Have you used older 3D apps, before there was a hyper shade or render tree?
you could do only this much with materials, you had some options exposed to you,
some colors and sliders to set and that’s it.
I am sure today you really dig into the hyper shade to make specific shaders/materials/effects,
I bet you use all kind of logic and mathematic nodes to create those networks…
You have so much more possebilities in terms of control of the material.
So this is exaclty the same, but it openes more parts of the software to the user,
this is an amazing thing from a user point of view, and if you cant see it, it’s sad.
You’ve got a point here. If I’m not mistaken, the reason Autodesk bought Alias wasn’t for Maya. It was for Alias Studio tools, since they wanted that kind of software in their industrial design-area. Maya came with the package, but in spite of what many said on this forum, Maya was neither a pro or a con for Autodesk. It just came with the package.
Autodesk still pushes some of their media apps slightly, but it’s easy to see where they focus the most.
This might hint at XSI being developed in a higher pace as of now, since Avid/ SoftImage has media as their main area, not industrial design.
Yeah, definitely… I completely get it and I understand a lot of it. I do tons of tool and workflow scripting as well as expression writing. I am saying, reading early posts in the thread a lot of people complain about wanting to be an Artist not a Programmer. I can name handfuls of people I’ve worked with in the past who are great artists that know really NOTHING about the utility nodes in Maya’s Hypershade for example. Why? …Because they don’t have a clue as to what half of them mean, do or how they even function and they don’t really care to learn. By saying “they” I know people will assume I am talking about them, and I am not… I am speaking hypothetically about people I HAVE worked with at different studios…
The videos of ICE that I saw yesterday did open my thoughts a bit more than original but I am still not blown away, it is cool but an excuse to change applications altogether? … Not really.
We are not saying that we don’t want to learn scripting. I have been using MEL for a close to a decade. I can use it just fine I just dont think that I should have to. It take to long, there is no realtime feedback the way there is in ICE.
In Maya right now if you wanted to to vary the rotation and scale of instanced particles you have to create 2 custom attribures and then write 2 expressions and then assign them. and the pay it and see if you got it right. if not you have to back it right click on the atribures and open a seperate editor and then edit the expression and then repeat the rest of the process and then keep repeating it until it is right.
With ice I can add a turbularize value node and the set my min and max value and the hit play and ajust the slders as it plays to get the desired results. done.
Now you tell me which is easier? which is faster? Now what is most important to a production artist or FX artist? Speed. thats what. What is most important to a production comapany? Speed and cost. Well we hve already established it is faster well that just leaves cost. Well One seat of XSI advanced with maintainence for one year cost to the dollor that same amount and the Maya unlimited /1year gold support bundle. But with XSI I get an additional 5 batch licenses. and I get behaviour crowd software. to get that functionally and additional render capability cost a Maya user $5K for the 5 renderer licenses. then you have to fork out the cash for a license of Massive which is about 10-15K USD last time I looked.
So that make it faster and cheaper than Maya.
well?..
oh and by they way when you renew you maintenance on maya it is about $200-300 nore per year than XSI advanced.
Oh yeah and my XSI eval that I have been using for about 2 weeks… yeah it has not crash on me except when I was trying to import a LWO file that turned out to have 2 point polys it it which are not supported in XSI or maya for that matter. Other than that it has not crashed one time.
Maya has crashed close to once a day or more just about every weekday for about the last 2 years.
I think that there were several reasons for Autodesk to buy A|w. Another BIG reason was that Maya was causing serious competition to 3DSMAX in the game development area.
In any case, there were several benefits to Autodesk for the purchase of Maya.
Was it a good think for the Maya toolset to have been sold to Autodesk? I don’t know. I guess it depends on who you ask, but there is no denying that Maya continbues to be the de-facto standard for doing cinematic 3D design.
I kinda have to disagree. Avid, while they are a fine company has it’s roots strongly planted in editorial & compositing technology - NOT 3D.
Calmasascow reading
My point is that it’s one thing to become bored and/or frustrated with your chosen toolset at times.
And it’s easy to believe that migrating to a shiny “new” toolset will fix all (or most of) your woes.
