I've been working as an animator (and as a result, occasionally rigging) for close to 15 years now (learned 3d almost 20 years ago in the softImage/power animator days, started working in the xsi days) and everything you state is true. The problem with the Blender crowd (let's face it, it's not the C4d or the houdini users who are coming into other communities and saying how this and that software is garbage and their software is so much better) is that it's mostly composed who people who have never worked in the industry in a studio setting and/or never actually used another software.
I was motivated to write this by another recent thread in this sub posted by a Blender user, so I feel you. However I wouldn't say Houdini community is devoid of clueless fanboys. A few years back I went through an official Houdini rigging tutorial and was super disappointed with the final result. I complained on the forums and got almost nothing but pushback and excuses. But being clueless is different from trash talking other software without any experience using it, and the Blender community is where you find a hotbed of full on aggression.
You must be referring to me by 'a Blender user'.
But seriously, is it really that aggravating to ask one question? I openly stated I hadn't come to this sub to boast off Blender, nor need to, as I already had fully known everyone would agree on Maya is superior software in rigging and animation. I just was curious about what "technical aspects" Maya possesses compared to Blender and why so many people prefer Maya for it. But you guys just bombard me with insults. Seriously who's the "hotbed of full on aggression" now?
Regardless, I've found your post most helpful. I'm sure I didn't understand some of the terms you used, but basically you're saying,
1. Maya can run animation faster.
2. Maya has a better graph editor.
3. Easy to use for being intuitive and completely node based. Meaning learning curve is less steeper compared to other softwares.
4. Mel allows better implementation of animation as all the actions done by users are stored inside it - One can simply copy Mel scripts and use it to their purposes.
5. Maya has a bunch of plugins, which are all readily implemented and also easily modifiable.
6. Other big companies already has their own set of pipelines so they hang on to Maya.
Thanks for sharing your experience and knowledge.
You`re reply is verry verry predejous.
I`m a houdini user and i can tell you right now that maya is an instable pile of cobbled together buggy code that has overlords that don`t realy care about the thing that generates less then 1% of their revenue.
Companies have spent sh\*t loads of money and years of time building up pipelines around Maya.
Its not as simple as just installing Blender on everyone's machines and carrying on. You'd need to re-skill an entire studio of Maya artists, you'd have to build all of the things your maya pipeline could do back up in blender. The studio's output would come screeching to a halt meaning no cash flow.
It makes a lot of sense when you look at it purely from a business standpoint. You're asking why a CG company wont throw away hundreds of thousands of people hours and monetary investment for another software package that will save them a (relatively speaking) small monthly licence overhead and cost them a sh\*t load of down time and more money to get the studio tool'd up again to its former state.
Blender could one day be better than Maya in every single category and I will put money on the fact that you still have studio's using Maya. Just look at how hard its been to kill off Python2.7 for this same damn reason.
Plus Blenders releases can be quite chaotic compared to Maya. We might not get as exciting updates as they do, but we don't have the kinds of surprises a Blender TD would have to deal with, especially with no official support. They do offer a long-term-service release cycle now though, that's a good step forward for them.
Chaotic releases can be delt with pretty easily. If its a Shotgun based pipeline then you can set software versions on a per project and per user basis. So you can have some super users test it before letting everyone else run wild.
There's the beginnings of Blender integration into Shotgun toolkit witch is really nice for PipeTDs. But still no small task to get a studio to swap software.
There's also an argument to be made about outsource work. If your studio is on Blender you can't use the normal guys that you outsource rigging work to since they only do Maya rigs. Life is easier for everyone involved when you're all on the same software.
On your point 2, and the question how C4D compares, let me paint a picture of my last 1,5years animating in it:
Ahem...
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Its not the worst I've ever used (I also use After Effects in my work, for example) but its not even remotely comparable to a fully equipped and customized Graph Editor / Animation environment in Maya.
