Learning Maya

[samuel_bubat]

I recently started learning Maya after using Max for nearly 20 years. I tried to approach it as open minded as possible. I red a lot about how you should not try to immitate workflows you are used from your previous Software. Well I ignored this and did exactly that . While I think Maya it not a very intuitive software to my surprise a lot of workflows I' m used to in Max could be pretty easily translated into Maya. The node Editor so far seems to be a major strenght of Maya. As I'm a big fan of node based stuff, learning the node editor was not that hard. The max equivalent would be the reactions editor wich is pretty useless.
I have some further questions that maybe someone could answer. Especially people that also know Max.

People say Mayas strenght is animation. I' m not a character animator. But from time to time I' m using bones to animated stuff. I did not yet dive deep into bones and skinning stuff. I realized the Node editor is a powerfull tool to control complex animations similar to the Unreal Engine blueprints. Apart from that. Are there any other animation feature that one must know ?

What else is a real strength of Maya compared to Max. Some sort of killer feature one should not miss ?

Are renderlays still a thing when using Vray ?

When I right click into the Node Editor and select Create Node I only get a list with shader nodes. Is there some way to list all the possible Nodes ? It took my quite a while to figure out a simple "add" command is called a "float math" node.

Can anyone recommend good learning ressources? Must not be free. At the moment I'm using Pluralsight wich seems OK.

Thank You, any help is much appreciated.

[Morbid Angel]

A few things I used to like about maya over max were - better viewports (not the speed) but interactivity. Having actual real cameras for each view, made it easy to operate them. I still find maya modeling tools in some cases better then max. With that said, max has modifier stack and some very handy modifiers which maya does not have, and its a real shame Try doing bevel type extrusion along curve...its really terrible.

Maya's hypershade was great. You can hit "Tab" and call up search bar where you type whatever node you need and it will be created. However new hypershade is cumbersome it dumps unnecessary nodes into itself all the time and resets its graph layout all the time
Maya's animation is good imho, it has animation layers, keying on the timeline is easy, for example you can choose certain channels and key them in channel box something you can't do in max and its a real shame.
One of maya's real power is reference system. Unlike max's ill xrefs, it works quite well if you know how to use it.

UV editor, has always been ahead of max as funny as that sounds

Sims, maya has got some good out of the box cloth sims, now it has bifrost (water / smoke / fire) though its still early days for it after being there for 3 versions

Render layer is the other power for sure. There are new render layer system that they implemented but I have not used it yet, old render layers though allow you to do a lot (which is enough in most cases). Again something maya's scene states should have had but don't.
Token based workflow, where you can output your images based on scene name, camera name, etc is amazing. In max / vray or other renderer you always have to manually specify output path unless you use custom scripts. In maya you just type <scene>/<layer> and it will always output to that location, even if scene name and layer name changes. This goes further for example you have 3 render layers, you want to precalculate irradiance map and light cache for each one, just put <layer> in irradiance and lightcache paths and render, it will output layer name per file and then read it, no need to ever worry about renaming etc.

I don't usually use node editor because I use hypershae which is same you can connect any nodes there. Only real reason to use node editor if you want to do some advanced operations like isolate similar for example.

I can't recommend any learning resources sorry, long time maya user Also, being a long time max user, I know well the weaknesses of maya vs max, so often I jump back to max to do this or that and send the geometry back to maya No volume select is brutal in maya

[samuel_bubat]

Try doing bevel type extrusion along curve...its really terrible.

That was the first flaw I ran into because I use it in Max every day. Create Shape from edge, Sweep Spline. I'm also missing the symmetry modifier.

What I really like so far is the layer system. In max it' to bloated for me. I only use it to hide and show objects. I like it that you don' t need to have an object on a layer. In Maya, to me it' s a good mix between the max layer system and selection sets. The universal manipulator is great as well as the Multi Component selection in conjunction with "Tweak/Marquee. This let' s you really quickly fine adjust on subobject level. I also like the concept of live surfaces.

Regarding the UV Editing. I didn' t really took a deeper look into it' s features in Maya. Meanwhile I come along with Max Unwrapping quite well especially since Pelt Mapping was implemented. The only thing that really annoyed me in max was the terrible performance. I'm lookinfg forward how Maya does it.

Thank You Dimitry for your suggestions. Maybe I' ll bother you again in the future

[yolov]

Coming from the max world myself, I did the exact same thing - recreate max workflows in Maya. Over time you just try all the Maya-specific ones and replace your max workflows, at least that's how it happened for me.
In Maya, I like that a shading node exists just like any other without being open for editing in a material editor or being assigned to an object (you can script assignments and other things, or have debug shaders or anything else this way).
Render Layers are very powerful. Both the new ones (Maya 2016.5 and later) and the old ones have their advantages and drawbacks. One thing I like in the new ones is that you can override an attributes over an arbitrary selection of nodes and whatever nodes have this attribute - it's overrides, while those that don't have it are ignored.
Batch rendering is very useful, and there's also mayapy (headless Maya) which can be handy in some pipelines (we used it internally to automate our VRay tests among other things).
There are some things that are better done in max, that's for sure, but like I said - it just takes time to overcome that feeling of doing things the Maya way.
And a note - the node editor is almost 1:1 the hypershade, only the hypershade has a default filter to only show shading nodes.
The outliner is one of my favorite features, even more now that it has a very handy search function (was not there a few versions ago).
Also grouping.... ah, if only max had the Maya-style grouping.