Hello, I'm Eva 🙃   First of all I apologize for my English since it's not my first language. Also, I'm from Spain, so I'm talking about the requirements setted for Spain, cause I guess it can vary from one country to another.   Second, I just think the eligibility for Maya Indie should be based exclusively on your anual gross renevue from creative work if you're a freelance.   Now, I explain myself. I've been on the industry just for 3 years or so and a year ago I became a freelance because reasons and I've been paying the standart license since then. Today a friend of mine told me about Maya Indie (I didn't know about it cause hehe) and I was hopeful for a second until I saw the requirements for eligibility. Cause yeah, I make way less than 100k€ (way less like 25k) but the project I'm working on is valued on more than 100k. So, basically, I'm not eligible.    I don't understand how the money my clients makes has anything to do with the eligibility for a license I, as a freelancer have to pay. I'm not going to see any money apart of what my clients pays me per hour. Doesn't make sense to me. Autodesk just make it so hard for freelancers, and I mean, Maya is (usually) not the only thing freelancers have to pay, in my case I still have to pay for other 2 licenses but Maya is still at the top of my expenses just after rent.    I like Maya, not because it works fine cause it works like 💩 most of the time but I'm just used to it, it's comfortable for me, I've been using it for years but you guys bill it like it's going to clean my house, walk my dog and make me dinner. As a struggling artist it's really frustrating. Being a freelance is hard but it's even harder like this. Maya is an industry standart and sometimes we're even forced to use it.   Honestly, I've been learning Blender just to switch and save that money. If I were eligible for the Indie license I would be happy to pay it and continue using Maya. Two months of the standart one are already more than one year for the Indie one.   I'm sorry for the venting but I'm so angry cause I was so hopeful for a second before I was slapped in the face once again by Autodesk 😂 .   That's all 👋 Show More

As you can see blender is gaining to much popularity that making maya user to switch to other software . I want  maya to gets  rendering , better  modeling and many others. I  prefer maya over blender  I want more update for autdesk to improve maya and beat down blender in all aspect of modeling ,vfx,rendering, animation. Show More

Hey Autodesk,      Why not Having some public roadmaps? I think that would be a fantastic step towards your community. It will show that you guys care about your users. I think we all know that in terms of revenue, Maya doesn't bring much to the table, but we still hope it can be at least a little motivation for Autodesk to take steps like these.    Look what the guys from Epic do, and I don't think having something like this is asking too much: https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/tabs/109-unreal-engine-5-5   This is so awesome and exciting the way how they do and I personally love how they show with a little teaser of what its coming with a voting system embedded to each feature.     So please hire someone to be dedicated on this frontend, that I think this will bring a lot of life again to the community.   Thanks   - Daniel Show More

Hi everybody After a couple of very good conversations with Margaret Luppino from Autodesk I have been encouraged to post here with some suggestions and thoughts on the current licensing and pricing policy.   For background, I've been a 3D artist for 25 years and continue to use a number of different applications for my work. 3 years ago I finally got round to learning Maya which I have enjoyed very much. Sadly, after a downturn in business (largely relating to Brexit turmoil) it has been necessary to take stock of my costs and outgoings and due to the licensing structure which Maya sits within I have decided not to renew my annual subscription.   The current system locks people out of access to their tools when times are tough. I understand that for large businesses the predictability of subscriptions is welcome and affords flexibility when workforce numbers change. But for freelancers, small businesses and ex students just leaving college, the cost for access to the software is too high. 3 years ago my first Maya subscription was £800 +VAT. This year it would have been £1400 + VAT. My mainstay in 3D applications (especially for modeling work) Modo, costs £1499 + VAT for a permanent license with 1 year's worth of updates included in the price. A further year of maintenance updates is £339 + VAT.   Currently, Maya is the go-to application for animation and for good reason. However my belief is the subscription model, coupled with the inability to own a permanent license will ultimately lead to a squandering of that advantage. Elsewhere in the subscription only eco-system, Adobe is feeling the heat from a number of rival developers who are offering comparable and in some cases better alternatives to their software at prices which are competitive with 1 year's CC subscriptions. Black Magic Design has rightfully garnered high praise for the work done with Davinci Resolve and Fusion, which is now an arguably better alternative to Premiere. The Affinity suite of applications does a very good job in many cases of replacing Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. All of the above mentioned alternatives offer permanent licenses (a significant part of the marketing strategy) and there is even a free version of Resolve which many will be content with. In the 3D world, the Blender Foundation has reorganized it's funding and development process to great effect. We are now seeing triple A features such as Eevee and Cycles renderer being developed and the new version of Blender which is currently in beta is turning heads, being touted as a serious contender for professional 3D artists.   Blender is free and open source.   Elsewhere, Houdini offers an "Indie" license for $399 for 2 years. To qualify, studios have to earn below a certain threshold (I believe it's $100,000 per year). Substance painter and Designer offer Indie licenses for smaller studios and if you bought ZBrush in the late 90's, you can be using the latest version of it today having not paid for a single upgrade in 20 years. All of these examples show that not only can Indie & fair pricing models work, they actually drive the elevation of software to levels of being the definitive application in their field.   Whilst big studios are important to Autodesk, my contention is that smaller studios and artists are equally important but in a different way. A lot of the innovation in my industry comes from this sector of the community, along with original new ideas and concepts. Autodesk risks alienating itself from that source of creativity.   But it doesn't have to be that way. A few years ago there was a change in licensing policy which gave free access to Autodesk products for students and educators. It was a bold move which many applauded. I sincerely request that the current licensing model is looked at again and that Indie licenses are made available at significant reductions in cost to smaller studios and freelancers. A limit can be applied to the number of such licenses available to each studio to stop it being abused. I think it should be priced aggressively....Matching Houdini's offering of $399 for 2 years.   I also suggest Autodesk rethink the policy of no longer offering permanent licenses. For those of us who consider our work and the art we create to be an integral extension of ourselves, it is a deeply emotive issue that we cannot own our tools. I cannot stress this point enough and I know I'm not alone. By all means continue to offer subscriptions to those who prefer them, that's fine. But give us the option to own the software we use to make our art.   I remain largely skeptical this post will make that much difference but the encouragement I received from Margaret Luppino to post here has been acted upon in good faith. I have the utmost respect for the developers at Autodesk and I know there are people within the organization who genuinely care about their customers. For those who are more concerned about shareholders, I'd like to add a final word of caution as to where I believe the current licensing model will lead. Without a change in direction, ultimately Autodesk will lose market share to those who do offer permanent licenses for their software, by which time it will be too late to act.     Show More