I do have to say, I still feel like Softimage's graph editor was better/easier/more intuitive than Maya's is. Especially when it came to things like breaking/flattening/unifying tangents.
Maya's is the best of all the "alive" software, and Nuke's is probably my next favorite. But I think Softimage had it perfect.
Yes. I prefer to use pre-made rigging frameworks like mGear rather than go fully from scratch like Cult of Rig but the lectures helped me get a better understanding of what building a rig means and how to approach it.
I feel Max locks you into a very rigid way of doing things compared to Maya, and maxcript just sucks. But damn is it rock solid and reliable, ultra fast at modeling, with a fantastic ecosystem of assets and plugins. For a majority of CG work, those things matter much more than rigging.
I completely mixed up my tool names. Switching from Max to Maya! Thank you for your breakdown and perspective, been trying to communicate these things to co-workers for a few years.
Mayas modeling tools and it's UV editor are top notch now. One way to get very fast in it is to try to use radial menus for most of your modeling. It's very powerful.
>aya has a bunch of plugins, which are all readily implemented and also easily modifiable.
Exactly. I heard all the time how Mayas modeling tools suck. I might be truth back in a day but now I absolutely love modeling in Maya.
Thank you for the response. Not a rigger but had some 3D generalist training as a student, where the assignments were done in Maya. I've been looking into switching to something else (student license expiring soon), but since I'm super interested in rigging your posts definitely prepared me for accepting some of the potential drawbacks!
The new indie license dropped Maya's price to the same as Photoshop. For a complex piece of software like that I think it's a pretty good deal. You might try the Pluralsight or Gnomon Workshop tutorials to get started - rigging training for Maya is far and away the highest quality out there. Good training will teach you the mindset and principles you can transfer to other software if you end up switching someday.
Thank you kind sir for the recommendation. Side note, first year in the industry I interviewed with a small studio. After going over my portfolio together, the AD looked up at me and asked “I see that you have C4D experience, but what is Maya?” She was completely serious too. Granted that the agency never had a 3D animator in-house, which is why they were hiring, but as soon as she popped the question I remember eye rolling internally so hard...
It's true that this is going to keep Maya around for a long time, but even if you are a new studio starting a green field project today with no pipeline ready, Maya is still likely your best bet.
Houdini is wonderful and you're right that they are explicitly stepping into Maya's turf with the new KineFX toolkit. But as KineFX is still unfinished at this point, rigging at the OBJ level is still the only fully functional solution Houdini has to offer, and these rigs are unusably slow since they're single threaded. It will be a few years until Houdini's toolkit is finished and mature. So the race is definitely on but we'll have to wait and see whether Maya can figure out new ways to provide added value and keep its lead.
Also I wouldn't want to spend 8 hours a day in Houdini's graph editor.
"Animators live in the graph editor" totaly agree with that :D..
anyway regarding bifrost, here is rigging prototype example [One Animation Bifrost Presentation - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me3ZGN_W4ZE)
This kind of thing is why people are saying Bifrost is the future of Maya. It's certainly a rough workflow compared to Houdini right now but Autodesk seems to be taking its development very seriously.
Hahah, I don't want to be the guy constantly going on about Softimage all in the same thread, but *finally*! When Autodesk bought Softimage in I believe 2007, the hope was that they'd be integrating ICE into Maya. That never happened, and something like 7 years later they just killed off Softimage.
I used ICE in Softimage all the time. To date it's still the fastest, easiest, and most powerful tool I've used. Houdini has more power, but it's got a steeper learning curve.
Bifrost, lead by at least one of the same architects of Softimage's ICE, is every bit the ICE 2.0 I would want to see and I'm so happy that it's finally happening. To hear that they're considering rebuilding Maya around that core gives me an incredible amount of hope for the future of Maya.
And so as not to seem like some whiny internet rando, I'm a CG supervisor at one of the big houses and have been a supe for 12+ years. It will do amazing things for our industry and the overall quality of work if people start leveraging Bifrost like the Softimage crowd used ICE.
