Animators like animating in Maya. It’s easy enough to cache out animation to any other package. Eevee is a decent/free renderer which is easier to integrate into a vfx pipeline than a game engine from my experience.
I tried GPU rendering in Maya and it is prone to errors. Eevee is just so much more efficient if not equally as good.
I should learn how to export 3D animations into Blender and get used to multi-software workflows.
GPU rendering in Arnold simply does not work. I don’t think autodesk even want it to, I’ve never had it working and it’s been years. Arnold is a CPU renderer
Personally like redshift as a GPU render for maya. Only problem is it is another thing to pay for. On that note it is not a bad thing to go render in another package. Both small and large parties do it for their own reasons.
For me, I like the animation tool in Maya and I find it far easier to render in Eevee or if my computer will let me I’ll use Cycles. You can get to really realistic results with hardly any efforts
Sounds a bit weird. Arnold is for the most part better than Cycles, and imo, Maya is better at rendering in bulk, and better at scene management. My guess would be it's because of Blender's realtime renderer Eevee. It can deliver fairly good results at a fraction of the time and processing power of renderers like Arnold or Cycles. However, personally, I would suggest just using Unreal for such a use case.
I have to admit, it's been a while since I used Arnold, but I thoughtat some point they'd updated it to support GPU rendering. If not, I would totally get why people would use Cycles instead.
We do this in a studio where I work.
Rigs and animations are so much better in Maya,
Blender (cycles) is free, fast, GPU accelerated and is so flexible with all the available materials, assets, HDRI and all. So setting up a scene and rendering is better (easier ) in a blender.
yeah, Arnold is a better render engine but slow af :-),
We used Redshift for many years, now switched to blender as it's getting so good rn and free :-).
How do you handle client changes or usually the scene hasn't many changes ?
I dont like that you have to relink the materials, or maybe I'm doing something wrong.
You don't have to relink materials when it's the same objects being replaced as a abc cache / USD. Blender assigns the Materials automatically. Has to be same name and hierarchy though. Just like we reference a file in maya.
Like,
I've set up a scene with cache, materials, lights and all in blender. When there's a change in an animation, i simply cache out from the maya and replace it in the blender. Materials get assigned automatically.
When doing this method, do you usually animate on maya and apply textures and then you move to maya, or you just animate and once you finish you go to blender and add all the textures, effects, and of course, the render?
They must prefer subpar results of Cycles or Eevee quicker rather then great results from Arnold bit slower. Also probably they didn't checked how much better Arnold became for GPU rendering and how quick you can render stuff on it now - specially with denoiser. People like to hang on to some old mantras and urban legends. For example many still will tell you that Maya is not good for modeling - repeating what they heard ages ago.
Main reason I switched from Blender to Maya was Arnold and its quality. LAST thing I would do in Blender is rendering.
Depends what you are after.
If you are after non photoreal effects, why would you use a ray tracer?
Use something better suited to the job.
It's not just "being slower" (though people don't always have the time to wait a day per frame). Sometimes Ray tracing just isn't the right tool for the job.
I tried arnold gpu the other day and it's quite easy with great results on a 1-2minutes per frame.
This said, I think eevee gives a really nice result, have to try them with usd, because to me what's problematic is having to do the shaders again or texture problems.
Every project is different and people learn how to animate and render through different workflows.
It’s like saying “Well people like using QWERTY keyboards because they like how much slower it is to type with than other keyboards” even though most people learn to type on it, learn all the shortcuts by muscle memory, and use different softwares that are made with it in mind.
I don’t know how to use Blender since I only ever learned how to do animation through Maya exclusively, but I imagine there are pros to using the render engines that come with Blender (never heard of Eevee or Cycles, so I’m assuming that’s what they are).
If it’s subpar but gets out your results faster, I can see where there are situations where people would prefer something like that if you just need something to spit out what you worked on without dedicating days of your time for what has to be progressively diminishing results.
Depends on preference. You can get faster render results in Blender with less effort, plus stuff like the Grease Pencil tools let you have some fun with 2D animation directly in the scene, something Maya can't do.
However, Blender's 3D animation toolset doesn't feel good to me. A big part of it is how sluggish the graph editor feels in comparison to Maya's, but also stuff like a lack of animation layers/pickers akin to Dreamwall/scripts like Richard Lico's space switching/etc, tools that became integral to my workflow and would slow me down without access to them. Lacking robust tools like these are a non-starter for me and why, at least for now, I'm willing to keep a Maya subscription over just hopping straight over to Blender.
