Hello All,
Just wondering which one is better for unity. Cinema or Maya,
I have maya edu bundle and thinking of upgrading but cost is way too much right now and started looking at cinema.
How’s the learning curve with cinema?
Is cinema installation same as maya?(login as root to enter lic.not happy with this btw).
saw that cinema is universal bin. ready so if I upgrade to intel mac later I don’t have to worry about my apps running on rosetta.
Thanks,
Ray
Maya seems to have perfect integration with unity. Every thing I have made in maya imports flawlessly.
Cinema looks good but it doesnt seem like the perfect bundle.
Maya truly has every thing. One of the things about maya that really impressed me what is it’s surface sampler tool for generating normal maps, http://downloads.alias.com/mkt/gmk_maya7_normals.swf
About the learning cruve, I have not tried cinema, but I can say maya is different. It’s not really harder but it’s different to learn.
I have taken the plunge into Cinema 4D. It’s a very nice modeling and rendering package, and has a great learning curve. (Very easy to learn, but still has a ton of nice features.) Head over to http://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/index.php to see many tutorials, artwork, etc.
To get Cinema 4D files into Unity, you must export to FBX format. A minor inconvenience, but given Cinema 4D’s ease of use and affordability, well worth the extra step. There is a universal binary out for Cinema 4D; it performs really well on the new Mac Intel machines. However, FBX export is not yet supported in the universal binary version. That means switching to the powerPC version for exporting to FBX if you run it on a Mac Intel. (At least for now – I assume the holdup is Alias not having the FBX libraries ported, yet.)
With everything said, I think Cinema 4D is fantastic program and works well with Unity.
Does Cinema have a normal map or surface sampler generator? If it does how easy is it to use?
-Bill
C4D douse have a normal mapping tool in the newest version as far as I know. But I’m not sure it exports the corect type of normal maps. I tryed both C4D and Maya and personaly I like Maya better. My 2¢, Jeff
Cinema 4D normal maps are generated under the Bake Texture tag.
I have not tried using normal maps with Unity.
@sync1b
I like maya , have great tutorials/videos/books.
yes I agree learning it is a bit different. I’m currently using carrara and hexagon and cheetah3D.
@tsphillips,
Thanks for letting me know that fbx is not yet universal b4 I plunk my $$ into C4D.
@Outcast(Jeff),
Why you prefer maya?
I spent more time reading C4D and if I added some of their modules the cost is still less compared to maya but not by much, I think.
Well, I just have to wait if maya will release a universal bin. By that time maybe I will have enough $$ to buy it.
Ray
After using Maya a little bit C4D felt very clunky. So far I’m not a pro at eather app, but I liked the workflow in Maya a lot better. The marking menues are so smoth to work with, I just love them. I like Mayas UV tools better than the ones in Body paint, and the PSD shader networks are realy great. Only two things I like better about C4D is the rendering engine and the equivolent of Mayas apend polygone tool. So yah, over all Maya wone out for me, pluse it feels like a much more compleat pacage. Jeff
yes for me I like Maya. Cost wise to get C4D with similar set of tools to Maya Complete in Australia, C4D works out more. However, with C4D studio bundle you do get Bodypaint… however with Maya you get PaintFX tool set… and the Artisan tool set… so I feel it balances out. Plus to buy Bodypaint as a standalone app one would be better off buying Modo (Modo 2 will have full 3d painting support).
Also I think from experience that Maya’s scripting language is better and easier to use then C4D’s… it uses syntax that is similar to javascript, so if you are use to using Lingo, Actionscript, PHP, JS then one feels very at home with MEL. Plus one can program in JS inside of Unity!
Also IMO I think maya’s renderer (Mental Ray that is) produces nicer looking renders then C4D and Mental Ray is an industry standard - lots of free shaders, plugins, etc. But with that said I still think Lightwave holds the crown there!
Maya has a much larger (and less whiney) community then C4D… you have www.highend3d.com that has lots of free Mel scripts that add functionality to Maya that in C4D a similar sort of thing either doesn’t exists or costs money.
But C4D is universal binary already… and I suspect the Maya UB version is still a while away, mid 2007 at least, or after Apple releases workstation class desktops based on Intel chips.
Also a big plus in my book: Maya’s character animation and general animation tools are better then C4D’s… but like all things related to 3D, it’s the artist’s skill and knowledge of an app that makes the difference. But C4D does have very limited built-in character animation tools. By that I mean, setting up bones, IK FK, weights, skinning, etc is harder in C4D then Maya.
A G5 with an ATI x800 card running maya is a dream combo and I recommend it!
BTW I’m an old Lightwave user, who has used C4D professionally and is now a happy Maya user. But I still keep half an eye on C4D… and LW for that matter! 
So for me, my dream 3D app trio is Maya, Modo and Zbrush. Have Maya, getting Modo soon… zBrush to follow! 
As an aside, I think Modo is the app to watch in the future, especially when it gets animation capabilities!
cheers.
I agree with thylacine, you get up to the level of C4D, LightWave, Maya, and it’s just a matter of preference and what interface works best for you.
