Still using blender - Maya Type Tool Woes

[Anonymous]

So AutoDesk is trying for feature parity with Blender. Makes sense seeing the free program should not trump the $4000.00 app in so many features. They added in game engine support - to a degree and now svg import and a type tool to improve on the completely useless prior incarnation. After all what good is a type tools without preview or live modeling. Problem is in 3 service packs the most obvious issues have not been addressed. The tool is utterly useless with 98% of standard installed fonts. As an additional goodie Maya of course crashes with about 50% of the standard fonts installed. As a good citizen I have file several bug reports which of course were ignored. So yeah - like so many others we are still doing font work in blender and import it into Maya. What gives?

Here's what font work looks in Maya 2016 EXT1 spf5!

[santd]

Hello @Anonymous,

I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing so many problems with Maya 2016. We are definitely striving to constantly better our software so if you would like, please reply with a scene file in which we can replicate the issues and I can take a look to see if there is something specific that is causing the errors or if they need to be logged with development.

I look forward to your response.

Cheers,

[Anonymous]

Sure. I am happy that you guys started to take an interest in these kind of things. Hasn’t always been the case.

The issues with the new type tool are so blatant it is difficult to imagine how they ever passed quality control. Again - around 90% of the standard installed fonts (in this case on a mac) display severe problems or even crash the machine. All fonts in question are of the TTF variety and would be imported in Blender instead of being pulled from the system like Maya 2016 ext1 sp5 does. 

I included a scene with the Courier font. I enabled Outer Bevel and switched off Fractional Offset to get some rounding. That’s it. 

You’ll see that even in this simple example stray verts have been extruded to form these horizontal planes. This bug results in extreme distortions with sherif and milder ones in sans sherif fonts. In essence the tool is useless because one would need to spend a lot of time to delete these stray verts and extrusions and use the ‘append to polygon’ tool to close the shapes back up. With a phrase like ‘Game Over’ this would take hours. Checked this on a PC and had very similar results. Not ready for prime time!

[santd]

Hello @Anonymous,

Thank you for providing me with your files, I have tested this out on my Windows machine and all is well on that end. I tested on my mac machine and I am seeing the problem there.

I have logged a change request, with our development team, so they will be taking a closer look at the issue and determining a resolution.

Cheers,

[Anonymous]

Hmm... - OK. Sounds good. Maybe there is some truth to the rumor that all QA cycles for Mac were dismantled several years ago 🙂

So with a "change request" and such i guess we'll keep using Blender for a couple of years then. Well, at least we seem to be on the right path. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Still no resolution of this issue in SP6!. And why the heck do we have an SP6 in April anyway instead of a new version of Maya? Is this the result of the newly imposed subscription policy? Anyway - the Type Tool in Maya 2016 Ext1 is as big a mess and useless as when originally introduced.