The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Discussions about migration to other software
angus_davidson
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by angus_davidson » 20 Mar 2014, 18:05

You can also tear off tabs like you do in soft This helps a lot. Trying to recall if Maya remembers their positions. i think so
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MauricioPC
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by MauricioPC » 20 Mar 2014, 19:04

The first time you use Maya its quite weird. But then you get the grips and things get more smooth.

I'm putting together a dual monitor set up also. The thing that's more depressing is that I don't think Softimage will have a student edition at this 2015 version, so I'll need to choose Max or Maya soon to start studying.

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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by angus_davidson » 20 Mar 2014, 19:11

MauricioPC wrote:The first time you use Maya its quite weird. But then you get the grips and things get more smooth.

I'm putting together a dual monitor set up also. The thing that's more depressing is that I don't think Softimage will have a student edition at this 2015 version, so I'll need to choose Max or Maya soon to start studying.
There wont be a student edition of 2015 (ie the free download one from students.autodesk.com)

If your on the current edu subscription it will be available at your subscription center.
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Hirazi Blue
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by Hirazi Blue » 22 Mar 2014, 15:09

Laurence Cymet, the product manager for lighting and rendering on Maya yesterday made a fascinating remark on the Mailing List:
Maya is as much an "OS for CGI" as it is an out of box DCC (in many ways more so)

Eventually I stopped laughing... =))
As an "OS for CGI" it seems to have been clearly modeled after Windows 2.1
and I'd love to know the Mayan definition of "out of the box".

A couple of days of testing Maya and I am really thinking I have to quit this silly hobby...
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MauricioPC
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by MauricioPC » 22 Mar 2014, 15:14

Hirazi Blue wrote:Laurence Cymet, the product manager for lighting and rendering on Maya yesterday made a fascinating remark on the Mailing List:
Maya is as much an "OS for CGI" as it is an out of box DCC (in many ways more so)

Eventually I stopped laughing... =))
As an "OS for CGI" it seems to have been clearly modeled after Windows 2.1
and I'd love to know the Mayan definition of "out of the box".

A couple of days of testing Maya and I am really thinking I have to quit this silly hobby...
If you think you can model, animate, texture, render and do FX on it without the need of plugins, that makes sense. But at the same time, it doesn't mean it's a good 'out of the box'. :D

Hirazi, what do you do (work-wise)? I'm curious, lol.

And please ... if it's a hobby you don't have to quit and stop using Softimage forever. I mean, you already own the dam thing. If I had the money I would buy and use it as a hobby forever too.

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myara
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by myara » 24 Mar 2014, 14:01

I gave that pdf a quick look and most of it is still valid. Neither Maya nor Softimage have changed that much since the Alias and Avid era.

If your goal is to move to Maya, then I would suggest that while you are using Softimage use a Maya keyboard based to make your transition easier when that time comes. Personally I do that because I have to deal with Maya from time to time. But the lack of hotbox in SI almost obligates you to remap some hotkeys such as components filters and subdivision keys.

To work in Maya you need to get used to the hotbox and the tools menus like press W and click to have the Translate menu on your viewport or drag RMB to change component filters. These menus can be a little slow when you are dealing with very high meshes and in that case hotkeys are more reliable so I would suggest to remap them too just in case, because F9 ~ F12 are just too far away.

Remember to change these hotkeys in Maya ASAP:
Ctrl+Q = Quit ! (if you have saved the scene it doesn't warn you, it just quit!, just like Alt+F4)
8 = Paint Effects
and a lot more

There are some concepts that are different like Hard Edges (I'm dealing with them right now).

In Maya Hard edges are just defined by their Normal angle to make them look hard, so when you smooth your mesh, hard edges are smoothed too. If you want a Softimage like effect when subdividing you need to activate " Propagate Edge hardness " in your Smooth Mesh attribute, and crease those edges too. Btw, Smooth means Subdivision. That's why you can't export/import hard edges perfectly between Maya and Softimage.

For modeling it isn't much of a problem to export/import. So I would avoid as much as possible to work in Maya and do everything you can in SI :D

For motion and rigging is impossible to have a perfect workflow between SI and Maya so you'll have to prove how masochist you are while struggling with Maya.
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Hirazi Blue
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by Hirazi Blue » 25 Mar 2014, 20:31

From Jill Ramsay (Autodesk) on the Mailing List:
I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that your list has been hijacked in the past couple of weeks with transition discussions, a lot them revolving about what Maya can or can't offer you. In order to give back this list to the people who need to get on with their everyday work in Softimage, I invite you to bring those discussions to a new discussion group within the Maya forum: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Softimage ... geworkflow. Everyone is very welcome there, and our product designers will be standing by to take your feedback and answer your questions where they can, as will I.
(Quoted from here)
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Bravlin Pechatnik
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by Bravlin Pechatnik » 24 May 2014, 13:58

I'm didn't sure of usefulness of autodesk "migration" forum.
So i ask my question at native softimage forum too.
Is there any maya plugins or scripts for this type of edge selection (rcWalkAlongLoop,rcLoopGrow)

Pancho
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by Pancho » 01 Jun 2014, 11:44

Just read in the Maya forum at the area that bitfrost doesn't even support wet maps at the current stage. Feels like a "Ben and Jerry's" ice cream. "Half-baked"!

