No new features; integrate Maya instead

[kimonmatara]

Maya's biggest problems right now are:

• Chaff: Tools which linger on in a semi-functional state for legacy reasons, for example:
  • Paint Effects--completely closed L-system, poor renderer support, doesn't talk to the rest of Maya
  • Vector renderer--essentially abandonware image filter at this point
  • Shatter--hard-coded one-off operation which hasn't been updated in decades
  • cMuscle--clunky, semifunctional, should have been replaced with a FEM solution a decade ago
  • Smaller stuff like 'joint stiffness' which never worked and should just be taken out, closestPointOnMesh which still doesn't support pickable uvSets, and so on
  • 'Interactive' binding using influence objects (themselves different from the new deformer falloffs, which are different from MASH falloffs, which are different from Bifrost falloffs, etc), which no-one ever uses in production
• Poor integration: Frameworks which, although powerful, do not share data easily, recreate functionality found elsewhere, impose new interaction paradigms and generally feel 'tacked-on', for example:
  
  • XGen--buggy and bureaucratic
  • MASH--good for mograph but essentially a 'Bifrost lite' when they should be unified; looks like it could be leveraged for rigging but runs too slowly for that
  • Bifrost; in essence a 'hosted application' that needs clunky workarounds to talk to the Maya scene and gets schooled by Blender's "geometry nodes" in terms of integration
  • The sculpting toolkit, tacked on from Mudbox, omits basics such as multires and textures, clunks out when you push its interaction
  • The poly modelling toolkit, bought as a plugin and shoved in; Maya struggles to preserve its context around snapping / live surfaces etc.; other mesh tools clearly operate under a different 'system'
  • Artisan (hopelessly outdated for texture painting, replicates some sculpt tools, diverges for symmetry etc)
  • Asset containers which were shoved in and then abandoned without any support for the (then newer) Node Editor, persistent keying bugs and so on

Maya just needs 1-2 versions without any new features and, instead, a drive to modernise, clean up and integrate the package so that the different bits can either talk to each other better, or get reimplemented in a unified fashion.

[Kloworks]

There is no developer here, 
so its a waste of time.

many dev left Autodesk and join Nvidia 

there is one dev here but almost 1 year didn't replay anything.

sadly Maya become as a rent product without any feature.
44 under review since 2018

[Taylorcbray]

PLEASE, this would be game-changing and make Maya a lot nicer to use!

[1006138663]

Everyone hopes so. Maya needs integration, but it seems that they don't have enough developers.

[sean_willis]

Maya vector is an extremely stable and reliable vector renderer. And the plugin is not loaded by default so it's of no inconvenience to you. Just because something is not receiving new features and improvements does not mean it's obsolete. 

[kimonmatara]

An unloaded plugin that renders pink elephants would be of no inconvenience to me either. That doesn't mean it should be part of the installation in the first place.

The vector renderer is so outdated that, by now, it only supports a very limited subset of Maya scene elements. And, since nobody in their right mind would pick it for production-level toon rendering over, say, Arnold, its only use-case is SVG output.

Put all this together and you're looking at a 'feature' which is so ultraniche it should be split off into an optional download.

[adediredayo]

Agree with the fact that maya needs better integration for tool to interact with each other

Bifrost is more of a simulation tool not really meant procedural geometry.

Blender geonodes is cool but how useful is it in production

If procedural geometry will be an important tool in the industry the likes of Houdini would have implement it long ago

How many artist can use geometry nodes only technical artists can do something creative with geonode

[kimonmatara]

Houdini has had procedural geometry since version 1.0. Procedural geometry is important in the industry, most obviously for set dressing, and in fact this year both SideFX and the Bifrost team pushed out demos showing exactly that.

But this is besides the point--the issue is workflow integration.

[P.Yamagata]

Very throughout list! I hope it doesnt go to the wind, it may serve to show to Autodesk that tehre is a way out of that tunel. Can you imagine getting onboard to code for this Behemoth of a program with that much outdated traps? There is code in there that I sometimes open and find Notes written in 1996!!!!!!!! Autodesk just should sometimes get on and tell what they really want to do with the product. Are they really willing to mantain it as a top notch, leading edge, creation tool for artitst? It is what brings bread to tale table of the family of thousands of professionals around the world, it should be treated with a little bit more respect regards it's future.

[stigla]

My other issue is simple.
Since obviously there is not really new huge features, at least make it plugin backwards compatible.
It would be hard if you have new big features every new release, but since that's not really the case, some unification on plugins should be made, so for example one can use same bifrost for any of the last 3 versions of maya, or I don't need to wait for new versions of render plugins, or recompile plugins for every new version of maya etc.
It worked in Max for example, don't know the situation now, but it would make sense to me.
If I'm missing something please explain.
Other issue is GUI. Now every new thing has a different GUI. Please unify this as well.
I would like to see that I can use same kind of graph editor to edit anything, including profiles for bifrost or PFX.
Why not having a 3D curve which can be used in graph editors, etc.
New pencil tools are again having completely new interface.

[johnstifter]

I would not merge MASH with Bifrost, there would be no good way to build scripting tools in MEL to utilize modeling tools scripts and MASH together.