Which one do you think is better. to me there the same…
I use both. They both have their good and bad points. They both will do the same quality of work as long as you know how to use them. I’ve owned 3DSmax since version 4 and use it for Unity and I use Maya for school(Animation).
I have found over the years with this argument that most people that don’t like one or the other is usually only based on inexperience with that tool. So like I said I use them both and I like them both. You cant go wrong with either one.
ok so they are basicly the same only difference is the price
Maya 8 here for me.
they are pretty much the same… both just as capable… it depends more in which interface you feel more comfortable with
I’m going to say I prefer Max for interface, but I am biased because I started with it. It feels more natural and logical to me.
For those who are trying to decide, I suggest downloading the 30-day trial for both packages and decide for yourself which one suits you best. Wouldn’t hurt to check out some tutorials on youtube or other places so you can see them both in action. I’ve got several free max tuts on my site for anyone interested.
/ Brad
www.3dcognition.com
I started with Maya, but quickly swapped to Max because I found the interface in Maya to be very ugly and cryptic to use. It’s far from perfect in Max as well, but nowehere near as bad as I found it to be in Maya.
I also love some of the plugins for Max. Like Afterburn and Fume FX.
Animation is supposedly better in Maya, but I’ve never tried that.
I use Mental Ray for rendering in Max and that’s what I used in Maya so no differences there other that prefer the material editor in Max.
Modelling I find to be a lot better in 3ds Max, especially now that they included Polyboost in 3ds Max 2010.
I also love Particle Flow in Max for its simplicity.
I’ve tried Modo some and I think that has a lot of potential. It’s certainly a lot more modern than both Max and Maya in terms of presentation.
Blender I think will be a force in the future as well seeing how fast new features and updates are added.
I’m actually the opposite of Twiik, but then again, I started in college wanting to do film, which is pretty much a required skill set in the film industry (at least, at the time it was). I started out with 3DS Max 3 and made the transition over to Maya 2.5 (wow, that was a long time ago). I hated Maya for about a month, and then something clicked. I suddenly got the whole dependency graph thing (and MEL), and I was sold on Maya.
Max is okay I guess, but everything seems to be so clunky compared to Maya - in particular, the fact that MAXScript seems like an afterthought, while Maya is actually built on MEL. Keep in mind, though, that I haven’t sat down to re-learn Max in several years. It may be quite different now.
Remarkably enough, I’ve met people who swear by Blender, and won’t touch Max or Maya. Crazy, I know, but they’re out there. 
I qualify as one of those people. Barring the fact that I couldn’t afford Maya or Max anyways, I started modeling with Blender, and after getting to know it I find it very difficult and unintuitive to use any other 3d modeler.
Same here. I actually like modeling in Blender. And then I tried to use silo and modo and just couldn’t get anything done.
It’s been a while since I used maya. I always found that Max was better for polygon modeling and out of the box character animation. Though I like Softimage CAT for 3ds max.
In some ways 3ds max cad visualization background and tools that migrated from that discipline made max an easier modeler to use for building environments though Maya has caught up quite a bit in the area of Snaps and object snaps. Last time I used Maya it was still inferior.
Where maya stood out was in spline/nurbs modeling which is more FMV/video and movie oriented, and character animators tend to prefer maya too.
Commercially I’ve always been a environment and vehicle modeler with some character work, but mostly modeling.
Maya is far better suited to development of your own tools and pipelines, 3D max is still absolutely garbage for it.
I’ve been doing 3D for over a decade now, so all that being said, I prefer Max artistically, but for a large project that will require a lot of collabaration and an organised and trackable asset pipeline, Maya.
doesn’t matter for game object/character modelling. For movie rendering Maya is better as opposed to Max (out of the box). But max on the other hand has more third party plugin developers, and Autodesk itself has made more plugin products for MAX than Maya.
Both use a different UI, and hotkeys, so it’s a matter of getting used to (or feeling more attracted to one compared to the other)
It just depends on what you’re used to, and what you’ll be doing in them. In the industry you’ll usually find that Modelers like 3DS Max and Animators/TDs like Maya. Max has a cleaner / easier to understand workflow for modeling, Maya has a much better workflow for animating, and incredible flexibility in rigging and scripting.
That being said, I’ve used both professionally for many years and I think Maya is the better all-around tool. Once you learn and understand how it works, like someone said earlier - the interface just ‘clicks’ and organizationally everything makes complete sense.
So why is it better, in your opinion? Im genuinely interested.
On a related note, does Maya have anything like polyboost/orionflame for max?
XSI the best :lol:
I agree with what JTBentley said about tool and pipeline, MEL in maya allow for very customizable tool and specific to your need, which I dont know about maxScript but I am not sure it well used yet ( never heard good things about it from pro user …)
I everytime find max character animation pretty 
…
But in the end you have “industry standard” on one side and " what you feel comfortable with " in another side.
Max people will feel frustrated at once with maya more “Raw” tools than max , it’s often happen like this :lol:
Neither, I find the best modellers to be Silo and modo, hands down
I like the Softimage Character Animation Toolkit for 3ds max. using Biped for cycle animation is painful in comparison. CAT makes the standard WASD anims dead easy since it has built in support for strafing anims as well as the usual front/back etc.
Always found it amusing that the best character animation plugin for Max was from Softimage
Biped = An ongoing joke
It took them over half a decade to figure out that people’s forearms have some twist
I’ve also done some archviz work where we’ve had to work with people (prefab models that used biped)… Cloning, moving and altering them was among the most needlessly tedious experiences ever.
All things being said, we’re in a Unity forum, and ultimately it comes down to FBX format. Since the big three (xsi, max, maya) are all owned by the same company (who also happen to own fbx), that pretty much levels things out
However, what you need to consider is your team.
If you’re running behind, and you need to scale up, finding Max artists is a lot easier than finding Maya or XSI guys. Max guys will usually be substantially cheaper, also
I’m not an artist by any means, programmer FTW,
But occasionally I need to step into maya/max to manipulate something, and I still find Max more intuitive for my mindset.
I decided to ask a few pro game modellers what their tool of choice was: a clear and decisive "Max’
I then asked a few pro game animators what their tool of choice was: a clear and decisive “Maya”.
Guess it all depends on what your doing with it