Maya 2018 released

The thing is that I understand all your points, and I’m not saying Maya is crap and Blender is pure gold… not at all! 🙂

What I’m saying is that Maya receives very few improvements over the years, read the list that you yourself wrote down, this is from 2015 to 2018! you named some incomplete tools, and we were paying A LOT of money for it year after year, and a lot of those features are plugins that already existed, Bifrost is completely incomplete and won’t be complete for a few years I’m afraid, at least seeing their development speed, and many other of the improvements there were already in Blender and other packages, I was completely embracing Geodesic Voxel skinning for example, the results were great, well since we embraced Blender as our main production tool I started working with Blender using Rigify and the Autoweight funcion in Blender… it’s the first time I have a full bones rig, with no weird things, with a face rig and with a full skinning working out of the box, literally I have not touched the skin weights AT ALL, and that was not happening in Maya.

Regarding Arnold, as I said, it’s an astonishing production render, but for BIG productions, if you go for a standard 3d studio production, like Arch&Viz or Tech Viz or an animation series with medium budget, or other different things that cannot afford to have such long render times… then you have nothing in Maya, and the most irritating thing of Maya regarding rendering (that was not new) you don’t have A SINGLE RENDER NODE!

Now you don’t in Max either so… Cycles may lack things, of course, but recently it became an awesome production tool, regarding the denoiser, the only incomplete part is related to animation, but that affects you if you work with VERY LOW samples count, for example 32 samples (totally noisy image, a few seconds render), if you work with 200 samples or a bit more the denoiser works flawlessly and you won’t see any defect from the denoiser, still you will get a very fast render, and if you can render your scene in the GPU (wich usually we can with the GTX1080 and it’s 8Gb) then your render will fly, again, I don’t think we are compairing here apples to apples, Arnold is an specific targeted tool and using it in different scenarios is like killing flys with bombs, while Cycles is a generalistic tool, designed to serve for different purposes.

Maya is not bad at all as it is, the only problem is that you pay for things that are incomplete and don’t work, and they won’t work for many years, and now for example, they removed HumanIK from their products list… HumanIK is one important part of Maya and MotionBuilder… what do you think it’s going to happen? I don’t know but MoBu has seen very few improvements over the years and HIK also feels a bit abandoned so… bad feelings there.

The main thing is with maya you suffer from three things:

1.- Pay A LOT of money for it year after year and receive a few improvements

2.- You are in the hands of Autodesk, since now Maya is a rented tool, if they decide to rise the price the amount they want… what can you do? nothing but pay them because you don’t “own” your tool, hence you don’t own your work.

3.- Slow development, and now reduced R&D as Autodesk itself said so, expect slower development and improvements, more plugin acquisitions and converting to nearly some kind of abandonware in some time.

Now, with other packages your receive different things, but I’ll put here three points about the benefits of Blender we saw to trust on it as our main production tool:

1.- Full access to the source code, so we can modify it, I can hire a developer and make changes in my Blender version without being a big studio, I can fix things or add features as I please, this is the reason number one about why a BIG sutudio should include Blender in their production pipeline.

2.- No future surprises, Blender is stable and fast in development pace, and we know what features are being worked at any time, so this allows us to plan our productions and our future developments and projects.

3.- As of today, Blender is a full production ready tool with the best modelling toolset in the market, with one of the best 3d trackers in the market, with an awesome render engine embeded and with support for the most important ones like Vray, Corona or Octane, filled with addons and tools that increase it’s productivity and it’s constantly tested in production inside a team that also has it’s main developers, so it’s a tool developed and tested in production inside the same house, BTW if I have more money I prefer to go and acquire VRAY for Blender, far more useful than Arnold in general and delivers awesome quality too, also production proven, or pay the BF to accelerate the Development speed, or hire a developer to fix the bugs that are problematic to me specifically (then we can release them to the BF if the find them interesting).

After many tests we decided to make the shift because we tried this three things, it’s not even about it being free at all, we also considered Cinema4D and Modo, both of them with a lot of weak spots in many areas.

Regarding this phrase: “and your focus is the best quality possible, it is not the best tool you can choose”

Why?

That is simply not true IMHO, I’m not saying that the best tool is Blender, or C4D or Modo, or Max, I’m saying that I saw crap done in Maya, and I saw pure magic done in Maya, I saw crap done in Blender and I saw pure magic done in Blender, the thing is that as of today Maya is what big studios with big budgets are using, so you will see astonishing things, but it’s not because the tool, it’s because the artists using it, if you go an ask people working in Sony Animation, or ILM or other places, they’ll tell you that they use Maya but they “don’t use Maya”, because Maya is like a platform for all the development done over it, they don’t use the majority of features inside Maya, it’s a platform so the BIG studio can create it’s own tools, and for that they pay big money to Autodesk, imagine a BIG studio embracing Blender and doing all the development over it, there is not much difference, except they already invested A LOT in Maya, so they won’t do the change, at least not in the near future, but give time to the time, big studios are not silly ones, and they won’t like paying three times more than before for the same platform as before, and small studios… well, they are out of game if the stay with Autodesk, no matter if it’s Maya or Max, you are completely sold out so…

In the end, I disagree with Maya being the best tool, it’s a good tool, but it’s just that, a tool, there is nothing in Maya that makes it objectively better than Blender, and if you can name one thing I’ll be happy to hear it, remember, objectively, so you have to disgregard your past experience with Maya and try to judge it equally regarding features, that is something that a studio should do in the end to take proper decissions and not allow emotions to be involved in the judgement, something we had to do, and it’s not easy when all your history is related to Max and Maya up to the bones.

One last thing, regarding Bifrost or MantaFlow, you are right, and I won’t be arguing about it at all, Mantaflow will be incomplete when it’s inside Blender in the near future (actually you can play with it already, and BTW Bifrost is not part of Maya either, it’s an external engine, exactly the same as MantaFlow, why do you think you can’t mix maya rigid bodies with Bifrost? or Maya particles with Bifrost?) but the fact is that we prefer to use an specialized tool for the job, RealFlow (with it’s new price tag it’s a completely awesome tool) or Houdini, they both are far better than Bifrost and MantaFlow and we can use both with Blender.

Cheers!