But if you really think that your work will get any easier or better by moving from Maya to XSI (or any other 3D app), you may well be in for a rude awakening.
There will be months (years?) worth of battling a frustrating and productivity-killing learning curve.
There will be bugs that are not fixed from one release to another -and there will be “must have” features that are never implemented.
XSI is an elegant product - and the mental ray integration is beyond compare.
But on balance, it’s no “better” or “worse” than Maya.
The issues you complain about in Maya are legitimate.
But there are workarounds - as there are (and must be) for every other piece of complex, feature-rich software in the world.
If you want a change - that’s great.
I’m just advising that you don’t make the change for the wrong reasons.
Its quite nice to see people looking at Softimage XSI… just the Softimage website reminds of how Alias used be before they got bought out by Autowreck.
things I thought might have benefited Maya years back from such an aquistion have been frivolous and quite pathetic where some sort of effort has been made but not much.
I’m already giving XSI 6.5 trial a go and really liking its similarities to Maya makes it pretty damn easy to slip right into even its helpfile and the direct ? is helpful unlike the maya browser html crapdocs …
ok so there are a few niggles I have with ugly bevelled ui (you either like it or hate it)… I wished they’d improve it or lose it … and the fact it doesn’t adhere to my systems os theme… but its ok to use windows scrollbars(wtff is up with that?)… the open/close dialogs -rubbish… but at least its attribute dialog windows etc don’t look like shit. Infact XSI dialog windows are much better layed out and easier to navigate and work with… even like the little things like the color gizmos etc…
but I guess existing XSi users really must like that basic photoshop grey bevel ui look? i wonder if they’ve ever asked for improvements to its ui? I think many maya users can relate to that :)… but I also noticed a lack of icons… it feels very unfinished… the shelf is off by default( probably cus its oversized ugly icons look abit naff like they gave up on doing them …and there aren’t many of them for common functions)… I dunno about you guys but icons to me really help, why go through boring looking menus when well placed icons within the UI elements for functions are so much faster to pick out and use. Even adding xsi scripts to the shelf looks a bit meh… and what is up with those fake button bevel menus(not that sidebar one on the main ui, I mean like the render tree)…where you’d think rolling the mouse over to the adjacent menu button! would drop that menu… but instead it doesn’t because you have to click on it first…:S get some damn consistency XSI.
Its rendering intergration with mentalray is great however… and render region in the viewport while not new for other 3d software… makes a nice treat when doing vertex texture painting… really takes that guess work out of painting weights and getting upates on texture placement… I know 3dsmax has had better vertex painting with textures showing in viewport and an easier setup but that was many many years ago before I ever came to maya… I’m still wondering why Maya feels a bit shit in that area since Autowreck came along.
So much I really like about XSi its not perfect I still wonder why it can’t detach viewports but its only small things like that I can work around, but right now I don’t have too, overal I still like Maya the mel scripts and the plugins I use to plaster up maya’s default crapness… I’ve come to accept it as it is, no amount of bashing or wishlists will help anymore, its pretty hopeless like the effort they put into making there feature improvements like giving us shitcubes in replacement of a viewcompass that just worked better or just not fixing up and improving on the old stuff like the layer editor etc… with 2009 coming up i’m only expecting more averageness overal.
While hopefully XSI will be making much progress with its NICE feature and hopefully they’ll get plenty of community effort in building up a collection of compounds to improve on itself over the year from its 7.0 release until its next release when I think my transitioning over to it will be much more in favour of XSI at a guess
I’ve read through most of this thread but I have to totally agree with calmasacow. I’ve been with maya since 4.0 (in some type of capacity). And I’ve been contemplating moving to XSI since version 4, tried max and I just didn’t like the UI and workflow. XSI seemed much closer to the feel of maya. The first time I tried I was actually kinda shocked because everything actually seemed faster and more responsive. It just felt cleaner and more concise, it didn’t take a 100 steps to do the exact same thing as maya. But I stood by AW, then the buyout, development became stagnant. I think the whole underlying topic here is the development path. Where it seems that SI wants to really push XSI as the artist’s tool, what exactly is it that Autodesk wants to do with maya? Not real clear. Don’t get me wrong I really love maya but if a L-system (ala paintfx) and a fluid system (ala realflow) gets integrated into XSI I really don’t think I’ll have any choice. I guess we’ll see what 2009 holds.