I’m a big Maya fan, but that’s just because that’s what they had at school and I became very comfortable with it. I used LightWave for a little over a year and just got tired of the Modeller/Scene paradigm (and that damn layer paradigm in the modeller which can give you a headache for certain things). But it had kick ass SubDiv capabilities before anyone else. I’ve tried C4D and like it very much. The renderer is versatile and deep, yet easy to get good results quickly (and I love the “Toon” renderer). I hated the way it’s GUI was set up though… too “Mac” with all these windows hugging together it always felt cluttered. It looks like 9.5 cleared this up.
I could go on and on about why I love Maya, but a few of my favorite things are contextual pop-up menus on absolutely everything, and the HotBox allows you to just go fullscreen and forget about switching between endless menus. Modelling tools are very powerful yet intuitive, especially for polygon modelling. And I’m not sure any other app beats the animation system, from Characters to Set Driven stuff, full History, etc. And of course for Unity Maya is probably the most seamless.
But in the end none of this really matters, just try them all out, get what you can afford, and your talent will do the rest
[Edit] Forgot to say that since Autodesk is aquiring Alias I’m very fearful of them cutting Mac support of future Maya versions. Autodesk has never shown any love for the Mac platform.
This is probably a semi-useless, slightly off-topic post as most of you guys here use mac only, but I thought I would make a few comments anyway.
I use XSI with Unity and I have to say I love it. I have used Maya before, but I really didn’t like the interface. I had gotten used to it, but when I started getting around in XSI I loved it. In XSI everything is at your fingertips, you don’t have endless menus coming out of your ears. Everything is centered around the screen, but it never gets in the way. I found Maya’s menues, and inspector (profiler? whatever you called the menu at the right of your screen) to always get in my way. Maya’s menus system is quick and everything, but you seem to have to know it well to begin to get comfortable with it.
Also XSI was built around mental ray from the start and has the smoothest integration of that renderer around, so it produces some very nice renders quickly. XSI also has very very powerful animation (character animation especially) tools, and full non-linear amimation, and almost full non-destructive modeling, editing, everything.
In terms of integration into Unity there is no contest. Maya is the best. With XSI you have to export FBX like most other apps, and of course it’s on PC.
If you have a semi-powerful PC and don’t mind setting up a network, you might also want to consider XSI. But as with any app, it comes down to personal preference. I don’t know anything about C4D, but Maya and XSI are pretty much head to head in terms of features. Different people work faster/better in one or the other.
Just my opinion, hope it helps someone. (I hope I am not the only one who does graphics on the PC? ;))
-Jeremy
Not off-topic at all, XSI is pretty slick (I tried Soft Image back in the day) and I bet a good percentage of people here have a PC for 3D purposes.
I’d actually like to hear from people who are using 3DS Max with Unity. 3DS Max for me has always been that “other” awesome 3D app that I’ve never gotten to try out. So many games are created in 3DS that it must have some great features… or it’s just the defacto PC 3D app. I hope Maya doesn’t get snuffed by Autodesk. The best scenario is features from Maya and 3DS get integrated and we can all benefit. Fingers crossed.
Yeah, it would be a terrible shame if Maya got snuffed. I think autodesk would realize that doing that would probably cause a great deal of customers to boycott autodesk software. I think it’s in their best interest to keep both Maya and 3Ds max running. Maya has it’s reputation for film and SFX, 3Ds max for it’s games.
I’d like to hear about 3Ds max and unity too. AFAIK, 3Ds max is used for games so much because it has/had some of the best low-poly modeling tools in the business, and it was the industry standard so most engines integrate it very well. Plus it has good plugin/sdk support (but so do XSI and Maya, and both are being used for more and more games lately). I have tinkered with max, but not nearly enough to make any kind of judgement about it (except the interface was ok) and that was an old version anyway.
I think max was great “back then”, but I am not so sure now with high-end tools like Maya and XSI. I think Maya and XSI beat it on the rendering side of things though, but we shall see.
Seriously, autodesk would be stupid to kill Maya IMO.
-Jeremy
As far as my reading and understanding it looks to me like we don’t need to worry about Maya being killed. The Mac version is still a question though.
This is from a document located here
I can not see them cutting maya for the mac. It would cause a lot trouble from mac users. So many people use maya on the mac. I think they would be screwing them selfs if they did get rid of the mac version. It’s nice that they will be making 3ds and maya more compatible, thanks for that jeff.
Bill
Found this on maya forum
http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/256404.htm
trying to attach linky.
Ray
edit the linky
thanks bill
FYI, dont put the / on the first [/url]
Bill
I can definitely see it happening. Autodesk has said a lot of derogatory things about the Mac platform in the past. And saying it will cause a lot of trouble for Mac users is not enough. The Mac user base for Maya is TINY compared to the PC base and it might not be profitable for them to keep it alive. Just look at Adobe dragging their heels on coming out with a Universal Binary for photoshop (2007 at the earliest). I think a lot of these companies are getting tired of Apple changing their architecture every few years.
I hope I’m wrong on this of course.
Mac users account for 25-30% of Maya licenses. I don’t think that’s really all that small. What Autodesk thinks, who knows?
And if you don’t think 25% - 30% is tiny, just imagine reducing your income by that much this month or this year. 
The direction for Autodesk seems to be in the right place: easy transitions for content from tool to tool; compatibility. To me, that doesn’t exclude the Mac platform in any way and, if anything, it suggests further support for it. However, Discreet programmers hate macs (so I’ve heard) and that makes me a little antsy.
I don’t think there’s anything to worry about for a couple years.