Just lost 2 hours of highpoly in an instant crash, CAN'T THEY WRITE A BLOODY AUTOBAK TO DESKTOP FOR FUCKS SAKE
Engineer my ass Maya
Ahhh thats happened to me when I had to use maya for things at Midway. I hated it so bad. I love my max 2010. Sure its a bit slow here and there but compared to the modeling tools in Maya theres no comparison from my experience and interaction in a production environment.
You mean .ma, the file format that always gets corrupted?
It was a crash to desktop, no popup for reports or trying to save the file ... I mean, what a worse moment to try and make a backup ... right when the program crashes ... wth ...
I think there' some script on highend3d that does the max autobak. I've never actually used it though, I'll dig it up for you. I've been using the incremental save set to 2 increments. I hit control s every time I do some real work and it saves my file and writes a back up file then overwrites the backup file after I save again. So I always have 2 back up files without having to change the name of my main scene I'm working on.
Asthane: I believe I did read your post, what did I miss? I've been working 65 hour weeks and things are a little blurry in my head these days when I get chance to post at home. Doing only modelling in a separate package seems expensive (a full license, just for that?), problem prone if you need to do any back and forth, and generally not worth it overall for either the artist or the company. I don't know about you, but I rarely get to sit back and just turn out one nice asset after another. Environment work often requires hopping around, creating a small prop here, fixing UVs on a wall there, fixing material ID's over there, cleaning up a shader or tuning attributes there... etc. Having to stop and export twice every time one of these tasks is 'model' seems beyond clunky to me. Not to mention it will probably kill any special attributes on the object, depending on what file format you're stuck with (as mentioned, vert colors, uv sets beyond one, skinning and weighting data, etc).
If you're working in unreal, and you just need to model your discrete asset, export to maya/max, and then export to the game, that doesn't sound too bad. But if you're using the main package as a world editor, using another package for just modelling is insane.
You probably see more tools for 3dsmax. But all that proves is there's more of a hobbyist community around max, not that there are more tools created for it. I'd venture a guess that a large percentage of what's created for maya is very specific to the project/company/pipeline and never publicly released.
I think I'm pretty package agnostic. I like modelling in max, generally. I far prefer writing tools in MEL over Maxscript. I liked XSI's animation, non-realtime shader setups (weightmaps!) and speed. I liked the simplicity of silo. But if I was a TAD or TD at a studio and you came to me, saying you wanted a max license so you could do all your modelling there, while the rest of the studio used maya, I'd just say no, flat out. The engineers should always determine the package. You WILL need tools, you will need one off special tools or scripts to deal with issues that come up late in production (often a day before a milestone deadline), and you don't want to be stuck with a brilliant scripter who doesn't know the language, or is hobbled by it. It seems to take most good artists 1-3 months to get comfortable and up to speed with whatever package they need to use. Customize your hotkeys, tweak the ui, add some plugins (sweet sweet draster switcher), but deal with the fact that you need to be working in the same package as everyone else.
Well Glib yeah I agree about env work. But for pure asset creation ... I don't think it really matters.
Plus I keep thinking that tasks like UVs, baking, and basic shader setups would be best tackled by dedicated associate artists, in the official 'pipeline package' decided for the team. But the highpoly modeling and the texturing (the artsy stuff) only requires the modeling package the artist is the most familiar. The artsy stuff only resides in : the most desired modeling package, the engine running in the background, and photoshop...
Asthane: I believe I did read your post, what did I miss? I've been working 65 hour weeks and things are a little blurry in my head these days when I get chance to post at home.
"you find something during rigging or UVing that you need to fix, you're not gonna have the luxury of going back to whatever you made it in, but that's fine. I'm not condoning ignorance of your main app or suggesting a whole other major application anyway; I specifically said small, cheap, dedicated modeling apps."
--then went on to talk about the annoyance of going back and forth, and you still seem to be under the impression that I'm talking about full 3d suites like Max/Maya/XSI/Modo and that if you model in something like Silo or ZBrush you won't know your main app. I thought I made myself pretty clear in my last post that that's not what I'm endorsing at all
I don't claim to be objective or right in everything I do.
I'd like to point out that I'm not a professional artist. I've done some freelancing, but for the most part I'm basically a UI whore. UI's interest me and I've been following the major apps on and off since about Max 2.5 (Except Blender, and not for lack of fucking trying, I swear). To me efficiency is king and program choice is all about coming as fractionally close to zero clicks as possible.
When I'm working in one program and I have to ctrl+click+click+click to select a bunch of faces (or god forbid, directly selecting verts in an app that requires pixel-precision) instead of a nice click+drag paint-select, it grates. It's just slower. I can do it obviously and for tweaks it probably doesn't even make a difference anyway but during the main modeling phase it's something I'm going to do thousands of times, so every click makes a difference.