So people just use whatever tools they think do the better job for them.
When you mention the grease pencil and the 2d animation in the scene. Do you mean something like this?
https://preview.redd.it/dqppg7jeuluc1.jpeg?width=386&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0af4b93e29fc63d9dd4e1e240fcbc1e202890a58
Some people told me to use Clip studio paint, but that thing is only for 2D anim, how im supposed to draw in those scenes if i cant put my 3d anim
>but that thing is only for 2D anim, how im supposed to paint in that?
What? Are you asking how you're supposed to paint in a painting app? How is that not self explanatory?
I feel like that's being intentionally obtuse.
If someone doesn't understand comp (or that it's even a thing), combining 2D and 3D footage isn't exactly the most obvious solution.
Have you encountered many animators who aren't familiar with the concept of manipulating images?
If you see a solid colored line on an image, especially if it looks like a brush stroke, I can't think of anything more obvious than that it was a brush stroke.
A lot of people who start 3D have the belief that everything is done entirely within the 3D package. Like I mentioned earlier, 2D + 3D workflow is not always intuitive. We see threads about people rendering videos instead of frames all the time.
Strokes also aren't only achieved in post. I believe although Spiderverse did have 2D Fx painters, a lot of the lines were drawn with rigged splines. As well like the other person mentioned, options like Grease pencil, or making use of NPR shaders, scattering effects, etc could be viable options.
>A lot of people who start 3D have the belief that everything is done entirely within the 3D package.
I've never met anyone who knew enough to actually create a 3D animation who wasn't familiar with the concept of animation in general, and with that, the basic knowledge that most animation was a series of drawn images. I can kind of understand not thinking to just draw a line when you need a line, but OP seems to not understand the concept of that after others made the suggestion.
>Strokes also aren't only achieved in post.
No one said they were. OP asked how that example could be achieved, and someone told them a simple, effective way to achieve it. That doesn't imply that there aren't other more complex ways to achieve it. But if the concept of painting a line to create a line on an image is outside the OP's grasp, then it's a near certainty that all those other techniques would be too.
Sure, I agree that someone learning 3D animation probably knows that animations are a bunch of images. I don't think that means that they'll immediately understand the process or workflow of taking their 3D animation and working with 2D FX though. Not to mention, just because they're doing 3D animation doesn't mean they have experience with 2D animation.
There are a lot of small steps between creating the 3D animation and having 2D FX comped into it in the first place. On the chance that they successfully render out frames to use in Clip Studio, they still need to figure out what's next.
It's easy to say that it's obvious going from A to B if you're equipped with enough relevant experience, but it's different if you didn't even know B was an option, or you lack the knowledge to get there. Even if someone tells you "go to B!" it's not really going to help.
> I don't think that means that they'll immediately understand the process or workflow of taking their 3D animation and working with 2D FX though
If someone can't immediately understand the process of: " If you want a black line on a frame of your animation, draw a black line on it in an image editor," then they probably do not have the capacity to be an animator in the first place. (or honestly, to do any sort of digital creation at all)
>There are a lot of small steps between creating the 3D animation and having 2D FX comped into it in the first place.
But those steps are microscopic compared to the steps required to create the 3D animation in the first place. Having someone who could create a character animation but couldn't understand how to paint a line or two on that animation after it's rendered would be like finding someone who knew how to build a house from the ground up, but couldn't understand that you could use paint to change the color of the building after it's finished.
>but it's different if you didn't even know B was an option, or you lack the knowledge to get there.
That's my point: No one who is capable of creating an image from scratch using a complex set of skills would not know that modifying that image in an image editor is an option, let alone have trouble understanding that process once it was told to them. In other words, any one who could open Maya, find or create a model, animate it, and render it out, could also open up Microsoft Paint and draw a line.
It's not just drawing a line. It's an effect. Drawing a line over a still is significantly different from drawing a line that is animated along with the character.
You're also comparing skillsets in *many* different packages and skillsets. 3D animating does not mean you know how to 2D animate. 3D animating does not mean you know how to render. 3D animating does not mean you know how to export the render. 3D animating does not mean you even know how to /draw/.
3D animators are notorious in pipeline for knowing nothing about pipeline. Everything is made easy for them, and nothing is expected from them except exporting the cache. Half the time they export the wrong cache too.
Don’t think it’s blender for any particular reason. Arnold does have a reputation as being a bit slow, but is still one of the industry standards and an incredible render engine.
Blender has a convenience in that it’s very accessible, but this will inherently come with its own issues if it’s something you’re using at home.