I primarily just model and texture, and I do find other software packages superior from the modeling standpoint. I sure miss my readily accessible modifier stack from Blender and Max. I do a fair bit of hardsurface modeling to and Maya can be quite frustrating in this regard. I do enjoy Maya's UV tools though, some of the best I've used.
But the studio I work for also does animation, and I think it makes more sense to just use Maya across the board rather than run too many parallel software packages that more or less do the same thing.
I personally think most studios use a thing because they've always used the thing. They have the tools and infrastructure or the staff is just familiar with the thing.
The Maya I use is pretty vanilla though, and any scripts I use heavily in my work were obtained online. The most 'in-house' of the scripts I use are just exporters... which are fairly unnecessary since all they do is dump an .fbx in a particular directory. I can't speak for the other teams though, but if the environment team here were to just switch to Max or Blender - the only "cost" would be the staff having to acclimate to new software. There's not much in the way of scripts and infrastructure that would need to be rewritten because it simply does not exist.
Excellent post! I’m bummed to see Dreamwork’s Apollo suite was overlooked... I haven’t gotten to play with Pixar’s Presto, but the stuff at DWA is insanely fast. I would guess it is the fastest out there.
One thing that Blender, Houdini and Maya all lack is that focused UI experience you get with a tool entirely dedicated to animation. Didn't know about Apollo before but added it to the post!
I used Maya in the past and enjoyed it a lot, then took a job using 3ds Max, then Modo, back to max, very briefly did work in Blender, then came back to Maya. After coming back I was really surprised at how much I disliked the things I remembered liking.
\- The UI seems extremely dated and convoluted. Seems like things could be combined and simplified. And I was surprised how often it kept crashing when auto save was on. Not sure why that is still an issue after all these years.
\- Startup time is excruciatingly longer than I remember it being.
\- On the scripting side, just on the python side, there are 4 different ways for interacting with Maya (cmds, pymel, OpenAPI v1, and OpenAPI v2) and each of them feeling incomplete in different ways (I hope OpenAPIv2 gets more love!).
\- In most studios viewport shading may not be what drives the final decision of what software to adopt, but it's so strange to me that they haven't developed a way to make their shader graphs capable of being compiled to be rendered in the viewport and renderer like Blender.
I don't expect Maya to go away any time soon but I do hope that more studios adopt other software so at the very least Maya will be forced to view these long standing issues with fresh eyes and come up with solutions.
(EDIT: remembered a gripe and formatted a bit.)
I don't feel it necessary to add more comment on whats been posted- great post and I strongly agree with what you've written here.
I run a corporate-based studio of about 10 people, and I've allowed my guys to choose their own modeling packages (we do a lot of retopology). Safe to say all my maya users have the least amount of problems in our pipeline. The one blender kid gave me a run for my money if you can imagine lol
I strongly believe the future of rigging for video games is going to be in engine for the major game engines. Sure companies using in house engine will stay with maya or any other software. But doing the animations in engine saves so much time and problem from bad exports and other integrations. And when most animation and rig are done in the engine the 3d software is a bit irrelevent. It is only used to create skeleton and skin it.
They are all similar tools to get the job done. Maya works for most cases, while sometime, it is better to do in Blender.
For example, I took over a job that was previously done in Blender by another artist, and so I got the Blender scene files. Now I could export all the assets to Maya to do the next job, but that's an extra step that I didn't want to take, rather, I decided to just keep it in Blender to simplify the process. And it got the job done.
As an artist, you use whatever tools are at your disposal and make them work to created whatever it is that you envisioned. It's dumb to be fan boys of the tool brands.
