Material Editing

[daev.finn]

the Node network for editing materials / shaders in Maya has not changed in twenty years, at least noticeably.   I pay nearly $200 a month for Maya, and another $80 for Vray.    At this point though I'm likely to bail on it soon.  My exposure to the free software Blender will make my life less stressful.  Additionally the node network actually works, after years working in Maya I still don't understand what Maya is getting at with networking.  It's truly truly awful.    Each yearly release of Maya I wait to see if there will an update with 1 ) A useable renderer (nope) and 2) a shader networking that actually works and makes sense.       

Unity, Unreal, Blender and countless other software packages have useable and useful node networks.  Newer software like Substance Designer has intuitive node network.  Maya does not have anything that makes sense.  

[Anonymous]

I agree.  Just opening the Hypershade is a dreaded task as it usually ties up my Maya for a whole minute and when I am working and need to just to do some quick tasks it is the only option.  It needs to be speed up, made more intuitive, easier to organize, and the utilities need to be developed to keep up with the times.  Creating complicated shading Networks is confusing and the Node connection behavior is lacking.  There is no easy way to quickly build shaders by pointing to a directory with texture files, to convert, downres existing, consolidate, apply duplicates, etc.  The Lookdev nodes don't seem to be particularly useful.  Take a look at the Zootools mini-hypershade tool.  Is designed for working with shaders without using Hypershade and you can see right away the tasks that users need to perform regularly, but the only option is the slow and overkill interface of the Hypershade.

[Anonymous]

https://vimeo.com/306726894

Shader Manager at 2:10

[RPYTHON]

Agree. Where is my fast and simple Multilister!