considering a divorce after 10 years with Maya, if 2009 isn't spectacular

#281

I remember getting into with some XSI people back in 2003 I guess and the next day I go ta phone call from a representative of XSI who wanted to give me a demo and a temp license to tryout XSI. 5 years later I’m still using Maya. :slight_smile:

#282

Most of the people back in the Maya 6.5-7.0 days that would go to the local Maya events were soon to be ex-XSI and Max users. They didn’t like the direction XSI or Max was going. shrug

#283

Edit Polys > Merge Vertices? Subsequently, if you select 2 UVs and hit Merge, it’ll “merge”/“weld”/“snap” the vertices too. Go figgur.

#284

Well I guess the other point I’d mention is that at least in Los Angeles the work force is largely based on Maya users.

Offhand I know of no studio that uses XSI at all in the area although I assume that there must be somebody using it somewhere since they have an office here and I can’t recall ever seeing job postings for XSI users either.

If anything I’ve noticed Cinema4d gaining ground in the broadcast and commerical areas.

But if you are an autonomous artist then it’s much easier to just decide you want to use different software.

Having said that I do wish that render layers worked reliably and for both the standard renderer and mentalray.

#285

maya is dead

thread over… :slight_smile:

#286

no it’s not you twonk. :smiley:

#287

I am one of those heavy duty users who worked on major motion pictures using Maya. I started using Alias products during the times of Alias Auto Studio and Power Animator. I am one of those who was using Alias when most of the interface was at the bottom of the screen and before there was such a thing as marking menus. I even know most of the first employees of Alias who created the Alias Studio which is still one of my most favorite applications thanks to it’s clever interface and stability, although I don’t do 3d modeling. Heck I’ve witnessed three or four alias logo changes (remember the first one with the red and blue pillars in shape of letter “A”?).

I’ve written some of the tools people around here use. I’ve also written some tutorials and many people I tought in my spare time are now making a good living in this industry and winning awards. I am not saying all this to impress anyone here, but more to get Autodesk to listen closely. However, I do not want to be open about my identity as I know that people can be quite emotional when they hear the bad news that they themselves are responsible for. To make things worse, what I will write here is not just my observation but something that is shared by many in this industry, mostly those who make recommendations and purchasing decisions (just like myself).

Here’s my list of grievances:

  • Maya 2008 (with “service pack” 1 or 2, all the same) on Windows XP is a piece of junk. I’ve been using Maya on Linux and IRIS before and it was not much better, but lately on Windows it is getting worse very fast. The software cannot work for more then a few hours without getting into some type of trouble: commands don’t work, or they break, or test renders are not using the right camera, or any one of those combinations. I’ve seen files not saved over the network when Maya spits out a message that it was saved successfully (this problem has been around for ages, yet no one seems to care, and our fileserver is more then plenty fast and reliable).

I am not even complaining about lack of features or some structural problems like lack of multithreaded interface or even simpler things like plain interface design. I write my own stuff when I see something’s lacking. But right now Maya’s interface is like Dr. Jackyl and Mr. Hyde. Sometimes it is nice and smooth and in other areas one is wondering what are people at Autodesk smoking. Whatever it is, I don’t want to even smell it, it is that bad.

As far as functionality, here are some of the problems I’ve encountered in maya 2008:

  • Changing attribute values at some point may stop working so you may tweak renders all you want, attributse are not read correctly. Restarting maya seems to help. In most extreme cases one needs to delete userPrefs.mel and other prefs files. Sometimes I need to do that a few times per week so now I have to remember to back up new prefs files every day to make sure I don’t loose prefs I added in the meantime.
  • Getting help from Autodesk is a collosal waste of time. They have so many bugs to deal with that they don’t even know what they are. Calling them or contacting them won’t give any solution. Due to my experience and knowledge I usually end up telling them what the workaround is anyway.
  • Mental ray instability in maya. How many times did you get “mental ray has become unstable, please exit maya”? I have setups which took hours to create and now I get those messages every time I open the file so I have to invent a new way of doing an old thing just to please Maya. Mental ray in Maya has become unstable because it cannot deal with anything more complex then simple exercises from “Learning Maya - Lesson 1”.
  • Hidden objects don’t show up in hypergraph in hierarchical view. They only show in up-downstream view.
  • MEL command for xform does not support World space of abosolute. Try to move an object in MEL using xform command and absolute values… impossible.
  • If you are test rendering a region in render view and you click on another viewport in Maya, it will not render that selected region any more, NO matter what you do. You’ll have to render an entire frame (which may take hours) to be able to select that same region again. (mental ray again)
  • If you “render selected” interactively in Maya, those selected objects will be the only ones rendered in Maya batch, regardless of your settings. The only way out of this problem is to render again interactively and turn of the option for rendering selected objects.
  • Use transparency maps at your own risk. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Most of the time they don’t work, so you have to pipe them through some b/w procedure just as a workaround because procedures in transparency channel are (luckily) not broken.
  • If you import a file that also has a persp camera in it, you’re in trouble. Maya was not built for to persp cameras, and certainly cannot deal with another one that’s imported.
  • If you start another maya session on your computer to quickly check something in another file or export a little piece, watch out. Maya will go bananas and you interface will get corrupted.
  • Licencing. Don’t even get me started. We’ve litteraly wasted (as a company) hours if not days on phone calls and emails regarding licences that didn’t work. You buy a software, and install it and it works right? Wrong. Never worked at Alias, and now with Autodesk it is worse. Or even worse - try to buy Mental Ray standalone for Maya and run it on your renderfarm. You’ll get serial port dongles for chrissakes! And they will have 2006 as “current date” imbedded, so when you try to licence the damn thing, it starts spitting out errors all over the place. It will tell you that 2008 is not the current year “your computer date and time is too far ahead.”
    How telling… maybe AUTODESK IS TOO FAR BEHIND???