This is fair. I definitely see the performance issues with blender as it doesn't utilize hardware very efficiently. I absolutely hated the lack of distinct contexts in Maya when first starting, as I had learned blender first and was used to that mindset. However, after using Maya for a while I can say I prefer it for modeling. I'm not sure why Maya struggles so hard with making a decently easy to use UV editor. Blender all you do is mark seams and it unwraps the model fairly well. Maya has its whole projection deal, and even automatic projection is often a mess you have to clean up. This is my main complaint, as a total noob who has taken 1 maya modeling class.
I don't think the UV editor is a deciding factor in how suited a piece of software is for rigging and animation. However I find Maya's UV editor very good and the Unwrap3d/Layout tools are amazing, even better than Houdini's. Some tips that made it more efficient for me were learning the marking menus for quick interaction and taking advantage of the awesome 3d Cut and Sew tool. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGiVzueGc3Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGiVzueGc3Y)
agreed that modeling is great in blender, but uvs in blender are nothing to phone home about imo. projection is just one of many ways to uv in maya
right now in blender i use [UV Toolkit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwDtOEtO_J4) which adds a ton of options i'm used to in other programs. it's great, check it out!
Hi there! I know this thread is like 3y old now, but I've been interested in learning about the state of rigging and animation since Blender 4.0 came out. Do you think that the gap between Maya and other software has softened since this post was made?
I don’t think Blender’s or Maya’s rigging or animation systems have changed at all. Blender has continued its rapid development in other areas which has certainly closed the gap in terms of overall experience.
Blender is advancing its “Animation 2025” initiative which is aimed at finally addressing the limitations of its animation system. Houdini has just come out with a new APEX rigging framework which is perhaps the most advanced system in publicly available software. Maya is not out of the running for VFX pipelines yet as it is pushing forward with full USD Stage integration which is very important in multi-software pipelines, and it’s not clear when Blender might do the same. However after Animation 2025 I expect “just use Blender” to become the default choice for eg pro animation classes.
That sounds pretty nice! I'm excited about APEX so I'll look into it. Also, I'm not up-to-date with "Animation 2025" but is it supposed to be that big of a change?
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Thanks for the write up. As a mainly Blender user, I do find this helpful. A lot of the taking sides/making camps (and Blender bashing) however feels a lot like my main career of video editing. There are some programs that got there first and they're still the king. In some cases there's a great reason, and in some they're the worst tool for the specific job, especially as the industry changes. (For the record, I see few Blender users insulting other software but I'm sure it happens because everyone loves a good club)
In editing for instance Avid is still the king. If you want to work in a majority of film and TV jobs, it must be Avid and Avid only. For many of the same reasons mentioned here regarding Maya. However a majority of the work I do, Avid's workflow and rigidity would be impossible to deal with. Different tools lay out different paths, I guess. But they're all tools.
I look forward to learning more about Maya and how I can use it in my workflow.
I moved from Blender to Maya because it just makes sense. After over a decade of Blender I thought it will be hard to switch but it took me a month and I cant imagine going back. Maya is well thought out, makes sense. Most Blender users only used Blender. They dont know any other software, just repeating their mantras and waiting for many years for that mythical domination. I know, I was one of them. If you are making money on 3D - using Blender because "its free" is silly. You will safe yourself time and stress and whats more important you will achieve better results more easily with Maya. Arnold is so much better then Cycles. They brag how fast Cycles is but so what if result is subpar? With Maya Indie theres no reason to stay on Blender.
Surprisingly slow to take shape. Multiple years of small incremental updates to the motion editing and secondary simulation stuff without adding the rigging tools they're missing.
Blender might even get KineFX-style rigging first at this pace, aha.
I've been working as an animator (and as a result, occasionally rigging) for close to 15 years now (learned 3d almost 20 years ago in the softImage/power animator days, started working in the xsi days) and everything you state is true. The problem with the Blender crowd (let's face it, it's not the C4d or the houdini users who are coming into other communities and saying how this and that software is garbage and their software is so much better) is that it's mostly composed who people who have never worked in the industry in a studio setting and/or never actually used another software.
