Maya 2023

oglu · Mar 2022

I like those new Boolean Ui

And Quaddraw is much faster.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2023/ENU/?guid=GUID-A68AA257-2CAC-445D-98C4-BEA924A35FE9

oglu · Mar 2022

https://youtu.be/0LKrSvMatpA

SebKaine · Mar 2022

Not very impress, by all this.

xgen + mash + shaderfx looks to be good client for next abandonware. the code will start to vegetate slowly without any update / bug fix. shame cause they were good tools. i'm especially sad to witness the slow death of shaderfx this idea of full control over viewport with low level node logic was just brillant.

Bifrost is evolving but i can't figure how they decide to exclude FLIP liquid of the framework, to give a non nodal workflow only for liquids. While the tool they buy 8 years ago was just a stellar nodal workflow FLIP solver. After 8 years this bifrost for liquids still look like a regression over naiad to me.

On the modeling side the hopes introduce by the dev video 5 or 6 years ago with impressive artist friendly feature were never implemented. Retopo is ok il will test it , but i bet that quadremesher plugin will do a better job.

Hypershade revamping will probably never happen and fortunatly we have the node editor , but the fact that nobody at AD take notice of how slow the Hypershade has become is a mystery to me.

I still love Maya because it's a good generalist DCC , but while i have notice some effort from AD to improve things, i don't see so much vision compare to blender / houdini.

Maya has switch over the years from the best full featured generalist DCC, to the best animation package. I see less and less reason to pay a subscription for assets creation compare to what blender offer now. Maya is cool for large scale teams with strong TD/RD teams, but for freelance it start to loose the edge.

oglu · Mar 2022

A lot of things in Maya happen cause of big studios demands. Autodesk does visit the big studios they tell them we dont use xGen mash and shaderfx. So they dont develop it further. Autodesk does care little about small studios or freelancer.

Bifrost hydro solver is still in the works but core implementation have to be done first. Like number one for big studios USD. Bifrost SDK. Pipelines are bould around USD. If you cant handle it you get kicked out of the pipeline. Its also the base for everythig developed on top.

Hypershade replacement is in development in form of materialX open source project. Which hase to be implemented in USD first. A lot of big studios involved and therefore extremly slow development. The maya team does a lot open source stuff but all of those gems arnt implemented yet.

But i fully agree Maya development is to slow and to much oriented around big studios.

SebKaine · Mar 2022

Thanks for extra info oglu, i agree 100%. with what you say.

Maya only start to shine when you need to make lot of people work together at the same time on a project that involve complex assets = big studios.

Personally i don't care too much about new fancy feature, but i would love that they just take notice of the Maya Ideas forum.

my personnal wishlist match pretty much it :

-better layout / pining / grouping with the node editor and unification of graphs behavior and looks = node editor = hypershade = bifrost graph

-new alembic plugin with support of all feature of the abc format ( point cloud with custom attribute support ) and a strong alembic repath system

-better hard surface UV + group stacked UV

-come back of some sort of multilister to display shader of the scene + a good shader lib , with a fast and simple UI without having to start hypershade.

-Viewport postprocess + Raytracing like it was announced here https://streamable.com/at586j

-fix ATF curves export bug

-unify all FX tools inside one core framework ( bifrost ) + support of all external rendering engine for this framework + doc and tutorials

-bug hunting / killing legacy code / speedup overhaul perf