Here are some things I wrote in the past 3 months about problems related with Maya 2019... There are some ideas too... Hope it helps somehow
Note that my "rant" exists only because I love Maya, and I really wish the best for it.
START UP
There are times when Maya suddenly gets fatal error only by opening the program, and when it happens there is no way to open Maya until you delete your preferences.
Lots of problems with the program might be solved deleting the preferences. But setting them again every time things like this happen is painstaking. Specially with advanced users who have a lot of shortcuts etc.
Generally, we got a list of warnings and errors in the command line even in the first run with a fresh installed Maya. Something is wrong.
Some Maya's own setup might be corrupting its own preferences... I don't know
SELECTION
Let’s say you’re modeling something, splitting your polys etc. You select some faces and you want to invert the selection. Ok, you invert the selection and get the visual correspondence of this in the viewport, but it won’t work. If you, for instance, delete those newly selected faces, ALL the faces in your object will be deleted. So you need to undo this action, delete the object’s history before invert the selection of any of the poly’s components. This is particular to the 2019 version.
Now, for the selection aspect, Maya has some implementation problems with simple tools. An example is a simple edge loop or edge ring selection. It doesn’t consider the undo function. For instance, you’re selecting an array of edge loops (double clicking on an edge, then jumping one without selecting it, and so on) and you misselect one edge, if you undo this action and double click in the right edge the program will select a ring. It’s a simple thingy, but also annoying.
Speaking of the Devil, Maya begs, for more than a decade, array selection tools (like “select one face every 2 faces in this ring). I’ve seen this in other programs even before I started using Maya, and people have been building plugins for this for more than 10 years!
SYMMETRY
Symmetry in Maya is just… totally incomplete. If you have a symmetric object whose transformations are frozen in your scene anywhere in it but the center, it won’t work. By this standard the “Local” symmetry only works with an object that has its origins in the center of the scene. By this, the “local” or “world” symmetry don’t differ much. You also cannot toggle different but simultaneous axis of it. Symmetry between two different objects that are mirrored versions of one another simply does not exists and this is a huge problem. This implies that you can’t modify two symmetrical objects at once after your scene hierarchy is complete. Any tool that are more “legacy” (like sculpt geometry tool) and has a “Reflection” option will ever generate asymmetrical results.
Many of modeling tools don’t support symmetry or if they do, do it wrong. Simple face extrude won’t show the full manipulator when used with symmetry (only a single direction of extrusion), merge vertex tool, which automatically merge two vertices, will consider the mirrored selection as a common selection and wont merge two selected vertices, or will merge them all (selected and the mirrored reflection together) depending of the threshold.
MODELING
Maya is losing space to other applications on modeling standards. Yes, there is a “new” Sculpt section that let you sculpt polygons like in Mudbox or something. It's very nice for blendshapes for instance, but not as much for sculpting. When you see a program like Z-Brush and how it handles extreme subdivisions in viewport and its amazing tools, you realize it’s kind of a lost cause for Maya (at least, for now). As mentioned before, using symmetry will often produce unsymmetrical results.
Standard poly modeling is pretty…. Standard in Maya. Modeling Toolkit was a hope back when it was implemented but its development stopped in some way. For instance, depending on how complex your model is, multi-cut will struggle to draw a loop, or cut a simple face. The more legacy tools don’t struggle this much and do the operations significantly faster than the newer (like insert edge tool, that also has an amazing “equal distance from edge” option that multi-cut doesn’t have).
Booleans had a huge leap in the 2014 version and stopped, but it is still in the stone age compared even with Blender, a free 3D program that handles Booleans flawlessly. Maybe the Maya development team has a lot to learn with Blender (and it’s hard for me to affirm this).
There are other issues, but those are the most problematic for me.
As technical modeling was never a thing for Maya, I won’t enter in the NURBS surfaces modelling here.
Shatter mesh effect just doesn't work. At all. Never. It's the same since Maya 6.0 and won't work. Create a cube, try to shatter it, won't work.
RIGGING AND ANIMATION
Painting skin weights is still buggy since… since I remember. It’s one of the most unstable parts of the program. You’ll realize that sometimes you will want to paint a full black influence of some joint in your mesh. If the mesh gets messed up in the process (like some vertex going suddenly to the center of the scene), Maya will surely crash in a few clicks. Save your scene and manage the damage after it crashes. By the way, Maya WILL CRASH in some point in the rigging process. I guarantee it to you. So be aware.
Using the new Human IK kit is a joy, until certain point. First, no A-posed character compatibility. Second, controls have their own transform values, and doesn’t matter the numbers you put in for them. Foot controls are always tilted downwards in a 45 angle which make a character’s foot rotation animation a pain.
Working with Effectors is still horrible. Imagine you set your effectors, make them work, save your scene, close Maya, run it again and open this scene again. The effectors WILL be showing messed up results, specially if you animate the IK Blent T, IK Blend R and, specially, IK Pull. I think something to settle a little bit of this problem was made for the 2019 version, but there are problems still.
If you animate some of your character’s controls and you list them in your Graph Editor, you’ll see a huge number of affected controls listed there that you don’t even knew they existed in the first place. Second, tangent modifications won’t do anything with their animation curves. This is immensely frustrating. Really, tangents just don’t matter for the “secondary” controls created by the Human IK Interface.
Retargeting animation with the HIK system and time editor will probably mess fur and hair effects. If you use plugins like Yeti, you’re doomed. DON’T USE HIK WITH YETI. They won’t work together. Texture reference won’t work. It is a mess.
Sometimes scrolling the timeline in an animated scene will crash Maya for some reason... I tried all the evalution modes... some can handle the scenes for longer times, but...
There is a problem with namespaces that should be alerted too (even if it doesn’t belong in the animation category). There are times that some namespaces will be maintained in the system even if you close your scene and create a new one. If you have a pipeline that somehow uses namespaces, this is problematic. It also might cripple animations if you decide to open the previous scene, for instance. Maya will rename the fresh opened scene namespaces that are equal of those already stored, and if you have a HIK character animated with the automatically renamed namespace, goodbye animations.
TEXTURING / RENDERING
Not that much of problems here but the standard. That’s because people WILL use third-party plugins for rendering. But in the texture department, oh boy.
If you open a scene with texture shading display, it will crash Maya. Not always, but almost. If you work with this mode enabled, it will crash. EDIT HERE - For some reason, resetting the preferences made the problem less frequent.
Maya struggles (and always did) to display textures on viewport and I don’t know why. Multi-patched textures are a mess. First, Maya admits only absolute paths for them, which can cripple a projects in a remote render farm.
Maya NEEDS to open the Material Viewer every time you start Hypershade, even if you chose not. It opens it, and then closes it. If you have a complex scene, you are doomed in the first open of Hypershade. Maya might crash.
Let’s talk about UV editor.
First, thank you for the UV Toolkit. That's amazing, for real. But let's go to the issues:
Textures will not be shown when you open the editor, even if the option to show them is turned on. You'll have to press the checker map button, an then the image button. And sometimes displaying the texture map in it will cause Maya to crash.
Sometimes freshly unwrapped UVS will be magically turned in their previous positions/wrapping just by pressing 1 or 3 (for flat or smooth previews). If this happens, you've just lost your freshly unwrapped UVS. Pinning the UVs might kind solve the trick, but will make animation evaluations slower. You list all the hypergraph nodes connected to the object to see if there is something wrong and there is nothing wrong. But still, this happens A LOT. This problem exists since Maya 2011. It's been 8 years, posting things here, and this persists till today.
Well, there are a lot more... I might post here sometime again.