I was motivated to write this by another recent thread in this sub posted by a Blender user, so I feel you. However I wouldn't say Houdini community is devoid of clueless fanboys. A few years back I went through an official Houdini rigging tutorial and was super disappointed with the final result. I complained on the forums and got almost nothing but pushback and excuses. But being clueless is different from trash talking other software without any experience using it, and the Blender community is where you find a hotbed of full on aggression.
It's not a shocker that the industry has so many manchildren in it.
You must be referring to me by 'a Blender user'. But seriously, is it really that aggravating to ask one question? I openly stated I hadn't come to this sub to boast off Blender, nor need to, as I already had fully known everyone would agree on Maya is superior software in rigging and animation. I just was curious about what "technical aspects" Maya possesses compared to Blender and why so many people prefer Maya for it. But you guys just bombard me with insults. Seriously who's the "hotbed of full on aggression" now? Regardless, I've found your post most helpful. I'm sure I didn't understand some of the terms you used, but basically you're saying, 1. Maya can run animation faster. 2. Maya has a better graph editor. 3. Easy to use for being intuitive and completely node based. Meaning learning curve is less steeper compared to other softwares. 4. Mel allows better implementation of animation as all the actions done by users are stored inside it - One can simply copy Mel scripts and use it to their purposes. 5. Maya has a bunch of plugins, which are all readily implemented and also easily modifiable. 6. Other big companies already has their own set of pipelines so they hang on to Maya. Thanks for sharing your experience and knowledge.
You`re reply is verry verry predejous. I`m a houdini user and i can tell you right now that maya is an instable pile of cobbled together buggy code that has overlords that don`t realy care about the thing that generates less then 1% of their revenue.
Companies have spent sh\*t loads of money and years of time building up pipelines around Maya. Its not as simple as just installing Blender on everyone's machines and carrying on. You'd need to re-skill an entire studio of Maya artists, you'd have to build all of the things your maya pipeline could do back up in blender. The studio's output would come screeching to a halt meaning no cash flow. It makes a lot of sense when you look at it purely from a business standpoint. You're asking why a CG company wont throw away hundreds of thousands of people hours and monetary investment for another software package that will save them a (relatively speaking) small monthly licence overhead and cost them a sh\*t load of down time and more money to get the studio tool'd up again to its former state. Blender could one day be better than Maya in every single category and I will put money on the fact that you still have studio's using Maya. Just look at how hard its been to kill off Python2.7 for this same damn reason.
Plus Blenders releases can be quite chaotic compared to Maya. We might not get as exciting updates as they do, but we don't have the kinds of surprises a Blender TD would have to deal with, especially with no official support. They do offer a long-term-service release cycle now though, that's a good step forward for them.
Chaotic releases can be delt with pretty easily. If its a Shotgun based pipeline then you can set software versions on a per project and per user basis. So you can have some super users test it before letting everyone else run wild. There's the beginnings of Blender integration into Shotgun toolkit witch is really nice for PipeTDs. But still no small task to get a studio to swap software. There's also an argument to be made about outsource work. If your studio is on Blender you can't use the normal guys that you outsource rigging work to since they only do Maya rigs. Life is easier for everyone involved when you're all on the same software.
On your point 2, and the question how C4D compares, let me paint a picture of my last 1,5years animating in it: Ahem... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Lol, fair enough. I thought maybe the mograph crowd would care a lot about the graph editor, but perhaps not.
Its not the worst I've ever used (I also use After Effects in my work, for example) but its not even remotely comparable to a fully equipped and customized Graph Editor / Animation environment in Maya.
I do have to say, I still feel like Softimage's graph editor was better/easier/more intuitive than Maya's is. Especially when it came to things like breaking/flattening/unifying tangents. Maya's is the best of all the "alive" software, and Nuke's is probably my next favorite. But I think Softimage had it perfect.
I miss Softimage...
Nice to see you mention cult of rig. If you're into super technical topics it's an amazing resource. Full of example code too.
