This is reply to one of my Animation Mentor classmates and I thing it could be usefull to other people. I was worried to post my grudge towards Maya since future employers could think that I am reluctant to use Maya but I now got used to its issues and tamed the beast
“I started using Maya with version 1 or 2, can’t remember, I also bought the book, bought the Tshirt ;-).
Being Power Animator’s successor I thought it would be an amazing software but very quickly came to hate it: Unix kind of ugly interface, no polygon modeling at that time (just Nurbs) and other weired issues that 3dsmax didn’t have. People were doing amazing stuff with it though, just look at Bingo!
So yeah, I went back to 3dsmax and have always been happy since especially for rendering and polymodeling work but I am not closed to other softwares.Let’s face it, Maya is king (or Queen) in the feature film industry.
After so many years using Max I realised that 3d softwares are so complicated nowadays that if you don’t have someone to show you which button is really usefull and which one is useless, you are gonna waste your time.
That’s why I am trying Maya again since AM provides training and support for that very ackward software. I give myself few more month to learn all the stuff I need for animation, then I will try XSI. There is more work in commercial and feature film on XSI in London and pretty much all the AM students based in London use XSI.
Maya really failed to impress me, so far, for the reasons I mentioned in the forum and in my workspace. Lack of full Avi and Quicktime support. Clunky default interface, inconsistents shortcuts (why can’t we move keys with a left click in Translate mode while in the graph editor?).
The funniest of all is definitely the fact that I had to define the front camera in the Global render settings when I wanted to render the side view for the Obstacle course.
Has anyone had fun trying to install LowMan rig? My impression so far is that Maya is targeted more for TD people than artists. If you don’t know Maya inside out before tackling a full project, you might run into a brick wall. I now wear a helmet, that helps 😉
One note before I finish my ramblings 😉 I am not saying Maya is a bad software, just look at Pixar’s work …oops no they use Marionnet, look at Dreamwork’s work …oops no they use Emo 😉 well any blockbuster, but once you know the software well, try to learn an other one with someone who knows it, and you could be surprised to see the the grass can been greener on the other side!
Maya is not a bad software, it just very clunky, I will put my troubling experiences on my blog when I find the time.”
Olive