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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by Hirazi Blue » 01 Jun 2014, 14:55

But to be fair, ICE did take a couple of versions to truly mature as well...
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by bb3d » 17 Jan 2016, 19:54

At my current job I have to work with Maya 2016 SP4 and what I can clearly say so far is, that I am really happy, that I did NOT take AD's migration offer switching to Maya. As usual, there is a huge gap between marketing hype and reality.
Working with Maya is still painful, it's a hell full of bugs slowing me down all the time.

- I just added some simple deformers (Lattice, texture deformer) to a tree to fake wind motion and the "supercharged animation performance" is far away from real time, beside the fact, that scrubbing in the timeline crashes Maya. A co-worker has a similar problem with Paint FX converted to polygons - it's deadly slow and crashes Maya every few seconds.

- Switching on the "GPU" option for the scene evaluation in the preferences crashes Maya immediately.

- In another scene selecting some objects and opening the "Attribute Spread Sheet" crashes Maya.

- Light linking is also very buggy... the tool "Select objects illuminated by light" doesn't work as long as the Hypershade is opened... LOL!

Those are just a few examples of all the strangeness and instability that this "3D app" is bringing to our current project.
Ok, the new Hypershade is a step into the right direction, the node system is modern and more intuitive than the old one, but it's just some kind of "catching up" with Softimage. The Shaderball is quite useless, in Hardware mode it doesn't show the correct shading and switching it to rendered slows everything down.
Again they re-arranged some menus, giving me a hard time finding some options and tools, like the normals tools which are now under "Mesh Display"... wow.
Despite all the attempts to improve Maya, it's still ages away from the elegant and efficient workflow of Softimage.

Hellomojo
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by Hellomojo » 17 Jan 2016, 22:02

bb3d wrote:At my current job I have to work with Maya 2016 SP4 and what I can clearly say so far is, that I am really happy, that I did NOT take AD's migration offer switching to Maya. As usual, there is a huge gap between marketing hype and reality.
Working with Maya is still painful, it's a hell full of bugs slowing me down all the time.

- I just added some simple deformers (Lattice, texture deformer) to a tree to fake wind motion and the "supercharged animation performance" is far away from real time, beside the fact, that scrubbing in the timeline crashes Maya. A co-worker has a similar problem with Paint FX converted to polygons - it's deadly slow and crashes Maya every few seconds.

- Switching on the "GPU" option for the scene evaluation in the preferences crashes Maya immediately.

- In another scene selecting some objects and opening the "Attribute Spread Sheet" crashes Maya.

- Light linking is also very buggy... the tool "Select objects illuminated by light" doesn't work as long as the Hypershade is opened... LOL!

Those are just a few examples of all the strangeness and instability that this "3D app" is bringing to our current project.
Ok, the new Hypershade is a step into the right direction, the node system is modern and more intuitive than the old one, but it's just some kind of "catching up" with Softimage. The Shaderball is quite useless, in Hardware mode it doesn't show the correct shading and switching it to rendered slows everything down.
Again they re-arranged some menus, giving me a hard time finding some options and tools, like the normals tools which are now under "Mesh Display"... wow.
Despite all the attempts to improve Maya, it's still ages away from the elegant and efficient workflow of Softimage.
Hey there made the switch x2yrs now - things are going great. I fully agree with you but I can code, that is the difference... It is quite easy to fix even existing bugs.... and enhance your workflow easily as the scripting is pretty easy. This is not an excuse for lack of cohesion and slowly fixing obvious problems but with coding - the flexibility is what I am beginning to appreciate. I have replicated a lot of what I love from Softimage.

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FXDude
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by FXDude » 18 Jan 2016, 15:47

Maya -can- be fine, particularly in a setting where a variety of issues can be circumvent by teams of RND, and in different aspects from an SI user's perspective, it's also considerably "less bad" than it has been in the past, and it can technically currently be considered "the next best thing" (which hasn't been killed), more specifically in the animation and modeling arena that definitely have -some- things that can equal or exceed Softimage functionality some of which can be pretty cool.

Yet throughout the larger part Maya's history, despite having it's own set of advantages, it seems all it has been doing was 'trying to catch-up' .

From Trax, to RenderLayers, to the shader node editor, UV unwrapping, to a variety of modeling tools, to the 'H' key, to middle clicking menus, all at different levels of integration, usability or 'quality', which despite some of these things being iffy to good reproductions, to be fair, they all contribute to making it "less bad".


Yet there can still remain a considerable amount of comparatively cumbersome things, for some more basic things including selection, transform, and parenting models, but it's especially the moment more than just basic or custom things need to be done, where you still either need to specialize, or get (very technically inclined) specialists, which in any case involves considerably more time and resources to get to desired end results.