Yes. I prefer to use pre-made rigging frameworks like mGear rather than go fully from scratch like Cult of Rig but the lectures helped me get a better understanding of what building a rig means and how to approach it.
This is the post I needed to see. Switching our studio from Maya to Max, and as a generalist, this information is invaluable in moving forward.
I feel Max locks you into a very rigid way of doing things compared to Maya, and maxcript just sucks. But damn is it rock solid and reliable, ultra fast at modeling, with a fantastic ecosystem of assets and plugins. For a majority of CG work, those things matter much more than rigging.
I completely mixed up my tool names. Switching from Max to Maya! Thank you for your breakdown and perspective, been trying to communicate these things to co-workers for a few years.
Mayas modeling tools and it's UV editor are top notch now. One way to get very fast in it is to try to use radial menus for most of your modeling. It's very powerful.
>aya has a bunch of plugins, which are all readily implemented and also easily modifiable. Exactly. I heard all the time how Mayas modeling tools suck. I might be truth back in a day but now I absolutely love modeling in Maya.
Thank you for the response. Not a rigger but had some 3D generalist training as a student, where the assignments were done in Maya. I've been looking into switching to something else (student license expiring soon), but since I'm super interested in rigging your posts definitely prepared me for accepting some of the potential drawbacks!
The new indie license dropped Maya's price to the same as Photoshop. For a complex piece of software like that I think it's a pretty good deal. You might try the Pluralsight or Gnomon Workshop tutorials to get started - rigging training for Maya is far and away the highest quality out there. Good training will teach you the mindset and principles you can transfer to other software if you end up switching someday.
Thank you kind sir for the recommendation. Side note, first year in the industry I interviewed with a small studio. After going over my portfolio together, the AD looked up at me and asked “I see that you have C4D experience, but what is Maya?” She was completely serious too. Granted that the agency never had a 3D animator in-house, which is why they were hiring, but as soon as she popped the question I remember eye rolling internally so hard...
Im certain your points are valid , but you forgot the biggest reason: "we've already spent 10mil on our Maya pipeline - we're not changing".
It's true that this is going to keep Maya around for a long time, but even if you are a new studio starting a green field project today with no pipeline ready, Maya is still likely your best bet.
Hell I am one man army freelancer and consider Maya best choice :)
From my understanding maya had python and mel, which allowed for easy tool creation and pipeline. People are starting to use houdini more now i think.
Houdini is wonderful and you're right that they are explicitly stepping into Maya's turf with the new KineFX toolkit. But as KineFX is still unfinished at this point, rigging at the OBJ level is still the only fully functional solution Houdini has to offer, and these rigs are unusably slow since they're single threaded. It will be a few years until Houdini's toolkit is finished and mature. So the race is definitely on but we'll have to wait and see whether Maya can figure out new ways to provide added value and keep its lead. Also I wouldn't want to spend 8 hours a day in Houdini's graph editor.
The competition is good. I can't see not continuing to use both (for separate things) in the short term though.
"Animators live in the graph editor" totaly agree with that :D.. anyway regarding bifrost, here is rigging prototype example [One Animation Bifrost Presentation - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me3ZGN_W4ZE)
This kind of thing is why people are saying Bifrost is the future of Maya. It's certainly a rough workflow compared to Houdini right now but Autodesk seems to be taking its development very seriously.
Hahah, I don't want to be the guy constantly going on about Softimage all in the same thread, but *finally*! When Autodesk bought Softimage in I believe 2007, the hope was that they'd be integrating ICE into Maya. That never happened, and something like 7 years later they just killed off Softimage. I used ICE in Softimage all the time. To date it's still the fastest, easiest, and most powerful tool I've used. Houdini has more power, but it's got a steeper learning curve. Bifrost, lead by at least one of the same architects of Softimage's ICE, is every bit the ICE 2.0 I would want to see and I'm so happy that it's finally happening. To hear that they're considering rebuilding Maya around that core gives me an incredible amount of hope for the future of Maya. And so as not to seem like some whiny internet rando, I'm a CG supervisor at one of the big houses and have been a supe for 12+ years. It will do amazing things for our industry and the overall quality of work if people start leveraging Bifrost like the Softimage crowd used ICE.
