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I think 3ds Max is easer with its UI but I know I need to learn Maya for college.

Klumpmeister
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Klumpmeister
I am learning Maya more but it's sorta hard to just start creating off the bat. With 3ds Max i am able to find the objects I want to lay down and start creating objects. I know Maya is used in college more than Max but do you have any advice for a starting modeler?
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  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    -- -1 points for not reading the post fully. sorry about that..

    When i started maya from max i got the gnomon introduction to maya and digital tutors intro aswell. If your serious about modeling in Maya take a look at NEX its a plugin that makes maya poly tools a little more usable
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  • snoop
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    snoop polycounter lvl 7
    Only advice I've got is to just stick with it. I tried learning Maya and had it within 4 hours. In fact, I find that a lot about Maya is easier than 3dsmax, especially not having to use modifiers. Who knows, maybe you'll find that liberating too.
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  • haiddasalami
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    haiddasalami polycounter lvl 14
    Pick up Digital Tutor's Introduction to Maya dvd's. Definitely one of the best ways to learn the interface. O and marking menu's (ctrl or maybe its hold right click not sure, my hand just knows where it is lol) and spacebar are your friend :) Makes workflow easier
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  • Eric Chadwick
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    Eric Chadwick admin
    Yeah, marking menus! Coming back into Max this is a big letdown, not having something as fast and clean as the marking menus. Quads are just not as good. :(

    I found Nick Zuccarello's video tuts to be quite good for an intro to Maya...
    http://vimeo.com/nickz/videos/all/search:maya+introduction/sort:oldest
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  • Stromberg90
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    Stromberg90 polycounter lvl 11
    If you know modeling well you should only need to get a grasp of the ui and you will be good to go :)

    I had to do the same when i went to school, only i changed from modo to maya, i started about 3 months before we started, altough i did change back to modo at school... cause i realy didnt matter what we used, now i am using 3ds max btw, so changing app is not that hard :)

    Good luck with school btw ;)
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  • Autocon
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    Autocon polycounter lvl 15
    Wow those NEX modeling tools look fantastic! Things like there connect tool and shift drag extrude make the max modeler inside of me very happy. With it looking like I might have to switch to Maya (ewww!) I might have to seriously consider picking this up even with the 170 dollar price tag.

    I have used maya before so I know it well enough but dose anyone know of any tutorials on that spacebar quad menu thing? I love my simple yet context sensitive custom quad menu in Max and would hope to emulate something similar in maya but got all kinds of lost trying to figure out how.
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  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    Autocon, its buggy as hell, just like the rest of maya. its better than maya on its own though. You have my condolences if you have to switch, its a great tool for animators but the modeling tools while relatively complete really dont cut it if your used to silo or max.

    One thing about nex which drives me nuts is the shift drag has no threshold on it so selecting edges quite often results in extrustions which you dont see until you do a smooth preview :/
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  • Eric Chadwick
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    Eric Chadwick admin
    Autocon wrote: »
    anyone know of any tutorials on that spacebar quad menu thing? I love my simple yet context sensitive custom quad menu in Max and would hope to emulate something similar in maya but got all kinds of lost trying to figure out how.

    help file and a video tut
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  • haiddasalami
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    haiddasalami polycounter lvl 14
    r_fletch_r wrote: »
    Autocon, its buggy as hell, just like the rest of maya. its better than maya on its own though. You have my condolences if you have to switch, its a great tool for animators but the modeling tools while relatively complete really dont cut it if your used to silo or max.

    One thing about nex which drives me nuts is the shift drag has no threshold on it so selecting edges quite often results in extrustions which you dont see until you do a smooth preview :/

    Really wish someone would just release a better version of Nex. but what dont you like about the modeling tools than whats in max? There's usually workarounds to getting the same thing done....its just sometimes those workaround take a lot of banging your head :P
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  • dRaster
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    dRaster polycounter lvl 17
    r_fletch_r wrote: »
    Autocon, its buggy as hell, just like the rest of maya. its better than maya on its own though. You have my condolences if you have to switch, its a great tool for animators but the modeling tools while relatively complete really dont cut it if your used to silo or max.

    One thing about nex which drives me nuts is the shift drag has no threshold on it so selecting edges quite often results in extrustions which you dont see until you do a smooth preview :/

    Thank you for feedback on NEX, we love hearing what others think of it.

    I'm one of the developers of NEX at dRaster and I'd like to address your points.

    I'm sorry you ran into any bugs with NEX. If there are any bugs that you were able to reproduce, please send us an email with it and we'll be happy to look into it. I agree, Maya has progressively gotten worse with stability, I don't think NEX makes it worse. In fact, our tools are more reliable than the native Maya tools (especially the Multi-Cut tool).

    I'm not quite sure I understand your issue with shift-extrude. You can only extrude edges using shift-extrude if your shift-click on a transform manipulator, in fact your cursor even changes to indicate an extrude mode when over a manipulator. Shift-clicking on an edge by itself will only toggle its selection. Now, if you're accidentally shift-clicking on a manipulator than I suggest that you use Ctrl+Shift (add) and Ctrl (subtract) for selection changes. NEX actually hides the manipulator when holding those modifier key combinations to help with making selections (so that the manipulator doesn't get in the way of your selections). Now, having said all that, having a tolerance setting might not be a bad idea. Believe it or not, we actually thought of that but chose not to as we were planning on adding shift-extrusion for faces and verts. And doing a zero-extrusion on a face can sometimes be useful if you, for example, want to do an inset later.

    In any event, we take feature suggestions and bug reports very seriously. We know because of the wide variety of system configurations out there that we can't fix every issue but it works perfectly for most of our users. If you have "Maya certified" graphics card, there should not be a problem running NEX. If you do have an issue, please send us a report or even reply back to this thread and we'll work with you to resolve it.

    Cheers,
    Arash Keissami
    dRaster, Inc.
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