How crippled is Maya Lt when it comes to animating?

[Anonymous]

When comparing the two products Maya Lt is missing a whole lot of features.

What exactly is diminished when you are trying to animate highly elaborate machines?

I am currently leaning toward Houdini Indie as it is a much more complete package without the exorbitant price of anything that Autodesk offers, but still, if one product has much better features than the other in one area that is very important to me - animation - then I might reconsider.

Houdini offers quite a lot for what I want to do in my Unreal Engine 4 game:

- big dynamic environments

- elaborate animations, mainly of machines

- simulated projectile weapons, destruction, etc.

- 3D modeling for machines, weapons and buildings, including interiors

I'm still not sure about its animation and rigging capabilities though. And full Maya is ridiculously expensive, while Maya Lt has almost nothing except animation - the diminished version.

[djonesuk]

As far as animation, Maya LT has most of the features from Maya.  You can see the differences between Maya and Maya LT here.  It lacks a few of the more advanced constraints and deformers that are aimed towards film/VFX rigging, there is no camera sequencer (as it's used for film) and you are limited to two animation layers

Maya LT offers 3D modelling, UV creation, texturing, baking, rigging and animation in one package.  Houdini is more of an effects and simulation package. Basically, they are quite different tools that are difficult to compare in the way you are doing. 

As Maya LT does not have any dynamics/simulation or rendering capabilities, and Houdini does, they complement each other quite well.  

[moomalade99]

Looking at the comparison page, the animation and rigging section looks fairly feature complete for doing complex animation. 

Apart from one important, deal breaking exception. No unlimited layers. You get two!!!

Super shady by Autodesk