What is easier to use? 3ds Max or Maya? I am going to buy one of those. Thanks
Try them both but save your money and use blender.
It’s debatable. Over the years I’ve found Maya and Max to be similar in use and terminology, as in if you know one, you’ll have less trouble learning the other. While Lightwave and Softimage always felt the same way too (learning one of those, makes the other easier to pick up).
But back to Max and Maya. Maya is without a doubt more powerful out of the two, and for heavy duty stuff it wins hands down as that’s where it was born (high end movie CG production), especially to a programmer who would have little trouble making magic happen with Mel. While Max has for many years been pretty much the defacto app to use for 3D work in video games if you wanted to take the path of least resistance (Lightwave took the TV CG market and Softimage shared the high end with Maya and Houdini).
So while it doesn’t really matter so much these days as they’re all beginning to find their niche’s in each other industries and you’d be ok with either. I’d probably suggest Max simply because of the wealth of information and extra’s available for it which are better geared to creating work for video games.
Softimage is my favorite, its maya, but better IMO.
But between Maya and 3DS, 3DS is the most commonly used software in games, something like 70% of the studios use it, but for movies and animation, its the opposite in maya’s favor.
I’ve heard of studios not hiring junior artists because they don’t know how to use 3ds.
Check out Blender if cash is tight. I have seen many professional studios who have Blender on their list of art tools that they want their artists to know. My personal favorite for ease of use is trueSpace 7.6 but sadly its buggy and old now since M$ killed its development.
Thanks for all the responses. I think I’m going to use 3ds. I have tried blender and it was a terrible experience. I hate the interface. Maybe I’ll buy both.
Their was a personal learning edition of Maya. So you can at least try that one for free.
A little bit of learning could save you a lot of money.8)
I think 3ds max and mayas interfaces are completely unusable. :twisted:
But the best advice is to not buy both, try the 30 day trials and make the same model in both. Which ever feels the best is the one you should get.
You should try zBrush
lol!
Coming from a LW/Softimage background. I always found Max and Maya to be difficult to get used to. But gotta agree, as much as I love ZBrush, the UI… is… horrible to learn! Until you get used to it, then it does actually work really well. But yeah, still wake up some nights, cold sweats, nightmares of the earlier days using ZBrush shudders.
Then those studios aren’t honestly worth the effort imho. I can understand job applicants missing out on Lead positions because a lack of knowledge of software X, Y or Z. Heck, even I missed out on a sweet Lead Artist role because I didn’t know Max. But if you’re not going for a position where you aren’t “the guy the artist should go to with a technical/artistical problem”, then I fail to see how knowledge of a certain application will work in your (dis)advantage. For artists, it’s still the quality of their work that counts.
If you work fulltime in Max for a week, you’ll be quickly up to par imho. Maya, Max, XSI, Cinema 4D, Blender and Lightwave, they all work in the sort of same manner. So generally speaking, the same techniques apply over all the applications. Houdini’s the only one where you actually need proper training in to the procedural paradigm… And if you’re just slightly technically oriented, Houdini’s not all that hard to pick up as well.
As far as Max vs Maya goes, it depends on your needs and pipeline I suppose.
I mean, Max is still -for some reason I don’t really understand- the standard in asset building for games…
But I found the app to be a horrible myriad of feature cluttering, crappy UI/design choices and generally slow performance, even on my dual quad core + quadro FX beast there were some major hiccups from time to time. But Max has a massive userbase, loads of scripts and shaders out there, plenty of tutorials around, etc…
Maya has been innovative over the course of it’s lifetime, but I get the impression that it’s suffering from the same disease as Max when it comes to feature cluttering and UIs. But I personally think Maya holds it’s ground much better then Max in terms of performance and useability, however, that’s a personal opinion. And again with Max, it’s backed with a massive community, scripts, tutorials, all sorts of add ons, etc…
XSI I found is a good middle ground between the two. The UI is simple and straightforward. ICE is freaking amazing, but not like you can use that in game dev; it now includes face robot, good rigging/animation tools, proper scripting interface and API (standard languages like c#, c++, Javascript and Python). It’s massively performant due to it’s gigapolygon core where you can literally have 10 million+ polygons visible in your scene with any loss of performance.
But the support and community strength of XSI is way below that of Max or Maya, you really need to search for scripts, and even then it’s a gamble if they work or not, Mental Ray versioning was always somewhat behind those of Max/Maya, etc…
In the end, you’ll just have to download the PLE’s of both just try them out!
Another Softimage user here btw. 
I’ve heard just the opposite, studios are more forgiving if you have the portfolio to back you up. To them its not worth it to spend a month or two training a monkey who’s going to be modeling collision meshes and unimportant assets, but if they can get their hands on an awesome lead character artist, they’ll do a lot to accommodate them.
I guess it could go both way.
I’ve had first hand experience with missing out on a lead role because I did not know Max/Maya. But it depends on the kind of Lead role and on a per studio basis I guess.
So yeah, it could go both ways indeed.
imo, maya is incredibly easy to learn.
i mostly use 3dsmax, and i can handle myself halfways with maya.
For what i’ve seen with maya, it feels like everything is more ‘integrated’, physics, hair, paintfx, everything works very nicely, with max you gotta know all the workarounds, it never works on the first try… it requires tons of trial’n’error
Id say 3ds max is much easier, but has its limitations, but maya is a little more difficult but can do ANYTHING u want it to, including amazing animation deformations.
you can do anything you want with max too, just gotta know how
you can do almost as much in Blender!
I’ve been using Maya for years and absolutely love it, a lot.
It’s pretty perfect. But still, I haven’t even tried any other 3d app (besides Blender which is obviously not comparable), so I’m not baised at all.
EDIT: Idk if I’d say its easy to use or not. I’ve been using it for a really long time so it’s practically second nature, but your reaction might be different if you use something else. However, a lot of modeling really does rely on a very small set of tools (split edge, extrude, merge vertice…), so once when you get used to those tools as well as the basic qwerty tools, primitives and right click menus you should already be able to make some pretty great stuff. The rest is basically up to your artistic ability.
Without bones pro plugins, 3ds max animation deformations are bad, i dont know of any other functions that make them better but then that leads to time consuming events. Maya for animation hands down.