If I can trade some export hassles for a program that expresses exactly my ideals in how I think a program should work, I think that's worth it. I'll spend the $159 or $595 or $0 (some people claim blender is their ideal program, not that I understand it) myself. I'm sorely tempted to just write one so I can get that last fraction closer to zero clicks as possible but I'm afraid the math would be fatal and no one would buy it anyway because it wouldn't likely be flexible enough to match anyone else's ideals, just mine
Just lost 2 hours of highpoly in an instant crash, CAN'T THEY WRITE A BLOODY AUTOBAK TO DESKTOP FOR FUCKS SAKE
Engineer my ass Maya
I feel your pain, Pior!
Maya seems to be ok with individual meshes that are highpoly, but has a real problem with files that contain lots of smaller meshes (Ie. anything tech). I've lost work countless times and now I tend to save a new version and export as obj as often as I can remember to. It still happens and I still lose work, though. Having a duplicated instance in a file seems to be an automatic way to corrupt a scene as well.
yeah each one was hard to get used to at first but then after it didn't make much difference. I still have personal favourites but at a studio where everyone has to use the same program everyone is faced with the same problems. Added with the fact that not many people use hotkeys its easy to work faster than most other people so no need to stress.
Although marking menus in Maya are almost as fast, so better for stuff that you don't do all the time and just need occasionally. Max's quad menus are slooooow by comparison, and IIRC Lightwave doesn't have right-click context menus. Does Modo?
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Just lost 2 hours of highpoly in an instant crash, CAN'T THEY WRITE A BLOODY AUTOBAK TO DESKTOP FOR FUCKS SAKE
Engineer my ass Maya
Ahhh thats happened to me when I had to use maya for things at Midway. I hated it so bad. I love my max 2010. Sure its a bit slow here and there but compared to the modeling tools in Maya theres no comparison from my experience and interaction in a production environment.
PWND...
but anyway, u can probably find the backup file with *.ma in your temporary folder.
usually it's in c:\documents&setting\users\Local Settings\Temp
It was a crash to desktop, no popup for reports or trying to save the file ... I mean, what a worse moment to try and make a backup ... right when the program crashes ... wth ...
If you're working in unreal, and you just need to model your discrete asset, export to maya/max, and then export to the game, that doesn't sound too bad. But if you're using the main package as a world editor, using another package for just modelling is insane.
You probably see more tools for 3dsmax. But all that proves is there's more of a hobbyist community around max, not that there are more tools created for it. I'd venture a guess that a large percentage of what's created for maya is very specific to the project/company/pipeline and never publicly released.
I think I'm pretty package agnostic. I like modelling in max, generally. I far prefer writing tools in MEL over Maxscript. I liked XSI's animation, non-realtime shader setups (weightmaps!) and speed. I liked the simplicity of silo. But if I was a TAD or TD at a studio and you came to me, saying you wanted a max license so you could do all your modelling there, while the rest of the studio used maya, I'd just say no, flat out. The engineers should always determine the package. You WILL need tools, you will need one off special tools or scripts to deal with issues that come up late in production (often a day before a milestone deadline), and you don't want to be stuck with a brilliant scripter who doesn't know the language, or is hobbled by it. It seems to take most good artists 1-3 months to get comfortable and up to speed with whatever package they need to use. Customize your hotkeys, tweak the ui, add some plugins (sweet sweet draster switcher), but deal with the fact that you need to be working in the same package as everyone else.
Plus I keep thinking that tasks like UVs, baking, and basic shader setups would be best tackled by dedicated associate artists, in the official 'pipeline package' decided for the team. But the highpoly modeling and the texturing (the artsy stuff) only requires the modeling package the artist is the most familiar. The artsy stuff only resides in : the most desired modeling package, the engine running in the background, and photoshop...
When I'm working in one program and I have to ctrl+click+click+click to select a bunch of faces (or god forbid, directly selecting verts in an app that requires pixel-precision) instead of a nice click+drag paint-select, it grates. It's just slower. I can do it obviously and for tweaks it probably doesn't even make a difference anyway but during the main modeling phase it's something I'm going to do thousands of times, so every click makes a difference.
If I can trade some export hassles for a program that expresses exactly my ideals in how I think a program should work, I think that's worth it. I'll spend the $159 or $595 or $0 (some people claim blender is their ideal program, not that I understand it) myself. I'm sorely tempted to just write one so I can get that last fraction closer to zero clicks as possible but I'm afraid the math would be fatal and no one would buy it anyway because it wouldn't likely be flexible enough to match anyone else's ideals, just mine
But still, to me it's a small price to pay.
I feel your pain, Pior!
Maya seems to be ok with individual meshes that are highpoly, but has a real problem with files that contain lots of smaller meshes (Ie. anything tech). I've lost work countless times and now I tend to save a new version and export as obj as often as I can remember to. It still happens and I still lose work, though. Having a duplicated instance in a file seems to be an automatic way to corrupt a scene as well.
Silly old Maya...
well said..
You don't care coz you're proficient in all of em, except XSI lol
taken from your site :
Proficient in:
Max, Modo/LW, Maya, Photoshop
:P
Although marking menus in Maya are almost as fast, so better for stuff that you don't do all the time and just need occasionally. Max's quad menus are slooooow by comparison, and IIRC Lightwave doesn't have right-click context menus. Does Modo?
Last time I used lightwave it didn't have them. Modo does but I don't think it has anything that's quicker than a hotkey.