I do the graphics for a small start up and have used Blender for the 1st game and so far on the 2nd game. Our lead guy said he is thinking about purchasing Maya since it’s a better tool from what he has read. I know that there is a way to model within Unity itself (a plugin or pro feature from what I understand) so my question is this:
Is Maya or Unity modeling better and why?
If it helps, we mainly make phone games but are considering other formats later after we have for experience.
Maya, Maya is a dedicated modeling program (Among other features like nDynamics, rendering etc…) It would far succeed any plug in you could throw at unity.
You won’t get an equivalent modeling software/plugin within Unity that competes with Maya/Max anytime soon. Or ever, really.
Maya, 3ds Max, Zbrush, Blender and recently SketchUp are the primary programs. Maya and Max are the mainstream roots, Zbrush and Sketchup are more like workflow parts and Blender kind of does a little of everything decently. Modo has some following, and seems to be improving. It’s from the creators of Lightwave, so its kind of left field.
Definitely you don’t need Maya at all. Maya is only used because companies would have to spend thousands of dollar an lots of time to train people to use new tools and add new programs/plugins/addons to their workflow.
That is the only reason I use Maya, companies. So don’t go to Maya, specially if you are working with game and have a company. I went to three indies companies in the past few years that used maya and in one week I showed blender to people they started using only it .
I would recommend you get first the trial of Maya and make all team test it for one month for a few hours a day to see if it is really essential… to be honest… it is going to be just a waste of money.
If you are working with pre rendered stuffs, need metal ray, physics… go to Maya.
If your company is getting bigger and you want experienced artists and have lots of money to spend… maybe also maya…
As an artist, yes, you should definitely learn a lot of Maya/Mel/Phyton.
Even though I am working only with Maya now, I have to say that it is not a good tool, not near others. Has lots of bugs, stupid stuffs, tools with bad behaviors, and so on. Specially now that they are creating the 64 bit.
The new Unfold system is pretty amazing though. Also retopo in maya is delicious with the polygon tool…
Program X or Y won’t make you produce better models - that depends on the creator’s artistic capability… And I see no problems with Blender’s mesh modeling workflow :]
Or sculpting for that matter
Unless you need some feature Maya has that Blender doesn’t, and there is no way to work around it, Maya is a waste of money for the most part. Blender is just too good and too free for that. And it works quite well with Unity too.
Personally i use Blender. Is good for everything but I would preffer a bit more intuitive controls…
I love blender hot keys makes things go super quick.
I originally started learning 3D Studio Max and then started learning Blender a couple of years ago. I’m not a professional modeler. I’m primarily a programmer rather than an artist, but I’m getting pretty comfortable in Blender. So far, I can’t think of one feature in Max that’s missing in Blender. Blender is still way above my skill level.
I think PorkMucher said it best; art is more in the skill of the artist than in the tools the artist uses. That being said, quality tools make a big difference. But I would say Blender is a quality tool. The only real complaint I have with Blender is that I’m not a fan of Python and their Python scripting documentation is almost non-existent. I still manage to get the scripting job done though.
I guess Maya has MEL and Max has Max Script. Sounds like you can do Python with both and that there are some options. I never did in scripting back when I was doing Max, just modeling.
Anyway, if either Max or Maya have a real advantage over Blender, I’m not sure what it is but I expect it must be a really advanced feature. The more I use Blender, the more I find Blender to be sufficient.
Max probably has more educational books produced about it. But Blender has a few books and there are YouTube videos for it and such. I would say they’re about the same difficulty to learn.
But my somewhat limited experience with both is “six of one and half a dozen of the other”; I don’t have a strong preference for either. I’m more than happy to use either one but Blender is free and Max isn’t. I could probably obtain an illegal copy of Max, but I would rather work with a legal copy of Blender. I wouldn’t mind paying for Max but about $100 per year is probably the most I could swing for a modeling program especially since I’m primarily a programmer and just model mostly because I don’t have someone to model for me and I need models for testing and such.
But so far, I’ve never come across anything that I want to do, let alone need to do, that Blender can’t do. And I’m getting into shaders and writing C++ software that consumes Blender models and even then I can’t yet imagine something that Blender isn’t up to the task for.
So, I think the advice on getting your team to run a trial of Maya sounds like a good idea. Even before that, I would ask myself what feature it is that I’m missing that I need Maya for. Last time I checked a license for Maya was about the price of a good used car. That’s hard to justify unless you are modeling almost every day and earning an income from it.