@Anonymous wrote:
I don't expect the 2019 release to save the situation with Maya. I have given up this game of "maybe things will get better if I wait". The team and company behind Maya is not going to magically transform. Not overnight. Not over a year. Not over a decade. One thing is for sure. Even if they put some effort in one version they have proven again and again that the effort is not maintained. One thing gets "slightly less bad", and then it is followed by such new absurd disaster. It has become such a pattern. Only a fool would expect anything better. The odds are a Trillion to 0.000000001.
I respectfully disagree.
I am mostly a hobbyist who has owned licenses to Maya, 3ds Max, and Modo for more than 5 years. I have also used C4D, Houdini and Blender. All of these products are very good and all of these products contain issues.
I would hesitate denigrating the Maya team, however. After all, Maya has been the industry standard for more than a decade and is used by nearly all of the significant studios. It seems to me that achieving that level of success in an extremely competitive market saturated with high maintenance customers would require a great deal of skill and intestinal fortitude. Additionally, studios choose to use Maya for their productions. They are not forced. This says something about the quality of Maya for use in production.
In the last couple of years, there have been major improvements to Maya. In particular, the UV and Modeling Toolkits are miles ahead of where they were. Bifrost is another major implementation. There are other examples, to be sure. Since the team moved to more frequent updates throughout each year, significant improvements are more spread out. Consequently, major version releases do not appear to offer huge changes by themselves. I would argue that, pound for pound, Maya offers a more complete production package than any other single software. It is not perfect, but it is extremely good. I challenge you to find a software that is perfect.
I am not a fan boy of any of the above products. But I do harbor a great deal of respect for Autodesk and their product teams. They have been, and still are, the standard by which all other related products benchmark themselves.
Just my 2 cents 🙂
