Autodesk offers GMax-style Maya

Hmmm, they gave GMax years ago just to spend more resources building something similar in Maya and crippling it to 25.000 polygons… well, now it’s really time to chancel the subscription since AD is getting more and more senile…

Hehe, missed that first time around.

WOW, that got my attention!
so only avaiable in USA dollars and aud dollars for now on the store.
and no MAYA LT information site as yet.

The product was showing at the All Products page and it’s not anymore. Should have saved an print of it.

Now, if that is any indication, Maya is the future and the rest is dead in the game market.

What other reason they would have to have a thing similar to GMax again?

Autodesk seem to have some sort of weird inverse Moore’s Law where their products devolve over time.

“If we compared this new Maya LT version with the old Softimage Mod Tool 7.5 … I would say this new version is crap and expensive. Okay, maybe we won’t have the latest modeling tools, but Softimage was a great modeler even in the v7.5 and you got ICE and no apparent no export limitation”

there were tons of limitations in mod tool 7.5!
*Mod Tool can only be used for non-commercial games. Only the Pro can be used for commercial games, and that’s only XBox Live games
*Exported geometry is limited to 64,000 triangles (not polygons) per object.
*Uses .exp file format which cannot be opened in a commercial version of Autodesk Softimage.
* No SDK, plug-in support
etc, etc, etc

It doesn’t matter if you could use ICE, you could not render any fx out since there is no mental ray, and all mental ray shaders were blocked, and you would not have been able to bake deformers to anything.

So this is how you want to go after Modo and the likes of it, and you don’t mind casualties on your own side along the way, even if it’s one of your toughest soldiers, this was pretty much the coup de grace for Max, what is the matter with you Autodesk? who makes these decisions over there? what is going on in there??

Its obvious that the blind are leading the lunatics to take over the Asylum at AD. It really seems like they have no clue what to do with themselves. So you cripple the least able 3d package you have and sell it as a game dev tool, when the other two packages are leaps and bounds ahead…

http://area.autodesk.com/mayalt

@Steve & Duttyfoot: Thanks for the links.

DAngel, please, no personal arguments against people here. Do not take things to a personal level. Thank you.

Apologies are of course accepted. Fairness is not the matter, it’s keeping civility and not turning this into a battleground.

Criticism is welcome, just don’t express it through personal attacks.

so your saying the option to buy it online in the store is wrong?…it asks for my region and i select UK it say’s £700 plus VAT.

As for Shader FX, we are designing it in a way that its product agnostic. I’ll take the comment as a suggestion that you would also like to see it in Max as well. I think its a great tool and while I cant give a roadmap, I would also love to see it in all our tools and possibly standalone. Its not in Maya either at the moment, its only in LT.

What I would like to see Mr. Delise, is that at the least, a product that was designed for Max, appears first and foremost in that product and then in others, not the other way around(and that is if you do port it back to Max), and more importantly while you are here, what I personally don’t like to see is Max being taken out of this market as well, because that seem to be the direction you(your company) are going to, and may I say, probably have been going to for a while now behind your closed doors.

The biggest thing Maya LT has going for it are the number of students learning “maya” and so the potential workforce market that are upto speed with the industry standard toolset.

Much like how people offer jobs for photoshop…they want someone who can run photoshop , not gimp or painter…
That’s the key here for indie developers on a tight budget…they can pull from the pool of students in college, just leaving college with no need to re train.

It’s the photoshop elements of 3d !

Limited MEL support in Maya LT means no ability to author new MEL scripts or write MEL code within the application. Executing of MEL is still entirely possible as the entire Maya interface is built on MEL (no command input bar means having to be done via say shelf buttons). The caveat here is if your scripts tap into a feature or something that was removed it will likely cause errors because that code no longer exists (say you had something using follicles for example).

Still, being able to RUN mel scripts from the shelf is a big plus to what we understood before we knew about this.

You do realize that once an AD person bothers to post here, asking ANYTHING about Max will make them vanish into the shadows, right?

I want a migration to Maya as well, but it is increasingly clear that AD isn’t going to do it, and based on how many AD people have popped in, made flowery statements, and then completely vanished it is clear they are trying to stall until the final Maxscrew happens officially.

I just think that since I have remaining time on my Max subscription, the right thing for AD to do would be allow me to just switch it to Maya.

If they then let Maya die, I move from 50% AD shop to zero percent (with max dying I have already diversified to a non-AD competitor).

So a migration to Maya might not keep me with AD forever, but it is about the last chance they have to keep our business at all.

Hey Steve,

you spoke it straight out of my heart!
The same I am thinking of.

We are working already with Cinema 4D Studio (subscription) and 3DS Max ECS Premium (subscription) at our company.
If Max is really running dead, we will definetly jump completely to C4D.
If AD wants us to stay, they have to offer a one time switch to Maya ECS Premium.