Without going into the numerous "little things", some of the larger cumbersome things can include ;

-- insight into what's happening using the outliner and the node editor, which despite having been revamped, even more than before shows everything happening underneath, is only decipherable in extra tiny chunks at a time, and thus not helping very much on insight or general overviews - if you image search 'Maya node editor', it brings-up almost exclusively shader tree networks, and the few other hits seems to show why that is (how things work inside has always been... pretty messy)

Insight of what's happening compared to the explorer and even the 20yr old schematic notwithstanding it's own set of quirks and visual clutter,
(a revamped schematic would have been nothing like the node editor, except for the fact that :: it would essentially be the same as before but allowing to connect things through there)


-- Tweaking with Nex, making waves with Naiad, motion graphics with Mash, which despite how Maya as a whole can be better with than without these things, and that there has been some core and UI changes, -- predominantly moving or evolving that way, contributes to it (further) becoming inconstant or like a potpourri of different things put together, and to a certain extent making different parts not necessarily talk to each other very well. For example despite the presence of Nex, it's often found preferable to tag/translate points rather than switch modes before making component tranforms.

-- Also, while no package is issue or bug free, particularly for newly introduced things, sheer unpredictable bugginess (even for the most basic things) seems to be a relatively major (and apparently not a much improving) thing, some or many of which of course do get fixed, but while seemingly introducing or breaking an equal or greater amount of things in the process.

Making such comments far from uncommon;
James Wilkinson 3 months ago
What Autodesk DONT tell you is the sheer number of bugs there are in their software. It's unbelievable! For example I was having trouble even SELECTING my model! The screen would black out and the model wouldn't select at all. There are HUNDREDS of other bugs too. Be warned, if you are thinking of buying 3D software please be aware that this software is VERY problematic
But above all in my opinion in relation to XSI, Maya may be procedural to an extent, but I don't think enough to say that it's "procedural", which is probably a major factor explaining the strong inclination towards Houdini among the Soft userbase.

While reasons for adopting Maya can only be clear, mostly relating to it's presence all-over and that it can also be good (in some contexts more than others), apart any of the above, looking for alternatives can also be pretty understandable, not just soft users, but any user or shop considering policies that have only become ever-more constraining and restrictive, quite visibly milking that foothold as much as can be withstood,

Which can be like choosing to go with an relationship that can easily qualify as abusive with someone who considers the other as mere object or commodity, doing so because of convenience (among mounting inconveniences), or for perhaps real (yet also perhaps partly engineered) lack of alternatives, making for a fair bit of not necessarily very appealing aspects.

Nevertheless, sticking with Soft until something becomes at least -roughly- or remotely as versatile and complete -while- artist friendly can also be quite understandable, as it's no exaggerations saying that it has 'had-it-all' (or alot of the main advantages of the main packages -and then some- rolled into one) for quite some time, considering how it was already -years- ahead of it's time, while different packages (notwhithstanding certain pros like Maya customisability or Houdini Flexibility) each in different ways still have a -long- way to go before getting to what many soft users would consider to be "point 0".

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Mathaeus
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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by Mathaeus » 19 Jan 2016, 14:07

Had a chance for yet another trial of Maya during holidays - and have to say that, after some time, it become more and more friendly. Perhaps I needed just some time. While annoying things are still present of course, like deleting the operator in one window, re ordering in another, lack of MMB scrolling value, and so on - I simply don't see anything closer to SI experience. Plus some great points - this app (Maya) is a wonderland when it comes to customization - been able to create shorcuts (well, hotkeys...) even for sequence of commands, directly from hotkey editor, all that nicely saved as one user preference MEL. Found ''whatis'" command which tells me which MEL is responsible for what - wow!. Found how is possible to adjust font size for every part of GUI (Maya strings file) - another wow when it comes to new high - res monitors. Dooooooozens of selection modes, painting, whatever else. Didn't messed up that much with graph editor, as it already behaves just as it should. It seems they transferred some naming from Max, ''isolate'' for hide polygons of objects, 'connect' for subdivide edges, which also fine, for me.
All that is definitively complex, but never hurt to have more and choose what I want.

Well all that belongs animation and modeling - but - exactly these two were most problematic part in 'transition', as they belongs to skill. No big deal to learn structure of app or a bit of scripting, vector math is always the same by nature..... but skills....

Will see, will I extend that animation-modeling ground, further. For now, I could imagine a
beautiful friendship, I hope for many, many years.

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Re: The road to Maya (yes, Maya)?

Post by FXDude » 19 Jan 2016, 22:18

3DS Max has also become considerably "less bad" than in the past, as it also has undergone it's own humanisation over time, (or we could almost say 'softimagisation') including it's scene explorer, decent sub-d implementation, along with equally streamlined modeling tools, shader networks, including it's own visual scripting engine, while perhaps somewhat more user-friendly than other offerings.

Yet apart that it can also still fill an arguably limited part of what SI was all about, it's not surprising if there is generally as much reluctance in adopting it as the "next" app, for probably much of the same reasons as with Maya, which can of course be offset by Maya's predominance in VFX shops, which is also probably the main factor that can at varying degrees, make a number users perfer to overlook things that would otherwise be simply unacceptable.
(likely the very basis allowing a given organization to do practically anything it wants (likely for it's own benefit), or the very point of (as well as the vehicle for) becoming one of few if not ideally the only viable option)

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