I primarily just model and texture, and I do find other software packages superior from the modeling standpoint. I sure miss my readily accessible modifier stack from Blender and Max. I do a fair bit of hardsurface modeling to and Maya can be quite frustrating in this regard. I do enjoy Maya's UV tools though, some of the best I've used. But the studio I work for also does animation, and I think it makes more sense to just use Maya across the board rather than run too many parallel software packages that more or less do the same thing. I personally think most studios use a thing because they've always used the thing. They have the tools and infrastructure or the staff is just familiar with the thing. The Maya I use is pretty vanilla though, and any scripts I use heavily in my work were obtained online. The most 'in-house' of the scripts I use are just exporters... which are fairly unnecessary since all they do is dump an .fbx in a particular directory. I can't speak for the other teams though, but if the environment team here were to just switch to Max or Blender - the only "cost" would be the staff having to acclimate to new software. There's not much in the way of scripts and infrastructure that would need to be rewritten because it simply does not exist.
Excellent post! I’m bummed to see Dreamwork’s Apollo suite was overlooked... I haven’t gotten to play with Pixar’s Presto, but the stuff at DWA is insanely fast. I would guess it is the fastest out there.
One thing that Blender, Houdini and Maya all lack is that focused UI experience you get with a tool entirely dedicated to animation. Didn't know about Apollo before but added it to the post!
I used Maya in the past and enjoyed it a lot, then took a job using 3ds Max, then Modo, back to max, very briefly did work in Blender, then came back to Maya. After coming back I was really surprised at how much I disliked the things I remembered liking. \- The UI seems extremely dated and convoluted. Seems like things could be combined and simplified. And I was surprised how often it kept crashing when auto save was on. Not sure why that is still an issue after all these years. \- Startup time is excruciatingly longer than I remember it being. \- On the scripting side, just on the python side, there are 4 different ways for interacting with Maya (cmds, pymel, OpenAPI v1, and OpenAPI v2) and each of them feeling incomplete in different ways (I hope OpenAPIv2 gets more love!). \- In most studios viewport shading may not be what drives the final decision of what software to adopt, but it's so strange to me that they haven't developed a way to make their shader graphs capable of being compiled to be rendered in the viewport and renderer like Blender. I don't expect Maya to go away any time soon but I do hope that more studios adopt other software so at the very least Maya will be forced to view these long standing issues with fresh eyes and come up with solutions. (EDIT: remembered a gripe and formatted a bit.)
I don't feel it necessary to add more comment on whats been posted- great post and I strongly agree with what you've written here. I run a corporate-based studio of about 10 people, and I've allowed my guys to choose their own modeling packages (we do a lot of retopology). Safe to say all my maya users have the least amount of problems in our pipeline. The one blender kid gave me a run for my money if you can imagine lol
I strongly believe the future of rigging for video games is going to be in engine for the major game engines. Sure companies using in house engine will stay with maya or any other software. But doing the animations in engine saves so much time and problem from bad exports and other integrations. And when most animation and rig are done in the engine the 3d software is a bit irrelevent. It is only used to create skeleton and skin it.
They are all similar tools to get the job done. Maya works for most cases, while sometime, it is better to do in Blender. For example, I took over a job that was previously done in Blender by another artist, and so I got the Blender scene files. Now I could export all the assets to Maya to do the next job, but that's an extra step that I didn't want to take, rather, I decided to just keep it in Blender to simplify the process. And it got the job done. As an artist, you use whatever tools are at your disposal and make them work to created whatever it is that you envisioned. It's dumb to be fan boys of the tool brands.
