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.