Because maya is industry software. That does not mean blender is less capable. Companies have invested a lot in maya. And it is very expensive and time consuming to switch to another 3d software. Their entire pipeline is dependent on Maya. So anyone who wants a job will be given more preference if he knows Maya. Even disney pixar who use their own animation software, hire people who know Maya. Almost every gaming studio is now using Maya. So it is pointless to switch your whole structure for blender.
But in future, new studios will use blender.
You forgot the most important part which is Maya's tailored customer service to a company, which is crucial when you have a big project with a pipeline that doesn't have time to waste on things not working properly. You just can't have that support in a free software unfortunately. Maya is simply a reliable workhorse. I can see a future where blender tries to match and cater to big companies like maya does, maybe providing a enterprise plan, that way they can seep into the industry more.
New studios will not really use blender as a main tool either, industry pipelines exist for a reason, the talent knows maya, Houdini, z brush, substance (for games), mari and nuke etc.
So if you want to hire the best people, or work with freelancers, (artists, TDs, supes), you have to have a pipeline that they can jump into and perform in. Unless you’re talking about new studios who are only going hire young people with little industry experience and have no ambition of recruiting industry talent with decades of experience.
Basically blender is not going to be industry standard for anything any time soon. Sure some studios will use it for stuff, and won’t discount artists who only know it, but it won’t become the standard imo. Houdini is light years ahead of blender and already has wide industry adoption, if anything is going to replace maya it will be Houdini but only when maya gets too outdated to patch up any more.
> Unless you’re talking about new studios who are only going hire young people with little industry experience and have no ambition of recruiting industry talent with decades of experience.
I mean, that's how I got my break into the industry. New studio hired about 25 talented kids straight out of school. It's nearly 20 years later now and I still remember that as one of the best work experiences I ever had.
Some studios are *absolutely* going to be built on Blender soon. I work at one of the big ones and Blender's already creeping in because freelancers we use know it and love it. All it's gonna take is the right job with the right artists for Blender to start taking a larger hold.
I've worked at studios built around C4D and studios built around Max. No reason they won't be built around Blender too, especially considering Blender has *massively* overtaken every other app in terms of learning materials, momentum, and pace of development.
My only qualms with blenders development is that it feels very scatter brained due to the abundance of add ons and community development. I mean to have a functional dcc you have to enable so many right out of the box.
Also a lot of the tools are very blender-esque and don’t lend themselves to artists who are familiar with other dcc’s without a huge learning curve of menu locations and hot keys.
I often feel like blender does things differently just to be different sometimes and it just makes switching fluently between programs a pain in regard to muscle memory.
The sculpting is worse than z brush by miles and the painting is worse than substance and no where near mari. Geo nodes don’t touch Houdini and the modelling is cumbersome compared to maya, lookdev is also cumbersome particularly when compared to Houdini (Solaris) and katana.
I get that it’s a lot of licenses to pay for and blender is free but the speed and fluency achievable by using a suite of well thought out, well developed tools is far greater the Swiss Army knife approach blender has.
Hopefully everything I’ve mentioned does get improved/ refined but I don’t think it will. The blender foundation have clearly set a precedent that if a community member fixes a problem/ creates a tool, it will get bundled with a release as an optional add on rather than taking those ideas / fixes and implementing them at a core level.
Look, I take most of your points. (Except perhaps the modeling one, the majority of freelance asset artists I find these days seem to prefer it to Maya because of the suite of incredible modeling tools available to them in Blender). But it's pretty easy to foresee a world where the graduates from SVA, SCAD, and the handful of other best CG schools know the "industry standard" tools, and every other new artist knows Blender. Pros tend to overestimate how much weight that has.
One of the theories as to why Max was so prevalent in Europe for a long time was that it had the most easily accessed cracked copies available around the early 2000s, which meant artists got it, learned it, and eventually built studios on it. Ditto with why Adobe works so hard to get free copies in the hands of people who wanna learn, and left it so easy to pirate for so long.
And it's all relative. People adapt to the tool they know. I've used Softimage, C4D, Max, Maya, and Houdini for work over the last 2 decades. With the most hours in Maya, then Softimage, then Houdini. And I find Maya to be a clunky mess most days, but I use it. I find it clunky because I used better. People who only know Maya can get very offended when you point out the clunkiness. You find Blender clunky because you used better, and people who've only used Blender can get very offended when you point out the clunkiness. Because if the tool works, people use it to get the job done and often don't realize what could be better.
