my team.
In all seriousness I can't imagine a Max/Maya hybrid product ,and nor do I think it's viable. It blows me away that Mayas usage has grown considerably in the games development market over the last couple of years. EA are Alias' biggest client for instance, and yet still Alias have done little to gear it toward making realtime content. Christ they'd have fixed alpha sorting in the fucking viewport by now If they did care. Max's extensibility isn't there as SouL says, so I wouldn't want to switch to Max. It needs a core re-write to compete on an extensibility level with Maya. I dunno. If I could convince our studio to use XSI I would. I'm so sick to my back teeth of hearing the Maya V Max argument. If we all switched to the one good and reaonably priced app. that is XSI then everyones a winner!
Honestly, I don't care one iota about how easy the app is for a programmer. I'm the one making assests with it, not them. It's their job to make tools for the app I use, and allow me to do my job. Period.
[/ QUOTE ]
True the artists are the ones using the program to create the assets. But it's the programmers that link your raw asset into the game.
I don't know about you, but after having known what it's like to have a silky smooth pipeline, it's hard to work on anything less. There's a lot of frustration involved when you have to touch a handful of different tools just to export an object from an app to the game engine.
A clumsy pipeline ruins the artist's iteration rate. Which is so important in acheiving high-quality visuals in a short period of time. The less time I have to eat up using different tools, the more time I have to improve my work. The quicker I can get my work finished, the less likely I'll have to stay late.
I'm all about having a harmonious relationship with the programmers. Because they have an influence on the overall timeframe it takes to get my work done.
The importance of good communications lines between all the different disciplines in a developement team was never clear to me 'till I started working on a 44 man team. We had a universal, highly modifiable outside tool that did everything, every artist on the team needed it to do. In conjunction with that, our programmers and technical artist set up Maya to interact flawlessly with that tool. Having that stable platform to work off of, artists were able to make requests regarding pipeline issues that the programmers would tackle.
Even the most simple things would help out.
Artist: "Hey, is there a way we can have the mesh/texture(s) auto-update and auto-load as we do our work in Maya/Photoshop? It would save us a lot of time to have all that automated rather than having to manually update."
Programmer: "Alright, I can plug that in."
We had a fast and establised pipeline for our game. But even as we progressed through the game, our programmer would still give us support to refine/tweak the pipeline.
As far as what application to choose when starting a game... I honestly feel it's the people with the most influence will be the programmers and the technical artist(s). Since they'll be the group of guys that will interact with the technical side of the program. An Art Director or Lead Artist could have some say, but at the end of the day, they, too, need to realise that program preferences will have to be set aside if they want to achieve a pipeline that'll allow them to maximise their time spent creating assets. The grunt artists would have little to no say in the matter.
The only way you're going to get an entire dev team to switch aps is if you can present the benefits of how one app will affect the project pipeline over the other. It's ease of use, customization, and integration needs to be of importance above all else.
There's still a bit of Max out there. Mostly because a lot of dev teams are comfortable with what they can get out of it. And also because there's a lot of "new" tech built on top of old tech that was supported and built to interact with Max. The further into the life-cycle of that old tech you get, the more difficult in becomes to switch applications. Switching over to a new app more or less guarantees a lot of data that needs to be re-written. And we all know that takes a lot of expensive R&D time.
Programmers are cool. And it's very interesting the kinds of things they talk/bitch about. A lot of the things they talk about relates to issues that artists have to deal with, too.
I'm currently on a much larger team, on a different project. The pipeline is a nightmare. And there's little anyone can do because everything has already been established long, LONG ago. Changing it now would destroy so much of the work that's been put into it and our game. Haha 'doh!
Friend of mine mentioned something interesting. Maybe the reason this news coincides with the release of XSI's Maya migration tools is because either Avid (Softimage XSI) was tipped off early of the plans, or maybe Autodesk also tried to buy Avid as well. That's a scary thought.
[/ QUOTE ]
even if it was true, who would go out and transfer all his pipeline, all his knowledge to yet another 3d app? sounds like a stupid way of burning money. it's not like max or maya suddendly stopped to function.
besides, it seems entirely logical that avid is on the buyout list as well - they have a 3d app and their hi-end video editing suites are competing with discreet smoke and fire. so how safe are you with such a switch anyway?
soul: the kind of customization you describe has been done in more apps than just maya. nothing special, in fact. some companies are even running their game engine preview in a max viewport.
most of the major tools should work well in a pipeline. but max was initially the choice of small studios without the need for real pipelines. no wonder the early adopters didn't saw a need until recently.
as for autodesk starting a new app from scratch: i bet development is already under way. however, that will take years to become a useful replacement. if you want to see how good a progress autodesk has made in bringing a completeley new product to the market, check out their toxik compositing-system, that's supposed to rival shake. quite an expensive joke right now.
though as stated before, Autodesk is a big company, doing more than just 3dsmax it's more likely they will feed that competition between the two apps.
