www.si-community.com

More about new features, or exactly about no new features here.
Now what to say.... optimists are trying to talk about invisible core changes and such BS. New things, like circularize command (command = not even alive operator), plus some nice featurettes already present in previous versions.

stagnation

And, yeah.... have to admit, it seems finally there is vertical docking for shelves, wow..... after 15 years. Well, never say never

Howdy! "We want dot develop better software, faster.." ;)
Congrats once again! Well done ..!

Some things are interesting, almost as interesting as some addons SI has had for years...

But yeah.. is this a years worth of updates?!

Will wait for 2017 SP5 and finally install the damn thing ;-P

They've fixed a lot of bugs, but its stuff that shouldn't have been broken in the first place, so yeah, underwhelmed...

Draise wrote:Some things are interesting, almost as interesting as some addons SI has had for years...

But yeah.. is this a years worth of updates?!

Not really; when the stuff can ship ahead of time, it ships in an update. For example the new UV Editor went out in 2017 Update 3.
In the old days, they would have hold on to it for another 6 months. On the other hand, they made a change where Maya now supports floating-point frame rates, and that has been in the works since before 2017. It depends on the project.

So..... Maya 2018 Shareholders Release™.........

Edit: I should have looked at the documents a bit better before my previous post. While there seem to not be many "hero" features, there are some nice improvements all-around. The "smart extrusion" is awesome looking and is what I have been asking/looking for, for a while now...that will speed up modeling dramatically.

It is nice to see that the Devs do add what people request, even if it is a small but significant change.

Rork wrote:So..... Maya 2018 Shareholders Release™.........

It's really a release for the users who have been saying that Autodesk keeps adding stuff and never fixing what's there.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/sites/de ... me_enu.htm
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/the-maya-blog/maya2018
I did not work on a single feature for a year; I'm investigating and fixing problem all day, looking at crash logs, working with the Qt company on Qt issues, etc.

Yeah. Some of the modeling things are nifty. Good work on the bug fixes. I should have read those.

Yes,that is a huge list. If you don´t fix bugs for years, this list gets longer and longer, doesn´t it. Its always possible to sell bugfixes as features.
And if you add features, you can say, we added features and had no time to fix bugs..next time, the other way round ;)
I wonder when the famous bifrost will make it into Maya as a nod based system, as claimed years ago...

Yeah... Apparently it's hard to dedicated some of the dev group to fixing bugs, as new features are more important to the shareholders... err... users....

And yeah... If you ignore the bugs over the years, at some point these bugfixes will become a looong list.

I still prefer SI over Maya any day. Heck, I prefer using Houdini, even though it will give me brain freeze sometimes ;)

And it looks like MASH is becoming the new "ICE" for Maya, as the promise that was Bifrost never really came to fruition....

But not to talk all bad, I have to say Maya has become more workable since 2015. Not SI workable, but errr... better... ;P

Draise wrote:Some things are interesting, almost as interesting as some addons SI has had for years...

But yeah.. is this a years worth of updates?!

While yes, one could just install a new rental offer, when it comes to functionality, I'm not sure.... Maya 2017 introduced QT5 and all that problems with windows, unseen in DCC apps before (as far as I know). This was, more or less fixed in update 3. Well, except for newly added (in update 3... ) UV editor window, this one was stable only on first launch. Advocatus diaboli will say, they made it to work exactly for GDC or FMX presentation, hehe... That UV window was finally fixed in update 4, but 'fixing process' is somehow dramatic process where windows are left to disintegrate first, then Maya gathers them back. It's looking like small earthquake.... To be fair, these wild windows, displaying the Open GL cache from last year and such, that's traditional in Maya. To be fair again, QT5 'plague' is running all around, these days Houdini 16 seems to be a primary victim.

According to that experience, new option to dock the shelf vertically, will ends with having your shelf permanently attached on Windows task bar, or something like.....

Imho general problem with 'small and nifty' features, is that anyone could play this game, let's say one man for Blender team (I think name is Kent Trammell) is able to compete and lead against AD team, all that for zero price. Another solely Maya problem is total lack of consistency - in 2017 it become possible to move points along normals, by some as usually weird shortcut combo, but, not to snap that moving anymore. Snapping is special story, snap to poly edge and curve is same thing, making both barely usable (as far as I know, because of temporary ''solution'' from Maya 2 or so, when they decided to add some polygon modeling, but not to add any simple new icon).
While ago I've desperately tried to get equivalent of SI Clone or Max's Referenced Instance, with, again somehow typical, half - success - actually there is a script in Bonus tools for that, but, that script has to do some strange deleting sequence in order to get the node setup to work (without reload), still not working with multiple materials on one object.

Note that in Maya modeling, it's still ''normal'' to have two disconnected edges between two vertices. In Maya simulation, you have to write expressions (plural) to get smooth blend of anything (including point position) between two particle caches (or, it works if you load these in Mash, then in Mash you have to do some another mad procedure).

Long story short, Maya as usual - good enough for rigging and animation, has great playback of deformed characters, few really nice solvers as well. Otherwise, just a weak, over-complicated mass with worst interface on planet. Occasionally or not, what's coming with Maya LT imho really worth that 300 - 350 Euros yearly. More than that, it is a sort of offence.

Mathaeus wrote: Imho general problem with 'small and nifty' features, is that anyone could play this game, let's say one man for Blender team (I think name is Kent Trammell) is able to compete and lead against AD team, all that for zero price.

Actually.. yeah I agree there.... Blenders release notes and bug fix lists are usually more exciting and, or one man developed addons, do that competition quite easily.... and free or for very reasonable prices.