I've looked over my previous opinions on Maya and want to provide a more directed approach to my concern. I feel it's difficult for new artists to get into Maya. The student license being limited to no commercial use makes sense. I feel for solo projects and selling assets on store fronts, it should have the same limitations as the indie license. Becoming a student for Maya is made less appealing knowing you can't use anything you make as a student. Most newcomers will not consider the idea of being unable to sell the assets they make with the license until a professor tells them or they hear it in passing. I'd like Autodesk to update these licenses so assets can be legally sellable after buying a license, as long as the license purchased is applicable for how the asset being sold.   The trial is currently 30 days. It's very difficult for someone to find the time to properly learn Maya in that time frame unless they don't work or have no social life. This accessibility of Maya is major hurdle for a lot of newcomers and a major reason people turn away from it, especially hobbyist.   Stripped down Maya (My original suggestion, updated) Currently, Maya has a lot of tools that hobbyist and independent artists won't use. I feel a cheaper or free version of Maya with just poly modelling, UVs, rigging, and animation would benefit Autodesk. These tools would capture the attention of people in the hobby sphere and bring in new users who may eventually purchase a full license. This would also enable hobbyists and newcomers a way to get familiar with Maya over a longer period of time without sweating the most basic knowledge. More tutorials would also exist, and thus a larger and more supportive community willing to help each other.   Maya without exports A education version of Maya that strictly allows users to make models and save in MB or a cloud save (with a file size limitation) that could be recovered upon purchasing a license.   Currently, I'm looking at graduating soon. I will likely be sticking with Maya simply because it has stream lined a lot of things that were hurdles for me while trying to learn Blender, prior to college. I did, at one point, look at Maya and didn't consider it for a moment. I would have spent that year learning Maya over Blender had there been an accessible way to do so. The only reason I switched, was because Maya is what my college taught. Autodesks hold on the industry will be harder to maintain as other options become more viable and preferred by smaller studios. Less and less people can afford college in this economy. I was barely able to get through college with a part-time job while living alone. The number of people who will be able to learn Maya is constantly going down and the reasons to switch are growing. Show More

Unfortunately, Autodesk is blind to the efforts of other software in user experience. What has Maya updated in the last decade? Well, I changed the set of icons and bought several plug-ins. However, many modeling nodes are still single threaded, and there is a lot of pressure when dealing with high model. Sculpture seems to have been updated a lot, but the promise of 2016 is still not realized. I don't know what the developers feel when they see it. Mash has no point data cache, and some operations have to be performed in nodeediter, So why not upgrade nodeEditer and why can't nodes be packaged? (if you can package, many problems will be solved, and the complex deformer node network is no longer complex), is the operation logic after Maya node flow or history stack? Whether Maya can have an efficient and convenient history editor has been a similar question for ten years. I know you've been working hard on Bifrost, and I know that all the functions of Maya can be reconstructed in Bifrost, but who cares about low-end users? I hope Maya can change. Show More

We strongly recommend buying blender and Houdini! Use 5 years to update them slowly, open up community discussion, let everyone put forward development suggestions, promise some great ideas, and then don't realize these ideas, kill blender in 7 years. At this time, it is very likely that a software "N" will gradually become the mainstream. Under pressure, a new Department called "cifrost" will be set up. Claim to beat "N". Show More

Wouldn't be easier crate entirely new DCC app based on Bifrost Core, rather than trying to fix old Maya and Max? Take best parts, workflows, solutions of those two and XSI, and make the best software of the 21st century.... Show More