What makes you think XSI will not be bought by someone else?
They are a prime candidate to be acquired imho and i can think of just the vendor who can do it…
XSI does not represent a large revenue stream for Avid and their focuses are quiet different, XSI needs to be owned by a company who’s main focus is 3D.
I see this XSI release a good thing for Maya users to be honest this sort of competition will really drive Autodesk to step up their game.
Err good point… that gives me chills. I really hope that doesn’t become the case. Competition raises quality and innovation I believe, and the bar seems to be raising for XSI. I’m not jumping on the new feature bandwagon, it just seems XSI is pointed in the right direction for the future, under it’s current vendor that is. I mean what if AD buys SI? CGI, IMHO, is still in its infancy in a lot of ways and, due to recent buyouts, innovation may start to slow, of course it will never stop.
A very, very long time ago I managed the task of completing the lines of code needed to make a computer draw a circle in red. Although not a difficult task to code for a coder, it did take me a bit of time. A couple of years later there came a software that had a tool with which you could draw a circle in a second. I was amazed and drew circles all day long. And squares and lines too. Now, here I am today, many years later in, albeit an immensely more complex graphical production, exactly the same situation. I want to draw my circle and if someone can do the coding for me to do be able to do just that in a simpler way, then praise be unto them. Because I want to draw many circles in the time that I have, not just one. I want to learn and study my tools too, all seventy-three of them. But most of all I just want to draw my circles. Coding is art too, but there are times when you lose track of where you are going because of too much time spent on solving problems. IMHO coding is supposed to be a way to really excel in what you are trying to do, not a way to do the basic things.
I really like Maya but the part of me that likes it most is purely masochistic. I’m really not getting things done in the same speed that I get things done in for example Rhino (of course only comparing similar modeling tasks), so after months of testing and evaluating other solutions for polygonal modeling and animation, I have decided to put my money on XSI. (However this decision is not only about the practical use of Maya, it’s equally about Autodesks country-locked license system. As I move around a bit, I can not afford to buy several licenses just to be able to use Maya where I’m presently residing).
Maya is a great package, but it seems to me that it’s “Extensibility” has sort of been misused for a long time as an excuse to not improve certain things that people have been consitently asking for.
It’s like a swordsmith who makes great swords but they have certain problems reported by the people who use them. But instead of trying to improve them he keeps saying that people are free to use his anvil to improve the swords themselves, just because he knows of a few customers who might be semi-good at this.
Maybe a bit of a silly comparison, but still ;).
I think the worst thing is when there’s a new Version coming out and it has some totally situational new feature that seems to have eaten a lot of development time, while the old basic problems still haven’t been adressed - the main example would be the “Ocean Shader” introduced some Versions ago.
The latest Versions of Maya do have some nice improvements tho, so it looks like Autodesk is getting on the right track.
You should probably rephrase that closer to something like “based on nothing more than my own conjectures and speculation, I believe that they are a candidate to be acquired, and with not one balance at hand I imagine they aren’t much of a revenue stream”
Phrased like that you’d still be off the mark in some regards, but at least you wouldn’t also be presenting some wild guesses as they are factual
I don’t want to sound confrontational, you proved to be clued several times before, but this particular statement was deceivingly factual sounding.
Softimage’s revenues have been going up for a while now, considerably.
Avid as a company after years of looking sideways at the Soft guys (considered the inc they didn’t understand but that threw the cool parties) is now quite happy with the company itself and the fact it’s sold more in a couple quarters than it did in the previous four years.
The fact that they put marketing and sales aside and let the product’s management to embark on a three years project with well over a year of user driven alpha and betatesting, pushing the deadlines everytime they felt they needed to to make a better software, speaks volumes on the subject of Avid and how they perceive Softimage as a company (this in regards to ICE).
I’m an ex Avid employee, and the above comes from some of my ex employers I still chat with for the record. That’s how I form my opinion of how Avid perceives their sibling 3D inc.
