Which one is commonly used for videos games I know that the witcher uses maya , but know that assasins creed uses 3ds max. But which one is used for jobs usually in larger studios.
We typically use Maya, but unless there is a specific pipeline tool requiment, artists can generally use thier preferred tool. A few use max (including one whole team), a couple of us use blender, and one even uses modo.
Maya.
But skills are transferable, so if you know Maya and you get a job at a 3DS Max studio, you can get used to Max just fine in a few weeks.
Did not know that
So as long as the result is the same its fine to use whatever?
It’ll take a while to get used to some of the odd behaviour, freeze transforms, delete history, merge vertex and unlock / refactor normal for shading. But generally Maya is great for games…
Again so is 3DSMax but also has it’s quirks, I’m not a fan of Modo personally… A lot of people use Blender, it has some pretty decent tools… In summary it’s about whatever you can work with quickest and that’s 3DSMax for me personally, but Maya LT is sooo much cheaper and it’s nearly as fast (also has some great rigging and animation tools).
1 Like
Thanks guys for the suggestions
Max used to be used heavily in games while Maya was mostly film and pre-rendered movies, but I’m not sure this is the case anymore. Both are very capable programs, and you could potentially use either for games with success.
For a while, I was convinced Max was better (and there are some things that are easier with it, for sure) but lately I’ve been using Maya LT (mostly because the price is reasonable). Maya LT has mostly all the core features you would need to make game assets, but at a price affordable to indies. And since the tools and interface are mostly the same as the full version of Maya, the skills you learn can be directly applied to an industry job that uses the software.
1 Like
For indie, definitely. For large studios, it will vary depending on tools and process. My last game, SW : Commander, had a very robust and integrated pipeline, and used a custom toolset written for Maya, so all the core game assets had to be built in it. My current game has a thinner pipeline and exporters built for max and maya. Just depends on needs. Our studio is pretty understaffed right now so we can’t afford ramp up time for new hires. For the most part we hire maya folks who can hit the ground running, but exceptions happen.
I would suggest maya, but try to get familiar with the others as well, to make switching quicker if required.
1 Like
I used to work for a large AAA studio for about 10 years, and they exclusively used Maya. As @zombiegorilla mentioned, there are plenty of custom tools that are built to make pipeline workflow more efficient, and once you have those, you tend to stick with that particular package. I’ve personally used 3ds max 4.5 and earlier, then switched to Maya. I felt that it was a lot more difficult to learn than max, but ultimately a lot more rewarding, since the underlying structure of Maya’s directed acyclic graph of nodes meant that the entire system was uniformly generalized for all disciplines, from modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating, to scripting.
With all that said though, I’ve switched to Blender. I let my old Maya license lapse, because it was costing too much to upgrade. i.e. the old versions don’t work with Win7+. Blender used to be very unfriendly to artists. But ever since version 2.5, the UI has gotten a lot better (and is still improving), which I think can rival the other paid alternatives. It’s still quite clunky, and some things take a few steps longer to do than in Maya, but when cost is an issue, it’s a no-brainer. While I was learning Blender, and cursing at it for things that Maya does a lot quicker, I reminded myself that the learning curve is the trade off for $3700/$800LT (US) dollars. Not only that, Blender is open source, so you know exactly what you’re getting. And any programmer-minded user can modify any feature to his/her heart’s content.
So bottom line for me, if someone gave me a lifetime Maya license, or I could get to a point where I can afford to continually shell out for a sub, I would never turn back to anything else. Until then, Blender to me is worth the extra time to learn its nuances.
As a side note, wouldn’t it be great if/when the commercial 3d packages would ever go through the price wars that the game engines are going through?
2 Likes
Generally speaking, I am a Blender user as well, it’s what I started with and most comfortable with. I use maya when needed, but I have never personally had a license. If not working in the pipeline, I use Blender (mostly for vfx), I am just faster with it.