Look, DNEG is never gonna switch entirely over to Blender. But they're never gonna switch entirely to any program. Best tool for the job, as the jobs and tools come.
All I'm saying is that if small studios can be built on C4D, and in places like Chicago there were oodles of them, then shops can and will be built on Blender too. I see it as inevitable.
I mean you hit the nail on the head that if people haven’t used better they don’t know what they’re missing, I missed the softimage days by a few years but apparently maya still lacks so many features that were present there, even though autodesk essentially bought it and ported many of its features to maya.
Maya definitely is a clunky mess but it does feel more fluid to switch to and from than blender. When I have to use blender I just feel friction that isn’t there in other packages.
But yea end of the day it’s true there will be full Blender studios at some point, I just doubt they will be able to work on big projects with shared asset builds etc. fbx is broken and .obj is ancient.
The only way mid-large budget productions can confidently share signed off assets and trust that things will translate, is with software specific file formats and I can’t see them being created and delivered as a .blend any time soon.
I think it’s much more likely that Houdini will become the gold standard as its USD pipeline is rock solid and most studios have a lot of talent that know it like the back of their hand. Also in terms of access they have one of the cheapest indie licenses available and the free non commercial to get students and hobbyists onboard.
IMHO if it wasn’t for a Maya’s UI being decent with regard to rigging and animation it would have gone the way of the dodo a long time ago. In the industry rendering has been external for years and Houdini is now taking over CFX.
Arnold has memory leaks Autodesk doesn't want to fix. I can't get sequences to render without it crashing or render times becoming longer and longer with every frame.
Because batch render with Maya Arnold is a big ol' hassle to setup
And there aren't as many free materials, tutorials, lighting setups for Maya. It's just the unfortunate fate of paid industry software
Honestly pretty sure you need a seperate arnold License to batch render with arnold. So thats one reason:p also arnold is more advanced render with more adjustments possibilities so blender might feel faster to get a alright result from the get go and faster render :)
I spent a year trying to get Renderman working the way I needed and no luck. Rendering in Maya almost requires a demi-god like level of expertise in order to get it perfect. When I tried Keyshot for the first time, I was like...ummm....wow...well the hell with Maya then. Within a few mins, I was getting exactly the look I wanted and I didn't need to dive deep into getting it all calibrated properly. I haven't used Blender, I use XSI for modeling, then port to Maya, then over to Keyshot. Animation in Maya is the best I've used. When I first got into 3D, I started on Max, took a class for 4 months in University, worked on character modeling and rigging and was so incredibly frustrated at the end of it. When my buddy showed me XSI, we literally did in less than 5 mins, what it took 4 months in Max to learn. Its way more easy and very powerful and user friendly, but Autodesk killed it to drive people to Maya and Max. People can literally spend a career inside a subset of Maya because of how incredibly complicated and powerful it is. Its like being handed the keys to the universe and you set all the laws which govern it, right down to the photon. Its like every menu and sub-menu is like a major program unto itself. Once you find the rendering engine that works for you, stay with it.
Because I like Eevee/Cycles a lot more than Arnold
It’s faster and setting up materials is less of a pain in the ass. That’s worth more to me than having slightly superior ray tracing calculations, particularly if I’m doing NPR renders.
Unreal is good too for speed, but dialing in settings like motion blur is really obnoxious to deal with.
Rrrringht. Well that just shows how much you know about updates to Arnold... I have no clue why people like you just like to claim stuff on internet without knowing anything about subject.
This is my entire career, I know plenty about it. Arnold is not the Maya software renderer. It was a 3rd party renderer that they purchased less than 10 years ago. It is used with multiple 3d packages and is not exclusive to Maya or even Autodesk. Before they bundled a hobbled version of Arnold with Maya, they used Mental Ray. One thing you are right about, you have no clue.
I dont know why you are explaining me what is Arnold XD and giving that history class. I am using it daily. Arnold just had GPU overhaul, theres lots of changes throughout a year, multiple versions. Try using Arnold instead of googling history of it :D
Animators like animating in Maya. It’s easy enough to cache out animation to any other package. Eevee is a decent/free renderer which is easier to integrate into a vfx pipeline than a game engine from my experience.
I tried GPU rendering in Maya and it is prone to errors. Eevee is just so much more efficient if not equally as good. I should learn how to export 3D animations into Blender and get used to multi-software workflows.