It’s not 100% accurate and it’s not “official”, It is in fact just the opinion of some friends, which might or might not represent their true feelings or the actual facts, but I thought I’d have the decency of mentioning my sources for making statements like the ones I made.
Of course that might also make me biased (although I used and still use other companies’ products regularly), but at least you know I am
As for AD and Maya, Last I checked they came up with a retarded year numbered release scheme and rammed it down everybody’s throat and then gave some scraps of paper to sales and marketing to play around with.
If the dev team doesn’t make it on time to stabilize and MRay’s build at that moment has the stability of a three legged moose, well that’s the user’s problem isn’t it?
Sorry, I don’t mean to flamebait, but occasionally I have to use Maya for a living, and I liked it A LOT more before Alias left SGI. After that it felt like the heart of the application (whether people liked the original values of its design or not) has been spiralling down and lost itself, and it makes my life just that little bit worse every single time I have to use it.
As for Avid vs AD, the way I read the post about I think was supposed to mean that Avid has a creative focus (editing/sound/dcc) in terms of both buying and developing, while AD has always had a much stronger technical/engineering foothold, and still does when you consider that even max excels the most (in terms of market share of the various artistic dcc apps) in arch viz.
If we want to talk differences in products and market approach, that misses that Avid has also had a long standing tradition of hardware and customer service (both their strongest and weakest point, but that’s a long discussion to be had ), which AD only found itself to face when they bought discreet (and even then they still weren’t manufacturing, only bundling), but if it comes to 3D that might be ininfluential.
My only 2cents I’ll add to this thread as this is probably already a borderline post.
If you are referencing to my post regarding the focus of the two companies, that was exactly what I meant. One of them is in entertainment, the other one in engineering.
"XSI does not represent a large revenue stream for Avid " was based on the last financial report they posted which i looked at, there was barely a mention of XSI, if things have changed since then i’m very happy for the folks at Soft!
In regards to being acquired i didn’t necessarily mean it to be AD there are other companies out their where Soft could fit in and nicely round off their portfolio, I’ll let you speculate over who
I’m sure Avid is a great company but i personally don’t think from a bigger perspective they are perhaps the best fit with Soft…
10 or so years ago when non engineering 3D tools where primarly used for film/tv work being married to a company that specialised in broadcast/video editing tools etc made perfect sense.
Fast forward to 2008 the broadcast/film usage of 3D is consistantly becoming a smaller and smaller segment (its not getting smaller as a segment its just not growing as fast in relative to new sectors like games).
The usage and adoption of 3D technology is becoming extremely wide spread, just look at the announcment from google today.
I just feel perhaps XSI could go futhure if the parent company was more focus on the widespread addoption of 3D in various different ways and industries.
Oh remember the last debate we had and i said i thought foundation’s was to cheap and not sustainable. Its interesting how its now being phased out .
Which is a good thing in my eyes, it shows that XSI is really strong now.
The 3d market at the moment is extremly competitive.
Maya, MAX, XSI, LW, C4D, Houdini I would consider the high end players applications like silo, blender are strong competitors…7,8 applications doing more or less the same, that’s awesome! We saw the prices coming down, we have real alternatives to Maya now.
Looks like Maya is loosing ground to XSI, but I wouldn’t blame AD only. The most annoying things are part of MAya since ages. unfair upgrading policies through memberships. Clustered GUI. Bad MR integration, stabilty problems, hardware issues etc. Sure AD is not facing these problems, as they took them just over. While checking the sites of XSI, LW and Houdini we see a tremendous progress going on. I will see what comes into Maya 2009, but I doubt that I’m gonna upgrade, if AD is not addressing these issues. I’m afraid that they gonna give us some new features, but the programm will keep it’s clustered interface, the bad MR integration and the same stabilty issues as 2008.
Autodesk:
Maya seems to be just a PR tool for Autodesk when a film receives an Oscar for vfx.
Most innovation we saw in the last versions were either bought (muscle) or WIP from Alias days. (Stam’s ncloth)
Coding:
Using maya without MEL is a little bit like using Flash without ActionScript. But it’s no surprise to me that there are many people who don’t like to code with Maya’s silly script editor.
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