And that’s only after a few weeks of using maya 2008, and only those bugs that I bothered to remember. I have wasted hours and hours on some occasions trying to figure out what was going on. And at this point I can only say maya is bordering with unusable software due to those bugs. They are not bugs, they are now serious lack of functionality. If I cannot import a file, save a file, move an object using MEL command, or adjust my test renders, then I don’t need that kind of “software”.

To add insult to injury, reporting a company that uses only illegal licences of maya (more then 50 of them), and that even brags about it in the media produces no effect at Autodesk. The person in charge of that at Autodesk could not care less, while pretending that they are doing something about it. I wonder if that all means that we should start using illegal copies of Maya as those don’t require convoluted licencing schemes that don’t work, and Autodesk obviously wouldn’t mind anyways.

When we bought mental ray standalone from Autodesk we were sent DVDs without hardware dongle. So we call them to send us dongle. They promised an overnight rush service. Then a week later we get a confirmation about that “overnight rush delivery”. The dongle arrives and doesn’t work. Then we order again and wait yet again. This time even longer.

If Maya 2009 doesn’t come out to be the best thing since sliced bread I will stop using it. I am not just writing empty threats, I am already learning Houdini and am happy to say that Houdini is all those things that Maya was supposed to be but never delivered.

It has been a happy marriage for most of the past 15 years, and it was an important part of my carrier but at this point I cannot see any reasons to use Maya over Houdini, except maybe Maya 2009. However, I have serious doubts that general attitude towards paying customers will change at Autodesk. Luckily they cannot buy Houdini so resting on their market share won’t get them far at least not in hi-end area of 3d. Most places that based their pipeline on Maya are now using Maya more as an interface - just a place where you move things on the screen. Everything else is not dependant on Maya. ILM at one point throught of using Maya for their pipeline, but now that’s history. Sony Imageworks uses Maya only for some modeling and that may change soon. Others are quickly developing their own in house tools which make Maya look like etch-a-scetch. And yet other users and companies (Rhythm+Hues for example and Imageworks too) are using Houdini more and more.

Autodesk wake up or be honest and tell us that you don’t want people using Maya so that we can make better purchasing decisions in the future.

#288

Still works great on all my computers. What’s “dead” about that?

#289

maya is not moving
the updates are just some fix
lots of major problems remain unchanged

i.e maya is dead

i am a heavy user too and each year i’m disapointed by the fact that maya do not move from any point (well it’s a bit exagerated, but when you see that they needed about 10 or more versions to implement live subd…)

i don’t care about shiny ncloth and all. i want a fukken animation core that works. i do not want to script all my pipeline anymore to do what alias/autodesk has forgotten…

#290

I’ve been plagued by most the bugs Mayaguru123 reported. Most nobably, loading MR and rendering previews is a lot like lighting a fuse and waiting for Maya to go boom (now there’s an idea for Maya 9’s splash screen).

I’ve found this thread pretty useful. I’m an independant freelancer and the only way for me to compare notes about 3D software is online. The “divorcees” have been specific about their problems, and that let’s me make a more informed decision about which software to invest in. What I don’t find useful is the same old “all software has its pros and cons so just use what works for you” line. Seems we could just make that a sticky at the top of the forum and save people from typing it over and over.

#291

I totally agree with Maya Guru.
not new features are needed but bug fixes and hardware suppport. We here invested in OpenGL Cards just for having viecubes turning black, handles disappearing from time to time…Houdini runs fine on Quadros and fine on GeForce at home.
I totally agree that IPR integration is incredibly bad, so is MR integration. his hybrid thing betwenn MR and Software render has to stop! So any basic Shaders, just to do the same thing…
I’m learning Houdini since month, thanks to the free Apprentice Edition, i enjoy how stable it is, how straight forward the complety rewritten GUI is. i enjopy that daily builds address bugs IMMEDIATLY.

#292

There are no specific bug reports in this post, just a general expression of discontent.

This is a plea, to Autodesks competition, of what not to do to their users.

Less than one tenth of my time is spent creatively, the rest is ushered into endless forum reasearch trying to find out why something isn’t working the way it has been described in the documentation. On my desktop I can’t even get the script editor to work (I have just resorted to editing scripts in the shelf editor.)