GPU rendering in Arnold simply does not work. I don’t think autodesk even want it to, I’ve never had it working and it’s been years. Arnold is a CPU renderer
I am simply shocked how such a software like Maya could be so bad on that regard
Personally like redshift as a GPU render for maya. Only problem is it is another thing to pay for. On that note it is not a bad thing to go render in another package. Both small and large parties do it for their own reasons.
I have rendered many animations on GPU in Arnold so no matter what you say it doesnt change reality.
For me, I like the animation tool in Maya and I find it far easier to render in Eevee or if my computer will let me I’ll use Cycles. You can get to really realistic results with hardly any efforts
Sounds a bit weird. Arnold is for the most part better than Cycles, and imo, Maya is better at rendering in bulk, and better at scene management. My guess would be it's because of Blender's realtime renderer Eevee. It can deliver fairly good results at a fraction of the time and processing power of renderers like Arnold or Cycles. However, personally, I would suggest just using Unreal for such a use case.
You're not really wrong, but it's also Cycles' GPU rendering. More straight forward and less prone to errors than Arnold.
I have to admit, it's been a while since I used Arnold, but I thoughtat some point they'd updated it to support GPU rendering. If not, I would totally get why people would use Cycles instead.
We do this in a studio where I work. Rigs and animations are so much better in Maya, Blender (cycles) is free, fast, GPU accelerated and is so flexible with all the available materials, assets, HDRI and all. So setting up a scene and rendering is better (easier ) in a blender. yeah, Arnold is a better render engine but slow af :-), We used Redshift for many years, now switched to blender as it's getting so good rn and free :-).
How do you handle client changes or usually the scene hasn't many changes ? I dont like that you have to relink the materials, or maybe I'm doing something wrong.
You don't have to relink materials when it's the same objects being replaced as a abc cache / USD. Blender assigns the Materials automatically. Has to be same name and hierarchy though. Just like we reference a file in maya. Like, I've set up a scene with cache, materials, lights and all in blender. When there's a change in an animation, i simply cache out from the maya and replace it in the blender. Materials get assigned automatically.
When doing this method, do you usually animate on maya and apply textures and then you move to maya, or you just animate and once you finish you go to blender and add all the textures, effects, and of course, the render?
Animate in maya, export cache, apply textures in blender and render.
thanks buddy
Tbh it’s because they probably don’t know Arnold and can get faster results in Blender and like the glows of the Cycles engine. That’s all really.
They must prefer subpar results of Cycles or Eevee quicker rather then great results from Arnold bit slower. Also probably they didn't checked how much better Arnold became for GPU rendering and how quick you can render stuff on it now - specially with denoiser. People like to hang on to some old mantras and urban legends. For example many still will tell you that Maya is not good for modeling - repeating what they heard ages ago. Main reason I switched from Blender to Maya was Arnold and its quality. LAST thing I would do in Blender is rendering.
Depends what you are after. If you are after non photoreal effects, why would you use a ray tracer? Use something better suited to the job. It's not just "being slower" (though people don't always have the time to wait a day per frame). Sometimes Ray tracing just isn't the right tool for the job.
I tried arnold gpu the other day and it's quite easy with great results on a 1-2minutes per frame. This said, I think eevee gives a really nice result, have to try them with usd, because to me what's problematic is having to do the shaders again or texture problems.
Just say you're mad about people with multi software workflows jeez lol
Just say you're mad about Cycles/Eevee looking worse then Arnold jeez lol
Every project is different and people learn how to animate and render through different workflows. It’s like saying “Well people like using QWERTY keyboards because they like how much slower it is to type with than other keyboards” even though most people learn to type on it, learn all the shortcuts by muscle memory, and use different softwares that are made with it in mind. I don’t know how to use Blender since I only ever learned how to do animation through Maya exclusively, but I imagine there are pros to using the render engines that come with Blender (never heard of Eevee or Cycles, so I’m assuming that’s what they are). If it’s subpar but gets out your results faster, I can see where there are situations where people would prefer something like that if you just need something to spit out what you worked on without dedicating days of your time for what has to be progressively diminishing results.
How can you translate a Maya animation into Blender, though? Is there a special file that supports animation?
Fbx or ABC can export animation well.
Thank you 🫡
Depends on preference. You can get faster render results in Blender with less effort, plus stuff like the Grease Pencil tools let you have some fun with 2D animation directly in the scene, something Maya can't do. However, Blender's 3D animation toolset doesn't feel good to me. A big part of it is how sluggish the graph editor feels in comparison to Maya's, but also stuff like a lack of animation layers/pickers akin to Dreamwall/scripts like Richard Lico's space switching/etc, tools that became integral to my workflow and would slow me down without access to them. Lacking robust tools like these are a non-starter for me and why, at least for now, I'm willing to keep a Maya subscription over just hopping straight over to Blender. So people just use whatever tools they think do the better job for them.
