Bring Quality Updates to Maya!

[johnmarquezjimenez]

For the love of god, Blender, Houdini, & even Cinema4D are getting crazy updates. Not just performance improvements and occasional new features that sometimes feel like somthing that was missing for a long time, but actually quality updates with big leaps each year in various different fields. Maya is one of the most expensive 3D softwares for a reason, and it is also the industry standard. The updates however, do not feel worth the price. 

There are tons of great ideas here seemingly neglected. For example, a 3ds Max like modifier stack system, that's been on the top of this board for YEARS, however it is still marked under review. I am not denying that there are some good updates, like the Boolean toolkit & the Sweep Mesh tool, but Maya could use a lot more improvement in terms of polygon modeling.

Not only that, but just overall, a great improvement in the updates Maya gets would be phenomenal, something comparable to what we see happening with other software. As a sidenote, fixing bugs & stability issues should definitely still be kept as a major priority. 

[Epicurian6]

Sadly I gotta say that you have a point there. In the meantime google my good friend Im3djoe on gumroad and YouTube. I collaborated with him on the latest edge projection and poly freeform script. Most of his scripts take basic ideas but give them a totally unique spin. This guy is tirelessly putting out more quality tools for poly modeling in 6 months than Autodesk does in 6 years. If Autodesk would improve the speed of their tools like boolean we would have already released even better tools which sadly can't be realised with current code being too slow to resolve the operations needed. Leave a tip, he deserves it!

https://im3djoe.gumroad.com/

[Kloworks]

There will be no big update anymore. 
since all the devs here resign.
and the devs not active, maya team now smaller even smaller then 3dsmax team. 
they bring some of 3dsmax dev to update the retopologizes speed.

you can see that 3ds max got more updates than maya.

so yeah Big update will never happen since there is no active team here.

I am learning blender until I feel ready I will move out.

Maya become a legacy old school.

[Epicurian6]

How do you know how many devs are in which team?

[Kloworks]

@Epicurian6  
simply first TJ Galda

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3224348

resign from autodesk

+ Rig dev also resign  
this guy 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1251696
disappear and suppose to handle the Maya idea 
one of the video they mention that one of 3dsmax team helped to develop and improve the retopologize.
---
second see how maya update for every 4 month 
maya 2023.1

2 updates only  

maya 2023.2 
4 updates all related to improve animation only
its like tiny update compared with the price

check now 3dsmax update  and you will understand.

Maya idea no any devs reply for almost 1 year and half 
its like maya idea open for nothing.

[1006138663]

As a Maya user for 13 years, I am migrating blender and houdini. Maya has brought me confused software logic in the last ten years. This is an inactive development team. They don't have enough energy to pay attention to the ideas of mass users. Bifrost once surprised me, but I was soon thrown cold water. Its deformation performance is only half that of houdini. Its UI is extremely imperfect and updates slowly, The development team pursued visual programming crazily, which did not surprise my use, but was a burden.In contrast, blender's EEVEE and geometric nodes really surprised me. They were born for mass users. Although the performance and function of animation modules are not as good as Maya, blender's development team gives us confidence. Compared with maya's development team, we really can't trust it.

[johnmarquezjimenez]

I am migrating to 3ds Max despite the animation advantage of Maya. That's not a loss for Autodesk as they own both products, but still, I'd rather be using the product they are actively maintaining rather than the one they just have around with little support in terms of updates.

[sean]

Please for the love of god, do NOT bring the 3DSMax style modifier stack to Maya, unless is is COMPLETELY not modal. That is one of the things that those professionals out there, who know better, HATE about 3DSMax; that everything is modal, due to the terrible stack!

This is going to piss some people off; but truly professional 3D packages are not modal, and people who know the difference will totally understand what I am saying here!

If I want to edit UVs I should be able to do so at ANY time. If I want to use a cut tool, I should be able to at ANY time,  etc. etc. etc. Not have to be in a special modal part of a stack to do certain operations.

THIS is the power of Maya for power users, who work FAST with hotkeys, as true pros should. In Maya one can do anything at any time, not have to worry about being in the right section of a modifier stack, constantly. As a result I can be EXTREMLY fast, and the 3D package just fades into the background, where I don't even have to think to model! 3DSMax just constantly fights me, and the 3D package itself becomes front and center, requiring constant monitoring, rather than my modeling being my focus, and becomes the bottleneck.