The only thing that allows me to get my rent paid on time is this forum and the many users who volunteer their time to help. To them I owe a great deal.

As for maya (which I have been using since the day the first version was released)… I haven’t switched because I haven’t been able to. I have simply not had a window of time in my schedule to learn a new platform enough to make the move.

The idea of Maya integrated solidly with Mudbox, Matchmover and the various other applications they have aquired was at first very exciting. I would love to be able complete all of those tasks in one seamless application, and that it hasn’t happend on anyones part is a bit odd to me.

That said, at the rate Autodesk/Alias has been moving since version 6, it will be another eight years before that vision is realized on the part of Autodesk. So far the only thing they have really brought to the table are fancy new icons.

The great migration approaches, the question now is XSI or Houdini?

My understanding is that Houdini is the preference when character animation is not the goal. What I want to know is, which platform offers the best comprimise of stability and documentation/training?

Back to work… So I guess I’ll see you all back in the forums in, oh, say fifteen minutes (unless maya crashes the whole computer in which case we’ll have to figure in the reboot time as well)…

edit: just to give one concrete example…
A few days before someone at mymentalray was nice enough to illustrate the ass backwards and preposterously redundant mental ray framebuffer system in a 101 video, I spent tweleve hours trying to pick it apart from what was offered in the manual.

Instead of leaving it undocumented they decided that it would be cute to leave a riddle of instructions that would not lead to any sort of completed result. In fact, just the opposite. They boast about it in the new feature section of the manual.

The process, as far as I understand, is not even possible without 3rd party solutions (the ctrl.buffer,) not that they would bother to mention that.

#293

I think XSI is the way to go, if someone wants a great Allound system…
Houdini has an incredible workflow, but modelling, and photo-realistic still renderings are not on par with other apps. Character Animation was improved a lot, lately. Muscles, Hair, Fur etc…
However, SideFX is working hard to bring new users to Houdini. I guess they will address some of these issues very, very soon.

#294

I’d say Maya or XSI as a main pipleline app. If you have already invested in Maya, continue to use it. Again, repeated because people don’t listen… switching apps opens a new set of problems. Just because one person switches doesn’t mean the app will work for you the same way. People have different requirements for the apps and push certain aspects of the apps more than others. ICE won’t mean dick for someone needing that kind of workflow. XSI is not without its faults and someone would be pulling your chain like a hooker looking for loose change if they told you otherwise.

I wouldn’t bet on SESI fixing any major changes any time soon to Houdini. Don’t ever buy into an app based on promises of things to come. And definitely don’t let one of us convince you to buy something. Seriously. :slight_smile: Test drive the software for yourself. If an app has what you need now, use it. There’s no end all be all.

lukas… change your sig to XSI from Maya since you claim you don’t use Maya anymore. :wink:

#295

I would say Maya is the best all rounder currently. I use lot of Nurbs so XSI and simialr products are lacking in that department.

#296

the truth is that I just want stability.

After learning maya there are parts I still like…artistically

but the software renderer has no diagnostic or memory management features.

There are places making good money who depend on that stuff…

what amazes me is that people just rush to the defense blindly…saying that if you dont like the software…LEAVE.

that is disheartening…because we liked the software enough to learn it…but software needs to be managed

the internal renderer should be maintained.

the mental ray renderer should be maybe stronger

and all plugins need to be recompiled for each version.

and you should have to buy plugins modules or work around scripts to make money after you spend money on the software.

maya is cool in many aspects…

BUT

its a sham the way it is managed.

I wont stop using it…but I will put in no paid overtime hours to find a different solution.

production hours shouldnt be bartered and then spent on crashing software…the sense of frustration I have on certain days when I know there is no way to meet a deadline…JUST BECAUSE OF NEGELECTED SOFTWARE.

its a real shame.

and while I know houdini…this isnt about houdini and its not about hating maya.

its about find ways around maya’s present obstacles in the context of production…which is hilarious because maya is supposed to enable everything in production.

#297

so how many days left before the divorce becomes official?

who is getting the kids?

#298

∞≠ << the worlds smallest violin playing

#299

Siggraph??
I think it was stated like 150 times already…

Truth is this topic (yes I’ve read it all) brought my attention to the point in which I am considering XSI or even C4D for our studio. We’re going to purchase quite a few licenses in the near future and we were looking at Maya. Now I’m almost certain we’re not gonna go this route. Not because Maya lacks features but how people talk about Autodesk. I’m simply afraid to dump all the $$.

I still have time for the decision but damn! How can such a brilliant tool become such a nightmare for so many people?

#300

I’m no expert in a lot of areas since I’m a beginner in the field, but still I’ve had time to use a quite fair amount of maya features for some years now, and the same goes for 3ds, that I’ve used for several years.
Well I don’t consider maya to be a nightmare, but it could be a lot better, just as max or certainly any other program for that matter. Things can still get done, people are just pissed theses things aren’t eased a little more.
Just to say, “nightmare” is a bit extreme…