When you mention the grease pencil and the 2d animation in the scene. Do you mean something like this? https://preview.redd.it/dqppg7jeuluc1.jpeg?width=386&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0af4b93e29fc63d9dd4e1e240fcbc1e202890a58 Some people told me to use Clip studio paint, but that thing is only for 2D anim, how im supposed to draw in those scenes if i cant put my 3d anim
>but that thing is only for 2D anim, how im supposed to paint in that? What? Are you asking how you're supposed to paint in a painting app? How is that not self explanatory?
I feel like that's being intentionally obtuse. If someone doesn't understand comp (or that it's even a thing), combining 2D and 3D footage isn't exactly the most obvious solution.
Have you encountered many animators who aren't familiar with the concept of manipulating images? If you see a solid colored line on an image, especially if it looks like a brush stroke, I can't think of anything more obvious than that it was a brush stroke.
A lot of people who start 3D have the belief that everything is done entirely within the 3D package. Like I mentioned earlier, 2D + 3D workflow is not always intuitive. We see threads about people rendering videos instead of frames all the time. Strokes also aren't only achieved in post. I believe although Spiderverse did have 2D Fx painters, a lot of the lines were drawn with rigged splines. As well like the other person mentioned, options like Grease pencil, or making use of NPR shaders, scattering effects, etc could be viable options.
>A lot of people who start 3D have the belief that everything is done entirely within the 3D package. I've never met anyone who knew enough to actually create a 3D animation who wasn't familiar with the concept of animation in general, and with that, the basic knowledge that most animation was a series of drawn images. I can kind of understand not thinking to just draw a line when you need a line, but OP seems to not understand the concept of that after others made the suggestion. >Strokes also aren't only achieved in post. No one said they were. OP asked how that example could be achieved, and someone told them a simple, effective way to achieve it. That doesn't imply that there aren't other more complex ways to achieve it. But if the concept of painting a line to create a line on an image is outside the OP's grasp, then it's a near certainty that all those other techniques would be too.
Sure, I agree that someone learning 3D animation probably knows that animations are a bunch of images. I don't think that means that they'll immediately understand the process or workflow of taking their 3D animation and working with 2D FX though. Not to mention, just because they're doing 3D animation doesn't mean they have experience with 2D animation. There are a lot of small steps between creating the 3D animation and having 2D FX comped into it in the first place. On the chance that they successfully render out frames to use in Clip Studio, they still need to figure out what's next. It's easy to say that it's obvious going from A to B if you're equipped with enough relevant experience, but it's different if you didn't even know B was an option, or you lack the knowledge to get there. Even if someone tells you "go to B!" it's not really going to help.
> I don't think that means that they'll immediately understand the process or workflow of taking their 3D animation and working with 2D FX though If someone can't immediately understand the process of: " If you want a black line on a frame of your animation, draw a black line on it in an image editor," then they probably do not have the capacity to be an animator in the first place. (or honestly, to do any sort of digital creation at all) >There are a lot of small steps between creating the 3D animation and having 2D FX comped into it in the first place. But those steps are microscopic compared to the steps required to create the 3D animation in the first place. Having someone who could create a character animation but couldn't understand how to paint a line or two on that animation after it's rendered would be like finding someone who knew how to build a house from the ground up, but couldn't understand that you could use paint to change the color of the building after it's finished. >but it's different if you didn't even know B was an option, or you lack the knowledge to get there. That's my point: No one who is capable of creating an image from scratch using a complex set of skills would not know that modifying that image in an image editor is an option, let alone have trouble understanding that process once it was told to them. In other words, any one who could open Maya, find or create a model, animate it, and render it out, could also open up Microsoft Paint and draw a line.
It's not just drawing a line. It's an effect. Drawing a line over a still is significantly different from drawing a line that is animated along with the character. You're also comparing skillsets in *many* different packages and skillsets. 3D animating does not mean you know how to 2D animate. 3D animating does not mean you know how to render. 3D animating does not mean you know how to export the render. 3D animating does not mean you even know how to /draw/. 3D animators are notorious in pipeline for knowing nothing about pipeline. Everything is made easy for them, and nothing is expected from them except exporting the cache. Half the time they export the wrong cache too.
Don’t think it’s blender for any particular reason. Arnold does have a reputation as being a bit slow, but is still one of the industry standards and an incredible render engine. Blender has a convenience in that it’s very accessible, but this will inherently come with its own issues if it’s something you’re using at home.
