It's a sad day....

[stezza]

Over 20 years working in Maya and VRay, it has now come to an end having been made redundant.
Have you seen the cost of a Maya license, phew?

So Blender is a good option but need to learn from scratch along with the beta VRay, at least I know what Im doing there.. oh what a ball ache.

[glorybound]

Yeah, $245 is pretty steep for a freelancer, but to be fair, if you charge a reasonable and fair fee, it isn't much. However, you can't beat free unless you can't be productive.

[hsz]

You also have Maya indie btw - just in case

[Morbid Angel]

I think autodesk will have to do something with maya. They can't not develop it and squeeze the $ out of everyone they way they do. I have moved to houdini, not looking back. Still using maya for some people who animate, in that maya is better for now. Any other software than autodesk software would be a better choice by now.

[hsz]

Not sure what you are talking about - You have Bifrost, LookdevX + USD + what they add/fix in vanilla Maya.

[oglu]

The thing is the everage Freelancer does not need Bifrost, LookDevX, Hydra nor USD or Flow. There is a huge development for pipelines but not so much for the little one.

[glorybound]

The thing is the everage Freelancer does not need Bifrost, LookDevX, Hydra nor USD or Flow. There is a huge development for pipelines but not so much for the little one.

Doesn't AD purchase these add-ons that they implement into their software; they don't develop them in-house.

[oglu]

They are the main contributors. Its all open source.
https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-usd
https://github.com/Autodesk/maya-hydra https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenPBR

LookDevx and Bifrost is inhouse based on there Amino platform. There is nothing left from Naiad.

[Morbid Angel]

The thing is the everage Freelancer does not need Bifrost, LookDevX, Hydra nor USD or Flow. There is a huge development for pipelines but not so much for the little one.

I laugh a bit about this list also. The general public I would say 90% would never need any of these. It will also take me 15 minutes of work to break one of them as they are severely under developed. Further more, the huge array of issues that maya carries over from version to version, such as viewport stability, terrible performance with heavy meshes, handling of slightly larger alembics to name a few. Good luck rigging a character with painting weights. A crash every few minutes is the workflow these days. We struggle with things like 2k playblasts and inability to playblast imageplanes. Inability to playblast to exrs. Good luck working with square footage. I can talk about the issues for days really.

Not all is bad in maya, we def had good as well. Just not justifiable the costs and what you may get from autodesk. I would vote to switch to blender 100% if you can.

[oglu]

If weight painting does crash please show us how. A lot of those bugs are isolated to a certain workflow, workstation or mesh. If there is a way to repro the Mata team will fix it.

[hsz]

"The general public I would say 90% would never need any of these."

That is def your personal case scenario - For us it has been great to have these tools. I keep hearing the same as well in other studios.


"It will also take me 15 minutes of work to break one of them as they are severely under developed"

Can you show me an example of what is supported at the moment and how can you break it in 15 or less? - it would be good to know so it can be reported and fix.