As for programmers , SouL is right, they are the ones making the import tools to the game, if he wrote the exporter for a certain software, this is faster - pipeline-wise - to use that software, though now tools like deep explorer are helping a lot to convert files.
art staff to use an application they are slower in
[/ QUOTE ]
I think artists will be slow for a week or so and pick things up. I know if I had to switch to Max fulltime. I'd be back slow at first but I'd ramp up quickly. I think it's easier to ask artists to switch then force something on programmers. I'd actually love to use Max fulltime for 3 years. Be nice to get to the level I know Maya with.
Joking.. i hope Max dont be affected very much with the inlfuence of that ugly and crappy interface of Maya. If the resulting program of autodesk and alias is something i dislike i will use as now Xsi, with no doubt is one of the greatest 3d apps right now. Modo also
Modo is an example of an app well programmed, very fast but with a lack of tools.
# Autodesk purchases Alias for $182 million cash
# The deal will take 4-6 months to finalize
# *Business as usual while merger is finalized*
# Focus on integrating workflow and interoperability between the products
# No immediate plans to cull any product lines, but continue them as per normal
# Both companies to continue normally with mutually exclusive product releases as planned
# Alias to leverage Autodesks massive distribution and marketing channels
obviously no merge between the two softwares planned yet
A clumsy pipeline ruins the artist's iteration rate. Which is so important in acheiving high-quality visuals in a short period of time. The less time I have to eat up using different tools, the more time I have to improve my work. The quicker I can get my work finished, the less likely I'll have to stay late.
[/ QUOTE ]
I want to write a paper with this as my thesis, as it's been going thru my mind ever since i finished my last paper. Well said SouL.
[ QUOTE ]
The grunt artists would have little to no say in the matter.
[/ QUOTE ]
Can't agree there. It's the grunts 'using' the pipeline. They can give you the best feedback as they are the ones with the most practical expierence with the tools. the tools are 'for' them.
-R
That's my point, though. If you've been using one app for 5+ years, and are forced to switch to something else, it'll take months to get anywhere near as efficient as they were with the other application. They have to learn new terms, account for the app's shortcomings, and so on. Surely, I'd love to learn Maya. But at MY pace, on MY time. Being forced into a new app, and expected to turn out the same quality work in the same timeframe is unreasonable, imo.
[/ QUOTE ]
It is unreasonable... if that's happening then clearly you have management that doesn't understand how things work. Of course people will expect you to slug through the first couple of weeks. I've been close to a month on Max and I've hardly been given any "demanding" tasks.
I am learning Maya soon. I find the modeling tools that are out of the box less than ideal for the tasks I see myself doing everyday, even if I do get proficeint with them. In the long run we're talking about every coding task by my tools dept cut in half. I have heard learning Melscript will be much easier than Maxscript...so i welcome the change regardless of the growing pains.
Half is alot.
If the programmers could make a choice that could cut my asset production in half, i would hope they'd make the same descion.
I'm sure by the time we're knee deep in the next project I'll forget all about max.
SouL...can you model characters AND animate?
-R
If I had a sub-staff of working artists, who aided me, it'd be a differant story. I'd actually have the time to learn. Like I said, I'm NOT unwilling to learn something new. It's simply that I don't have the time to do so.
Its not that the competition will end it is just going to shift focus. XSI will start grabbing up maya loyalists and don't forget there is still lightwave for the people who are on a budget and don't need their app to do everything. New improvements in to Modo 2.0 and the fact that it models beautifully will help it grab some market share and new competitors will arise.
Hopefully we (max users) can look forward to some decent nurbs and animation tools and maybe even some linux support (for those microsoft haters). And maya users can look forward to some decent poly-modeling tools (ever hear of soft selection its great only been out for a gazillion years), and some decent uvw editing tools.
As for people who have never touched other apps I would say that wass rather short sited of you and this should be a lesson to all of us not to make the same mistake. We work in a constantly evolving industry and animals that don't evolve die off. Autodesk could seriously butcher this and a competitor could snatch up the industry. Getting an eval version of modo or any other app might not be a bad idea so that you can at least get your feet wet just in case.
Seriously though, there is a lot of potential for this to swing either way. Awesome or horrible. I'm excited to see what comes of this 1-2 years down the road.
All this conjecture sure is fun though!