Depends on industry I guess. In my experience maya is mostly used for character animation in gamedev, but for environment/props it is max by default or anything you want really. If studio doesn't have exporters for other packages you can always do stuff elsewhere, then FBX it to max and export from there.
Decide to participating Challenge for the first time as a long time lurker, cause I wanna practice some hard surface model and enviroment art. I have blockout the base layout in Blender and export to UE5, haven't change the lighting to fit the concept setting yet, but I'll do it in the next update.
The auto setup only seems to work with .fbx but it's so much faster and easier to export seperate .obj files from zbrush. Is there a way around this? I can't convert them to .fbx outside of zbrush, maya will choke on the polycounts of my high poly bake sources. Cheers!
"Is it possible to transfer a Maya (or Blender) rig directly into Unreal using FBX and keep the weighting?" That's kindof my point : by tackling a tiny portion first and taking it all the way down to the finish line (instead of doing a full character), you'll force yourself to run into this kind of question earlier than…
Good work at wanting to improve. This isn't a great model for pushing your skills, as it's very simplistic and missing a lot of the tougher cases. The whole avoiding Ngon thing is really dependent on what you are modelling, they are actually totally fine on a flat surface. N-gons are mostly bad in cases where the plane is…