For some time now I’ve been wanting to post, make a video explaining why you should take Stingray, now that it’s being decommissioned, and roll it into Maya. Every time I sit to make the video, I stop and just get upset because something tells me you either won't listen or you won't even check to see this solution. When I came across the ideas page on Instagram, I at least wanted to voice/type my concern.    Right now, I’m having to learn Unreal, and the thing is, unreal is not setup for Maya. Only that it supports FBX for everything, but they really only cater to Max, Revit, ACAD and now blender and C4D and Octane/Vray for rendering.   I've asked over the years about Maya integration and they suggested it just wasn’t on their radar. Now they are moving through cinema trying to sell all the studios on live production, all the studios who have used and were powered by Maya for years.    I have projects that require Real-time export as my client is wanting interaction. The first phase of the project was completely done in Maya, rendered with Redshift, and exported as 360-degree 6k plates to showcase their product as a VR motion experience. If you had stingray integrated, I would be but a click away or a few clicks away to make all assets collisions and basic trigger events and port the experience to a desktop and allow the user to drive around in a forklift as they explore the factory. But for the past 2 months, I have been converting everything, almost remaking everything to fit unreal, baking down animation and finding new ways to animate since unreal doesn't support "set driven key animations" which Maya does and would allow me to bake these in to use in a real-time environment.   I pay my $1500 yearly Maya fee but I also just paid $1500 for unreal enterprise license in order to get direct help from them because there is so much convoluted and bad practice material posted online and epic has no intention of trying to streamline or clean it up. If they do its moving super slow. Their base is still targeted to gamers, so much of what we need for film or general interactive experience is with a cinema mindset. This is hard because when you ask for help, it’s a gamer giving you advice on what works for a game. Only way to get deep or more fluid advice is through epic directly. Which I now have to pay for. I would gladly do the same for Autodesk Maya should the new system require the fee with help on filling in the blanks. So, if Maya had its own real-time engine experience, the narrative would be set around film and high-level visual experience. You can't mix it up or get it wrong.  Maya has an amazing set of tools, I do not rely on LOD tool to downres an asset manually, I’m able to quickly build a low poly but high resolving solution of a client asset, unreal doesn’t even have a true pivot solution for animation, moving assets around, and Maya does. Which makes moving around, animating, and designing in the environment so much more rewarding in Maya. There are utility nodes in Maya that help you build up great assets from texture and lighting controls which bring you closer to real-world without having to jump into substance or another program and because it’s a utility node you don’t have to code it, it becomes apart of the shader hierarchy. You just need a better baking solution like Unreals Merge feature that takes the shader and asset and creates a whole new shader with all the work of the shader now compiled into an advance more simplified shader.  You can still keep the original master shader hidden or unassigned for later upgrades or improvements.   I’ve spoken about this several times and when I do my friends go silent. No one wants to admit that Maya is more inline with where the industry needs to be than any solution trying to step into the light. They just don’t want to pay the price for Maya anymore, but the reality is, most companies would already benefit. From the many high-level studios that have hundreds of written tools around Maya that could be leveraged or bought for use in a real-time workflow. You take a look at what Disney did for lion King and how they used unity and unreal, you telling me they couldn’t just do that in Maya?  They weren’t making a game, they didn’t care for trigger events and deploying a desktop or mobile solution, they needed a way to plan and push their sets in real-time to storytelling, they didn’t actually use the realtime program for any rendering. That was done in the native design program once they got the shots mapped out. But If you could program in a way to allow an exported desktop interactive solution with possible trigger events, you could not only plan all your shots in Maya’s new Real-time engine using LOD’s of the assets created in Maya with a switch that allows it to stay at lvl0 during render time, then take those same cinema assets, and now you have high fidelity visuals to showcase in real time how it should be with almost instant export to VR with no need to hire a secondary company to handle your real-time solution. This could be done in-house saving the studios so much money, a month of additional new learning for Maya artists, leveraging your Maya expert artists and giving them more breath to create into the future for VR and motion experience. Leave the game logic with a game maker and leave the visual experience with the leaders of the visual creation practice. With Unreal pushing hard into the cinema world, show that you will not be ignored. Some will say but Maya is a big part of unreal, but no, its not. The logic is nowhere the same. I feel like I’m learning a while new way of 3D the more I use unreal. I do feel I benefit from all the optimization I have to do for unreal, I like that unreal recognizes instances coming from Maya but that same logic could be applied to Maya if I’m keeping things tight for Maya with the idea of keeping things within the same workflow.   Am I saying that unreal and unity is bad, no but with their constant push into a more real cinematic experience, Maya is already there. You just need a realtime solution and with stingray you have it, you just don’t need them to be a split experience. Combine stingray into the fold and breath life into your developers and content creators just like you did with bifrost. You also don’t have years to think about this. Always willing to talk about it! Jamiel Boling Ieko Media LLC     Show More

Please add Sri Lanka to list of eligible countries for Autodesk Maya indie license. Show More

I want to learn Maya but I am not a student and I cannot afford the indie license and many people are like me. Because of this Maya lost many users , so no one wins here Houdini, Unreal Engine, Unity... Provides free, non-commercial use, so why wouldn't Maya do the same Show More