Maya LT

[Lord Futzi Voldemort]

I do not know Blender well, but to me it's interface is awkward, and being frightens me a bit. I assume there is no support, and the future is not stable (not that Softimage future looks stable, but at least there is a decent support!).

Th

Actually Support is only good if it has an effect. People writing down issues and passing it to the void, however kind and helpful they try to be, do not make up for nothing happening after you report a bug. That's different with blender. There is not a support portal if you will, but devs communicating with you. There are regular developement builds accessible for everyone.
Bugs are adressed very quickly in my experience and the list never gets as long as ADSKs.
I don't know how it is handled if you rent software and there is a bug. Will you get a refund if this bug is not fixed in the time period you have rented that software for? I mean, if you rent a car and it breaks down you have the right to get another one that works, don't you? I'm curious how ADSK will handle this.

PS: if you like you can fix bugs yourself in blender ;)

[luceric]

@luceric

Do you guys, by chance, also check other forums/sites that are geared more toward Indie Gaming and Mobile? If you check out Fingergaming.com they have a decent thread going about MayaLT. I think those sites might give the best feedback, if that is what you are looking for, as their users are geared to that targert market.

Thanks. Do you mean gamasutra, or?

Maya LT is Frank DeLise's product, he's the one taking care of this stuff. Frank had founded his own game company, Chaos studio, admittedly not a indie type studio, but Autodesk also has a few people who have come from in indie game and mobile, and of course tons of clients through Scaleform. They're not just totally shooting in the dark, there has been a long beta. But also no one expected Maya LT to not get criticized, because people want their product X for cheaper, not a cut down product X. Unlike Mod Tool, it's not just a one off, there is a permanent team on LT. It isn't just about cutting Maya down, it's meant to have its own personality and features. They'll figure that stuff out.

check the thread at polycount.com/forum for the discussions with the team

[Mathaeus]

Maya LT is a good move. I do not know Blender well, but to me it's interface is awkward, and being frightens me a bit. I assume there is no support, and the future is not stable (not that Softimage future looks stable, but at least there is a decent support!).

Don't want to turn this into Blender thread - but just support is great. Of course not support of type, that someone is able to bother the support people to the death.
There are lot of people on blenderartist.org ( just a bit less than entire CG Talk, by the way), willing to help, some of them are masters. At least, I got very precise answers while ago, in few hours. Also, at least where I am live, no big deal to find Blender Python guru. Well not that much as people familiar with Max SDK, but, let's say, enough.

Future - nobody knows, but, for know I think it reaches the level where is really really hard to just disappear.

About future plans, there's what they planning to do. Interface is on the roadmap, too.

edit:
couldn't resist, but there's one thing I LOVE with this Maya LT - finally, one AD software without Mental Ray . Wow !

[Letterbox]

edit: couldn't resist, but there's one thing I LOVE with this Maya LT - finally, one AD software without Mental Ray . Wow !

There was another Mathaeus... Softimage Mod Tool.

But strangely enough after all these years, for whatever reason just recently it was canceled. Which is a real pity lots of students and game mod'ers loved it - Oh, it was free too!

[Mathaeus]

There was another Mathaeus... Softimage Mod Tool.

But strangely enough after all these years, for whatever reason just recently it was canceled. Which is a real pity lots of students and game mod'ers loved it - Oh, it was free too!

a bit of nit picking, but it was gMax, too. gMax also was cancelled. Both gMax and XSI mod tool were free for non-commercial use, tools for fan art. I'm not sure how many people really used any of two. Today, Valve offers Blender as modding tool..

Maya LT thing is commercial app for making money, that's it. I could imagine the purpose of this app, anyway, more for small facility. Imho hardly for one or two man band.

[ojo3D]

There was another Mathaeus... Softimage Mod Tool.

But strangely enough after all these years, for whatever reason just recently it was canceled. Which is a real pity lots of students and game mod'ers loved it - Oh, it was free too!