This is coming from someone who started learning 3D on 3D Studio R4 for DOS the PRECURSER for 3DSMax, and continued learning 3D when the very first 3DSMax came out, and I immediately switched from 3D Studio R4. Used 3DSMax for decades, and still sometimes forced to use it (shudder), and used to LOVE max, until I saw the light of Softimage, and then Maya, when Autodesk killed Softimage. 

Softimage (RIP, best 3D package of all time) and Maya do things right. But Maya is falling behind in features, and it is obvious Autodesk has lost its way, regarding Maya, just like Autodesk lost its way regarding Softimage. I worry someday soon I will also be saying "RIP Maya, second best 3D package of all time", and that I will be stuck with 3DSMax (shudder) or Blender (shudder). Depressing.

Other than the 3DSMax stack, I completely agree with the OP, and wholeheartedly upvoted! haha.

Autodesk needs to seriously step up work on Maya, or most Maya users will be going to Blender. No way I am going back to 3DSMax, if I can help it. 

[Kloworks]

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@johnmarquezjimenez wrote:

For the love of god, Blender, Houdini, & even Cinema4D are getting crazy updates. Not just performance improvements and occasional new features that sometimes feel like somthing that was missing for a long time, but actually quality updates with big leaps each year in various different fields. Maya is one of the most expensive 3D softwares for a reason, and it is also the industry standard. The updates however, do not feel worth the price. 

There are tons of great ideas here seemingly neglected. For example, a 3ds Max like modifier stack system, that's been on the top of this board for YEARS, however it is still marked under review. I am not denying that there are some good updates, like the Boolean toolkit & the Sweep Mesh tool, but Maya could use a lot more improvement in terms of polygon modeling.

Not only that, but just overall, a great improvement in the updates Maya gets would be phenomenal, something comparable to what we see happening with other software. As a sidenote, fixing bugs & stability issues should definitely still be kept as a major priority. 

---

Max yeah the only annoying during UV, blender can do all modeling without modifier only some parts. which I prefer blender over max. 
Maya we don't need a modifier we need an overhaul the History system, I think best one to follow History in softimage it was great and clean and organize and you can change the orders of the list. usually modifier important in Hardsurface part. Especially bevel with boolean. you can see like Hardops and box cutter how great to handle "addon for blender".
in short its not like max and more like Softimage.

[sean]

@Kloworks Yes! Exactly! Make the history in Maya work like Softimage, and not try to replicate the modal modifier stack from Max in Maya! Well said! 

[stigla]

I don't know if anyone is even reading this anymore.
I'm confused about the future of Maya.
I'm not C++ programmer, even I do have a lot of around knowledge and made some small stuff with it, but what does confuse is so many changes every version of maya without really obvious need.
Jumping to new version of python means that you drop all the python scripts and tools build so far.
And constantly I feel we are just dropping old tools constantly without gaining new ones or even equivalent.
I feel I have less and less tools and more new things to learn to do less.
I was very excited about bifrost as well, but while I see it's power, the constant changes are making it impossible to follow. You build a tool and in new version already doesn't work.
And I'm not enthusiast. I'm using maya since version 1.
Same with API, now losing pymel, upgrading pyside, QT etc.
What's the point in all of these when you lose so many tools and plugins along the way ?
For example remash selection is no longer an option, and a major loss in the new remash tool.
We lost MR, when in fact this could be an excellent way to send stuff with materials directly to omniverse.
I'm really confused about the strategy.
I was told to login with new user name instead of email into community, while in AREA community I have to login with email, and can't login with user name. What is going on ?
And I'm not an enthusiast as the title says above. I'm using maya since version 1 and have been contributing to the community for a while. CGTalk has been the longest, but I have no idea anymore where to look for the maya community at all. It seems it doesn't exist anymore ?

[BenediZ]

Sorry, but this request is naive. You maybe don't know, that since several years Maya hasn't anymore a big developer team.  So it's most important to keep the software maintained and up to date. Bug fixes and performance are the most important thing. The software is powerful and great, but the code is old and reprogramming it will take long time.