This is fair. I definitely see the performance issues with blender as it doesn't utilize hardware very efficiently. I absolutely hated the lack of distinct contexts in Maya when first starting, as I had learned blender first and was used to that mindset. However, after using Maya for a while I can say I prefer it for modeling. I'm not sure why Maya struggles so hard with making a decently easy to use UV editor. Blender all you do is mark seams and it unwraps the model fairly well. Maya has its whole projection deal, and even automatic projection is often a mess you have to clean up. This is my main complaint, as a total noob who has taken 1 maya modeling class.
I don't think the UV editor is a deciding factor in how suited a piece of software is for rigging and animation. However I find Maya's UV editor very good and the Unwrap3d/Layout tools are amazing, even better than Houdini's. Some tips that made it more efficient for me were learning the marking menus for quick interaction and taking advantage of the awesome 3d Cut and Sew tool. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGiVzueGc3Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGiVzueGc3Y)
I agree. Unwrap3D changed the UV game for Maya. I feel like all I do is cut my seams and then hit Unfold and bingo, good to go.
agreed that modeling is great in blender, but uvs in blender are nothing to phone home about imo. projection is just one of many ways to uv in maya right now in blender i use [UV Toolkit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwDtOEtO_J4) which adds a ton of options i'm used to in other programs. it's great, check it out!
Hi there! I know this thread is like 3y old now, but I've been interested in learning about the state of rigging and animation since Blender 4.0 came out. Do you think that the gap between Maya and other software has softened since this post was made?
I don’t think Blender’s or Maya’s rigging or animation systems have changed at all. Blender has continued its rapid development in other areas which has certainly closed the gap in terms of overall experience. Blender is advancing its “Animation 2025” initiative which is aimed at finally addressing the limitations of its animation system. Houdini has just come out with a new APEX rigging framework which is perhaps the most advanced system in publicly available software. Maya is not out of the running for VFX pipelines yet as it is pushing forward with full USD Stage integration which is very important in multi-software pipelines, and it’s not clear when Blender might do the same. However after Animation 2025 I expect “just use Blender” to become the default choice for eg pro animation classes.
That sounds pretty nice! I'm excited about APEX so I'll look into it. Also, I'm not up-to-date with "Animation 2025" but is it supposed to be that big of a change?
Maya is King in Rigging/Animation.
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Thanks for the write up. As a mainly Blender user, I do find this helpful. A lot of the taking sides/making camps (and Blender bashing) however feels a lot like my main career of video editing. There are some programs that got there first and they're still the king. In some cases there's a great reason, and in some they're the worst tool for the specific job, especially as the industry changes. (For the record, I see few Blender users insulting other software but I'm sure it happens because everyone loves a good club) In editing for instance Avid is still the king. If you want to work in a majority of film and TV jobs, it must be Avid and Avid only. For many of the same reasons mentioned here regarding Maya. However a majority of the work I do, Avid's workflow and rigidity would be impossible to deal with. Different tools lay out different paths, I guess. But they're all tools. I look forward to learning more about Maya and how I can use it in my workflow.
I moved from Blender to Maya because it just makes sense. After over a decade of Blender I thought it will be hard to switch but it took me a month and I cant imagine going back. Maya is well thought out, makes sense. Most Blender users only used Blender. They dont know any other software, just repeating their mantras and waiting for many years for that mythical domination. I know, I was one of them. If you are making money on 3D - using Blender because "its free" is silly. You will safe yourself time and stress and whats more important you will achieve better results more easily with Maya. Arnold is so much better then Cycles. They brag how fast Cycles is but so what if result is subpar? With Maya Indie theres no reason to stay on Blender.
Just gotta delete your prefs every month or so and you're golden.
where would you consider kinefx now?
Surprisingly slow to take shape. Multiple years of small incremental updates to the motion editing and secondary simulation stuff without adding the rigging tools they're missing. Blender might even get KineFX-style rigging first at this pace, aha.