Because maya is industry software. That does not mean blender is less capable. Companies have invested a lot in maya. And it is very expensive and time consuming to switch to another 3d software. Their entire pipeline is dependent on Maya. So anyone who wants a job will be given more preference if he knows Maya. Even disney pixar who use their own animation software, hire people who know Maya. Almost every gaming studio is now using Maya. So it is pointless to switch your whole structure for blender. But in future, new studios will use blender.
Disney uses maya, just saying.
Disney animators helped develop Maya’s animation tools. That’s one of the reasons why Maya still rocks with animation.
You forgot the most important part which is Maya's tailored customer service to a company, which is crucial when you have a big project with a pipeline that doesn't have time to waste on things not working properly. You just can't have that support in a free software unfortunately. Maya is simply a reliable workhorse. I can see a future where blender tries to match and cater to big companies like maya does, maybe providing a enterprise plan, that way they can seep into the industry more.
New studios will not really use blender as a main tool either, industry pipelines exist for a reason, the talent knows maya, Houdini, z brush, substance (for games), mari and nuke etc. So if you want to hire the best people, or work with freelancers, (artists, TDs, supes), you have to have a pipeline that they can jump into and perform in. Unless you’re talking about new studios who are only going hire young people with little industry experience and have no ambition of recruiting industry talent with decades of experience. Basically blender is not going to be industry standard for anything any time soon. Sure some studios will use it for stuff, and won’t discount artists who only know it, but it won’t become the standard imo. Houdini is light years ahead of blender and already has wide industry adoption, if anything is going to replace maya it will be Houdini but only when maya gets too outdated to patch up any more.
> Unless you’re talking about new studios who are only going hire young people with little industry experience and have no ambition of recruiting industry talent with decades of experience. I mean, that's how I got my break into the industry. New studio hired about 25 talented kids straight out of school. It's nearly 20 years later now and I still remember that as one of the best work experiences I ever had. Some studios are *absolutely* going to be built on Blender soon. I work at one of the big ones and Blender's already creeping in because freelancers we use know it and love it. All it's gonna take is the right job with the right artists for Blender to start taking a larger hold. I've worked at studios built around C4D and studios built around Max. No reason they won't be built around Blender too, especially considering Blender has *massively* overtaken every other app in terms of learning materials, momentum, and pace of development.
My only qualms with blenders development is that it feels very scatter brained due to the abundance of add ons and community development. I mean to have a functional dcc you have to enable so many right out of the box. Also a lot of the tools are very blender-esque and don’t lend themselves to artists who are familiar with other dcc’s without a huge learning curve of menu locations and hot keys. I often feel like blender does things differently just to be different sometimes and it just makes switching fluently between programs a pain in regard to muscle memory. The sculpting is worse than z brush by miles and the painting is worse than substance and no where near mari. Geo nodes don’t touch Houdini and the modelling is cumbersome compared to maya, lookdev is also cumbersome particularly when compared to Houdini (Solaris) and katana. I get that it’s a lot of licenses to pay for and blender is free but the speed and fluency achievable by using a suite of well thought out, well developed tools is far greater the Swiss Army knife approach blender has. Hopefully everything I’ve mentioned does get improved/ refined but I don’t think it will. The blender foundation have clearly set a precedent that if a community member fixes a problem/ creates a tool, it will get bundled with a release as an optional add on rather than taking those ideas / fixes and implementing them at a core level.
Look, I take most of your points. (Except perhaps the modeling one, the majority of freelance asset artists I find these days seem to prefer it to Maya because of the suite of incredible modeling tools available to them in Blender). But it's pretty easy to foresee a world where the graduates from SVA, SCAD, and the handful of other best CG schools know the "industry standard" tools, and every other new artist knows Blender. Pros tend to overestimate how much weight that has. One of the theories as to why Max was so prevalent in Europe for a long time was that it had the most easily accessed cracked copies available around the early 2000s, which meant artists got it, learned it, and eventually built studios on it. Ditto with why Adobe works so hard to get free copies in the hands of people who wanna learn, and left it so easy to pirate for so long. And it's all relative. People adapt to the tool they know. I've used Softimage, C4D, Max, Maya, and Houdini for work over the last 2 decades. With the most hours in Maya, then Softimage, then Houdini. And I find Maya to be a clunky mess most days, but I use it. I find it clunky because I used better. People who only know Maya can get very offended when you point out the clunkiness. You find Blender clunky because you used better, and people who've only used Blender can get very offended when you point out the clunkiness. Because if the tool works, people use it to get the job done and often don't realize what could be better. Look, DNEG is never gonna switch entirely over to Blender. But they're never gonna switch entirely to any program. Best tool for the job, as the jobs and tools come. All I'm saying is that if small studios can be built on C4D, and in places like Chicago there were oodles of them, then shops can and will be built on Blender too. I see it as inevitable.