(I guess they are partly updating the software.) New feature need again maintanence and take ressoucres from keeping the software alive.

If you need features, use specialized software, it is quite common to use 10 softwares in parallel.

To me it just makes sense, to have everything improved, which is already covered by Maya but not good enough (such as sculpting, which forces to use zBrush). Therefore people ask for Mudbox integration e.g.

[jwlove]

For a long time, I've been saying they need to basically re-write maya from the ground up... and I know that's a huge undertaking with a lot of potential ramifications.  Probably the safest thing to do would be to re-write each function within Maya and make them each more efficient while keeping the same inputs/outputs.  I'd say it needs to be re-engineered a little bit under the hood to make better use of current computer configurations like using graphics cards for computing and multi-threading - but across the whole program to reduce bottlenecks - not just to speed up deformations for animation.

Maya's been out for so long that there are likely all kinds of band-aides and hacks to fix things...  sometimes new versions break old functionalities of stock maya tools - I remember one update breaking some blendShape functionality until they patched it.  Blender is so young and they're able to utilize a lot of the updates to computer hardware that are the current hardware standards right off the bat because it wasn't originally written for old computer hardware limitations.  And that also allows their code-base to be a lot cleaner since they're not trying to shoehorn multi-threading into code that never even considered that to be a possibility.

As another example... and it might be less likely to happen, but I would want them to standardize input and output plug names for certain types of nodes like the various math nodes - it's really annoying trying to remember if this node is 'output' or 'outputValue' or something else entirely...  is this one xyz or rgb... I know it would be annoying to go through and update my own code to make my tools work again with a change like that, but it would make future development much faster.

The python 2.7 to python 3 change was painful, but it's been needed for quite some time.  Python had been growing and improving for a long while and there was a marked shift in how the python developers decided to manage certain things.  This was not Maya's fault - the python programmers didn't keep it fully compatible with older versions, and Maya held onto 2.7 for as long as it could before making that change.  While annoying to have to go in and update code, if you're writing your own tools it's more like a minor hiccup.  But, anyone creating or selling python scripted tools should be prepared to make those changes and updates for the sake of keeping their customers happy and their tools in use.  At the very least, they could make their code open source if they no longer plan to maintain it.

Cleaning up the code could make it a lot easier to add in better features in the future.  It might feel like a step back on that update, but would allow for major leaps forward after that painful process was completed.

But one of Maya's strengths is its versatility - people are able to write plugins for all kinds of tools and nodes/deformers that make working within maya easier... what's sad is that all those super sweet tools are only available if you have access to them (like at a studio or something).  One example I can think of is seeing a plugin node demo that someone wrote that was essentially the entire node network for an ik limb - it handled the bending of the ik, stretchy ik, volume preservation, ability to change upper/lower limb length, twisting information, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting - all in one node that took inputs for control positions and joint start positions, and spit out the outputs to drive all the joints in the chain.  These types of things never seem to make their way back into stock Maya.  It would be nice if there was some way of that happening more often (I think delta mush was a deformer from a studio that they gave to maya)

[g2m.agent]

@jwlove 

Stop using "old" to make excuses for Maya. Here is the information from Wikipedia:

Blender: Initial release January 2, 1994; 29 years ago

Houdini: Initial release 1.0 / October 2, 1996; 27 years ago

Maya: Initial release February 1, 1998; 25 years ago

Maybe you can say: Maya is still young.

[jwlove]

@g2m.agent 

I think you may need to re-read my post... I wasn't actually making any excuses for maya - I stated they need to do a major overhaul of the code.  I only mentioned its age in relation to how it seems there's just tons of code bandaides on top of bandaides to 'fix' issues and gave an example of new versions breaking some older functionalities...  maybe the only thing that could be an 'excuse' for maya is the python 2.7 - 3.0 thing I mentioned... but I don't really think that is absolving the other issues I brought up in my post.

Thank you for the information about when blender was first released - I had no clue.  I had never heard of blender until maybe 10 years after I ever started learning to use Maya, so I guess I assumed it was a 'newer' program.  With it being older, it really only further proves my point that Maya needs to do some serious rewrites to improve the entire program. 

I think we're all saying the same thing here....