Probably that could prevent some people of using Maya LT, even thought the mod tool was not for commercial work.

[luceric]

Maya LT thing is commercial app for making money, that's it. I could imagine the purpose of this app, anyway, more for small facility. Imho hardly for one or two man band.

Why? Blender is not easier to use than Maya LT, and Maya LT is not more expensive than Photoshop, ZBrush or Modo.

For boadmaps and supports, it's not so rosy on the Blender side, imho. I got my first copy of Blender at the 1999 siggraph. Blender is apparently using the exact same OpenGL 1.x code, with the same performance problems, 15 years later. And still making promises about the UI.

The "plan" is to move "real soon" to OpenGL 2.0, which is 9 years old. Blender's interface has always been on the roadmap for the last 15 years. These roadmaps don't mean much except to show that nobody seems to be working on the core of blender and fixing the issues it has (what's more core than the viewport's opengl? everyone is using it) It's an OLD application that was written in the mid-1990s by inexperienced people at the time. All three ADSK apps were designed by people who were doing these second or third 3D app.

The advantage of open source is supposed to be that everything is constantly being developed equally and moves forward on the bleeding edge, but that's not what's happening here at all. It's not Linux or llvm. Imagine if Linux had stopped working on the kernel in 1996 and only worked on apps, flashy physics in the desktop manager, screen savers, and abandoned half of these projects mid-way. that's basically blender. The fact that there are a couple of shining stars like Cycle is a more a testament to the cycles developer than Blender. Blender is never going away, but is it ever going to a good artist app or a good development platform, I don't think so. It's just free, if it wasn't free you'd have ignored it.

[luceric]

Since this is a Maya LT thread, let's look at some modern OpenGL/DX11 viewport:
From http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread. ... 360&page=1

[ojo3D]

Since this is a Maya LT thread, let's look at some modern OpenGL/DX11 viewport:
From http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread. ... 360&page=1

This ShadexFX is incredible. Let's just hope all apps get that. Max, Softimage and Maya full too as now it's only for Maya LT.

[Rez007]

@luceric

Do you guys, by chance, also check other forums/sites that are geared more toward Indie Gaming and Mobile? If you check out Fingergaming.com they have a decent thread going about MayaLT. I think those sites might give the best feedback, if that is what you are looking for, as their users are geared to that targert market.

Thanks. Do you mean gamasutra, or?

Maya LT is Frank DeLise's product, he's the one taking care of this stuff. Frank had founded his own game company, Chaos studio, admittedly not a indie type studio, but Autodesk also has a few people who have come from in indie game and mobile, and of course tons of clients through Scaleform. They're not just totally shooting in the dark, there has been a long beta. But also no one expected Maya LT to not get criticized, because people want their product X for cheaper, not a cut down product X. Unlike Mod Tool, it's not just a one off, there is a permanent team on LT. It isn't just about cutting Maya down, it's meant to have its own personality and features. They'll figure that stuff out.

check the thread at polycount.com/forum for the discussions with the team

Yeah, I meant Gamasutra - fingergaming.com I think is just the mobile side of that. Thanks for the info on the team and I will check out the thread on polycount. I just think that not being able to render anything for the price of MayaLT, is going to miss a lot of the 1-2 man Indie Teams, which is a pretty big bulk of the Indie/mobile market.

ShaderFX does look nice.

[Mathaeus]

Maya LT thing is commercial app for making money, that's it. I could imagine the purpose of this app, anyway, more for small facility. Imho hardly for one or two man band.

Why? Blender is not easier to use than Maya LT, and Maya LT is not more expensive than Photoshop, ZBrush or Modo.

