I've been doing FX (smoke, fire, destruction, magic) in Maya for about 10 years. The last 5 or so have been very frustrating. Maya's development in fluids, particles and other tools crucial to FX work have stagnated. If not for plugins like Fracture FX or Phoenix FD I would not be able to do production quality work. Ask any FX artist who is in the trenches and they will agree. If you are an aspiring FX artist you may not want to invest the time in learning Maya's FX tools, many of which are extremely outdated.
This is sad to me because I really like the software and would love to see it improved. Some of the features are good, but overall the FX tools are a disorganized mess.
I've offered to give Autodesk feedback on how to improve their tools, but have never got near any of their developers or project managers. I think most of the autodesk people on this forum are support people with no experience in production and only basic software knowledge.
Part of me hopes it is not too for late for Autodesk to turn around this ship and start fixing Maya's FX tools but realistically the probability of that happening is very slim.
Eric
