Maya LT

[Lord Futzi Voldemort]

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, Blater 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 marterial 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.

You will also want light or texture baking.

[Bellsey]

I think Rez firmly hit the nail on the head, in that alot will depend on the scope, size and budget of your project/studio/team. We've not said that MayaLT is a silver bullet for indie mobile game developers, but it's going to appeal to them more than guys working on console or highend PC.
Of course there's quite a big gap between high end AAA and mobile game development and there will be developers who are indie mobile devs, and who are developing quite complex and high quality games and assets. Therefore LT perhaps isn't an option for them.
On a slight side note, I have seen AAA designers using (what was) Google SketchUp for blocking out their game levels. In that context MayaLT could be a possible a very viable alternative.

However, with the way indie mobile development has been expanding in recent years, guys like programmers, designers and 2D graphic artists are starting to get into games and work in 3D. Some of these guys may have come from game development, but there's also alot that haven't.
Full blown packages like Maya, Max and Softimage can (and do) appear quiet daunting, and too high for their budgets, so MayaLT might be something that appeals to them.

Some don't always have the breadth of TD knowledge for things like scripting. Many are just literally building assets, getting them into something like Unity and then doing everything in there, and you can alot in Unity. LT's modelling features have full parity with the full Maya and despite what many comment on, Maya's modelling are more than capable and always have been even before Nex came along in 2014, and the texturing features are also fine for getting stuff into Unity.

The scripting thing, I can understand, but it would be interesting to see exactly how many Unity developers are building custom Maya plugins for their small teams?
And I wonder if the lack of an SDK in LT is maybe not being able to build your own plug-ins in LT, or, that you cannot load third party plug-ins?

[Bullit]

What about Softimage Modtool? It is free.

[Mathaeus]

What about Softimage Modtool? It is free.

Well this become boring Softimage Mod Tool is free for non-commercial use. Here is about indie game business - or at least, how AD people considers that.

[Lord Futzi Voldemort]

The scripting thing, I can understand, but it would be interesting to see exactly how many Unity developers are building custom Maya plugins for their small teams?
And I wonder if the lack of an SDK in LT is maybe not being able to build your own plug-ins in LT, or, that you cannot load third party plug-ins?

The scripting thing is not only about building plugins. I don't know if you work with maya, but everytime I ask a maya guy how he would do something in maya that I'm used to in Si, he would say " there is a script somewhere for that".
Script commands help a lot in maya to improve workflow. I would'nt use maya without it.

[luceric]

You can render in Maya LT -- with OpenGL or DirectX, which is pretty high quality compared to what you're used to in Softimage,, where you would never think of doing that stuff (see dx11 tesselation in maya on youtube. Rendering cinematics with a offline renderer is not something that is very common in mobile (specially due to size constraints), or even in general (game engine rendered cinematics has become more common to keep the same look). If you're indeed going to spend cycles on offline rendering, imho you're investing quite a bit more than the normal small team or one man band Maya LT is meant for. You or the people you have hired to do that already own a full copy of a DCC.

This is Maya DX11 viewport:

[bottleofram]

In other words, "there's a Maya for that".

[luceric]

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.

You will also want light or texture baking.

Maya LT includes the Turtle renderer for texture baking, did you not look at the product page?

[Mathaeus]

You can render in Maya LT -- with OpenGL or DirectX, which is pretty high quality compared to what you're used to in Softimage,, where you would never think of doing that stuff (see dx11 tesselation in maya on youtube. Rendering cinematics with a offline renderer is not something that is very common in mobile (specially due to size constraints), or even in general (game engine rendered cinematics has become more common to keep the same look). If you're indeed going to spend cycles on offline rendering, imho you're investing quite a bit more than the normal small team or one man band Maya LT is meant for. You or the people you have hired to do that already own a full copy of a DCC.

This is Maya DX11 viewport:

he says - great, what else.
Render comes from here, yeah, created with full DCC app.
Anyway, just be constructive. Any chance to allow this Maya LT to have connection to Blender Cycles. Now when Cycles is released with permissive license, why not. Just personally, yes I'm completely agnostic whein it comes to Maya - but....'You can render in Maya LT -- with OpenGL or DirectX', come on....

[Bullit]

Well this become boring Softimage Mod Tool is free for non-commercial use. Here is about indie game business - or at least, how AD people considers that.

Apologies wasn't aware.

[ojo3D]

by steve gilbert (cresshead) - August 31, 2013 3:58 pm
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.

Accordingly with Steve Gilbert (MU thread) ... Don't know who told him or if he's guessing. But if that's the case, than it's not so bad.

[luceric]

Anyway, just be constructive. Any chance to allow this Maya LT to have connection to Blender Cycles. Now when Cycles is released with permissive license, why not. Just personally, yes I'm completely agnostic whein it comes to Maya - but....'You can render in Maya LT -- with OpenGL or DirectX', come on....

Maya DX11 Viewport 2.0 render:


More?
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthre ... 0&t=117608

[ojo3D]

Anyway, just be constructive. Any chance to allow this Maya LT to have connection to Blender Cycles. Now when Cycles is released with permissive license, why not. Just personally, yes I'm completely agnostic whein it comes to Maya - but....'You can render in Maya LT -- with OpenGL or DirectX', come on....

Maya DX11 Viewport 2.0 render:


More?
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthre ... 0&t=117608

How do you render from the viewport? lol

[Mathaeus]

Anyway, just be constructive. Any chance to allow this Maya LT to have connection to Blender Cycles. Now when Cycles is released with permissive license, why not. Just personally, yes I'm completely agnostic whein it comes to Maya - but....'You can render in Maya LT -- with OpenGL or DirectX', come on....

Maya DX11 Viewport 2.0 render:


More?

well if you have something along this line - greatly appreciated, why not. This is Blender + Octane, btw. Octane = about 280 euros for Blender pack.

[myara]

If the Mel thing is true, AD need to clarify this because that is a BIG difference. And if Python scripts are also usable that is even bigger. I don't know if I've missed that line but I didn't find it in any of the Autodesk pages.

You may want to render in a raytracing move quality render, but my point is that you don't really need to. Like Luc Eric was saying, a lot o games are using real time shaders to prerender their cutscenes, so the image taste wouldn't change so dramatically. Some folks may even think everything was in real time and PS3 is awesomely power. Ex, Last Of Us, Uncharted, Metal Gear, etc.

And if still you want to render, then yes, MayaLT is not an option.

[edit]
I see there is a trial version, I'll try it as soon as I can. If it can run scripts I may get a few licenses

[Bellsey]

How do you render from the viewport? lol

Since Viewport 2.0 was added into Maya, the Hardware renderer has also been updated to the creatively named Hardware 2.0. It basically allows you to render using all the VP2.0 options.