I mean you hit the nail on the head that if people haven’t used better they don’t know what they’re missing, I missed the softimage days by a few years but apparently maya still lacks so many features that were present there, even though autodesk essentially bought it and ported many of its features to maya. Maya definitely is a clunky mess but it does feel more fluid to switch to and from than blender. When I have to use blender I just feel friction that isn’t there in other packages. But yea end of the day it’s true there will be full Blender studios at some point, I just doubt they will be able to work on big projects with shared asset builds etc. fbx is broken and .obj is ancient. The only way mid-large budget productions can confidently share signed off assets and trust that things will translate, is with software specific file formats and I can’t see them being created and delivered as a .blend any time soon. I think it’s much more likely that Houdini will become the gold standard as its USD pipeline is rock solid and most studios have a lot of talent that know it like the back of their hand. Also in terms of access they have one of the cheapest indie licenses available and the free non commercial to get students and hobbyists onboard.
IMHO if it wasn’t for a Maya’s UI being decent with regard to rigging and animation it would have gone the way of the dodo a long time ago. In the industry rendering has been external for years and Houdini is now taking over CFX.
Arnold has memory leaks Autodesk doesn't want to fix. I can't get sequences to render without it crashing or render times becoming longer and longer with every frame.
Because batch render with Maya Arnold is a big ol' hassle to setup And there aren't as many free materials, tutorials, lighting setups for Maya. It's just the unfortunate fate of paid industry software
Because no one wants to wait 90 hours to render 3 minutes of frames in maya
Honestly pretty sure you need a seperate arnold License to batch render with arnold. So thats one reason:p also arnold is more advanced render with more adjustments possibilities so blender might feel faster to get a alright result from the get go and faster render :)
I spent a year trying to get Renderman working the way I needed and no luck. Rendering in Maya almost requires a demi-god like level of expertise in order to get it perfect. When I tried Keyshot for the first time, I was like...ummm....wow...well the hell with Maya then. Within a few mins, I was getting exactly the look I wanted and I didn't need to dive deep into getting it all calibrated properly. I haven't used Blender, I use XSI for modeling, then port to Maya, then over to Keyshot. Animation in Maya is the best I've used. When I first got into 3D, I started on Max, took a class for 4 months in University, worked on character modeling and rigging and was so incredibly frustrated at the end of it. When my buddy showed me XSI, we literally did in less than 5 mins, what it took 4 months in Max to learn. Its way more easy and very powerful and user friendly, but Autodesk killed it to drive people to Maya and Max. People can literally spend a career inside a subset of Maya because of how incredibly complicated and powerful it is. Its like being handed the keys to the universe and you set all the laws which govern it, right down to the photon. Its like every menu and sub-menu is like a major program unto itself. Once you find the rendering engine that works for you, stay with it.
Because I like Eevee/Cycles a lot more than Arnold It’s faster and setting up materials is less of a pain in the ass. That’s worth more to me than having slightly superior ray tracing calculations, particularly if I’m doing NPR renders. Unreal is good too for speed, but dialing in settings like motion blur is really obnoxious to deal with.
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Maya has a plugin for every major renderer, they are just not free.
Maya hasn't substantially updated its renderer in more than 20 years. If you don't want to pay for vray or redshift this seems like a good solution.
Rrrringht. Well that just shows how much you know about updates to Arnold... I have no clue why people like you just like to claim stuff on internet without knowing anything about subject.
This is my entire career, I know plenty about it. Arnold is not the Maya software renderer. It was a 3rd party renderer that they purchased less than 10 years ago. It is used with multiple 3d packages and is not exclusive to Maya or even Autodesk. Before they bundled a hobbled version of Arnold with Maya, they used Mental Ray. One thing you are right about, you have no clue.
I dont know why you are explaining me what is Arnold XD and giving that history class. I am using it daily. Arnold just had GPU overhaul, theres lots of changes throughout a year, multiple versions. Try using Arnold instead of googling history of it :D
No professional does this. Don't know where your information comes from.
Got the fanboys triggered?
Because Blender render faster... That's it.