Well, back to Maya LT. Limitations are horrible, so, imho, it simply does not fit into description of 3d app, today. That I know 'one man band' won't be doing only the indie game, that's story. Most likely, indie game is just one task. So, 'one man band'
would like to have a bit of all standard features, being ready to forgive the general performance, Open GL version, quality of particular feature as well. Except only one, where he will want the best possible: renderer. Modo, Cinema 4d prime, Blender, Lightwave, all of them have something competitive to offer, here. Let's say, just beautiful hair rendering in Blender Cycles ( fast MIS, full ray-traced glossies, so on).

For price of Maya LT, I can get, how many... about three standalone licenses of Octane Render, plus Blender hard-coded plugin. Or, upgrade to Modo's the renderer plus something else.

Now I hope someone will not go with that joke of DX11... nothing... as argument for rendering capabilities.

[myara]

I think you're missing the point. Maya LT is to make real time assets mainly for unity. And for that you don't need rendering at all. In fact, rendering is the last feature in the priority list. Why do you need rendering? I haven't done any indie game, not yet at least, but I've been working for many years in assets creation in game production and the only time when I did a render was when I had to design a game package.

Imho Scripting is more important though, being able to customize your workflow is essential to speed up the creation process and automatize a little some tasks specially when you don't have dozens of people at your disposal.

And about the price, in Japan, MLT is about 80% more expensive than Photoshop CS6 and 3 times more expensive than PS CC monthly fees. But I don't think it is waaaay too expensive like some people is saying here, specially the American prices.

If you are a Maya skilled designer, MayaLT would be a much better deal than Modo, Lightwave or even Blender. You won't need to spend time learning something, and time is sometimes the most expensive part. Lets say you need a week to learn Blender for a 4 months project, and since you are not familiar with Blender workflow your job may dealy one more week.
4 months x $50 = $200
2 weeks of work = definitely much more than $200

in this typical scenario MLT does make sense.

There is just one thing, I haven't met one single Maya user who doesn't heavily rely his workflow in customized tools being them 3rd party plugins, maya bonus tools, free scripts or his own tools. At least they should add the option to be able to use already written scripts, or only Mel without python or I don't know, something.

I think you could use any plugin and already written scripter ops in XSI Foundation. I don't remember very well.

[Mathaeus]

I think you're missing the point. Maya LT is to make real time assets mainly for unity. And for that you don't need rendering at all. In fact, rendering is the last feature in the priority list. Why do you need rendering? I haven't done any indie game, not yet at least, but I've been working for many years in assets creation in game production and the only time when I did a render was when I had to design a game package.

If means something, I've worked both.
Well I said "I could imagine the purpose of this app, anyway, more for small facility. Imho hardly for one or two man band". If I understood correctly, question was, why not for one man band.
I other words, yes if "only" what you doing is game, you don't want renderer.

[myara]

Simple, if you need rendering you're not the target.

[Lord Futzi Voldemort]

I think you're missing the point. Maya LT is to make real time assets mainly for unity.

I'm still waitíng for the reason why Someone should use secifically Maya LT for that, and not one of the tools that already exist.
It still hasn't even the top-of-the-list modelling toolset.

If you are a Maya skilled designer, MayaLT would be a much better deal than Modo, Lightwave or even Blender.

If youre a skilled maya artist, you will wan't to use your custom tools and scripts. Can't stress this enough.

[Rez007]

Simple, if you need rendering you're not the target.

I disagree. From your profile you have listed that you are a character modeler and in your larger post you mentioned that you only have done asset creation - in both of those cases then you will not need a renderer. However, a lot of Indie Teams need to do the whole thing, not just parts of a game. It is also greatly dependent on the type of game you are making. For our game, Blaster X HD, I did a ton of rendering, which also includes a intro video to the game - a lot of games on mobile have that. Then you also have to remember your marketing material for your game, how do you plan on making a video for that? Not everything is just in-game footage.

I agree that MayaLT has its purpose, but it is not for the 1-2 man "Indie" team that this might be marketed too. It is more for small shops that need an extra hand or two during development. To me, rendering is a huge feature that is missing, especially for the price.