1 Like
Tried Maya LT? $240.00 a year ain’t bad…
I’ve tried it for a bit, but at the time I evaluated it, I was already invested into Blender for a few months. There may have been some other reasons I decided against LT at the time. Maybe I really felt like “full Maya or nothing” or something like that, since I don’t think you can render animations, and there may be some other features… oh… I think it was lack of script support, but that may have changed?
Supports .MEL doesn’t do python… I’ve found it pretty much covers all basis, 2016 version has been a little bit buggy TBH… Apart from that it’s pretty good.
Lol I was going to ask if you had made star wars commander.
Now you got me thinking about it again. Thanks a lot… =). I may consider it after a few more months with Blender. I think another thing that irked me is that .mlt files can’t be loaded in Maya. So the only option would be to use an interchange format if you ever upgraded to full Maya. I also wanted to write my own plugins, but you can get pretty far with straight MEL script, and all of my existing scripts are in MEL anyway.
1 Like
Odd thing is, you can use full Maya files in LT…
Yup. I just left the team about a month ago. My last work on it was the recent Worlds in Conflict release.
I studied practically almost all the main packages before sticking to one:
1-3ds Max. One of my favorite, despite what most people says, i found it pretty stable, the viewport is blazing fast and has tons of features.
Reason to drop it: Windows only and didn’t like the animation features.
2-Maya, gorgeous and very complex beast. In the last version it has improved a lot, but the interface really bother me, it’s really counterintoutive and you have 1 million settings for every stupid things that make learning even the simplest thing a nightmare.
Reason to drop it: Viewport not so good, the selection tool were sometime a nightmare, the node system is really hard to edit, making it essentially linear.
3-Modo. Fast, can do everything you can think of. Very easy to script and the modeling tool are a blast. You can find free script that make it even more powerful. The animation tools are very similar to motionbuilder and even has some better features if you don’t work with mocap. UV is also a breeze.
Reason to drop it: the skinning performance is terrible, really really really terrible!!!
Anything above 3-4K poly with some vertex deformation (bones, morph targets,etc) will make the viewport go to like 1-3fps… It make it very hard to paint the weights and make the powerful animation tool useless.
4-Lightwave. It was the tool I learned when I was a kid just for fun( normal guys read sport magazines, I bought a lightwave book…) . Tried again this year to see how it changed. The UI is still the same after more than 10 years, really too quirky. Plus doesn’t seem to have a great fbx support.
5-Blender, seriously why all open source software have to have a terrible and overly complex interface that seem out of the 60s? It’s not that hard to take example from others…
Didn’t even bother studying it.
6-Houdini. Now this is scary stuff. It’s a very powerful tool which require a programmer mind. It’s the most complex of the bunch and it’s all procedural. It’s very cool for FX but I would never use it unless you are planning to make some movie.
7-Zbrush. A beast of modeling software. Totally unconventional and probably the best modeling software if you want to do high res models. It has a strange UI, but after you get used to it it’s quite good. It is always innovating and can move very high res models easily.
Reason to drop it: None, it’s really a top software. But other than model you can’t do anything else, so you need other softwares. You can’t rig, can’t animate and can do the UV but only automatically.
At this point I was quite unhappy and about to return to Max, which seemed the best of the bunch. Then I decided to try Cinema 4D which I always thought of a lower grade software than the mainstream one. I was wrong and so much.
The interface is a blast, the viewport is the best I could ask, very responsive even with high poly and very clear.
It has a nice way of handling procedural modeling without making it a nightmare to edit like Maya, similar to 3ds Max but with less issues.
The skinning tools are awesome, and has lots of powerful animation tools. It loads very fast, both the software and the models, much faster than anything I tried(from closed to fully loaded including model in 5-6 seconds). It seemed to have everything I could ask until I dug deeper.
It has its shortcomings too and all in very basic things…
Doesn’t have manual normal editing, doesn’t have vertex painting, fbx support is very basic.
Luckily for me there a tons of cheap plugins to expand it and the authors are very supportive to include new features.
So if anybody want to try a new software have a look at C4D, you won’t regret it.