Maya 2015 is out

And with a pretty strong line up of features!


http://area.autodesk.com/maya2015

One that stands out for me is ShaderFX which has made it’s way to the main release. ShaderFX is absolutely kicking blender’s node based real time shader authoring capabilities in the arse.

Not only have they caught up with the node editor in general, they have massively improved the real time viewport. They keep improving it.

The open subdiv implementation has seen some improvement in maya- becoming the standard smooth operator- using the gpu.
This gives Maya a massive performance boost during animation playback.

There is better instancing

A much better new smooth binding method using voxels

And finally the new UV unwrapping algorithm is catching up with blender’s.

What is your favorite new feature in Maya 2015? :o

I guess it really is time for Ton and co. to just abandon the idea of attracting professionals and just make a Blender for Blender users (as I said in the old thread of mine wondering if Blender has done diddly squat to attract more professionals over the last 12 years), especially when considering that Autodesk may now be making a concerted effort to listen to their customers. One of the main reasons why FOSS has even become relevant among professionals was due to the perceived incompetence of commercial companies in terms of product development (look at Firefox for example, their userbase is pretty much hitting the rocks now since Google entered the browser maketr).

Blender’s reputation among professionals as a maker of bad movies and the possibility that some see Ton as a failed CEO (NaN) doesn’t help either. I’m split on whether or not I want to see Blender become a major player in the professional circuits because that might mean chucking the BGE.

Now the Max users on the other hand might disagree, but Autodesk has a lot of tools at their disposal to help them migrate to Maya.

I think that Ton has done an incredible job with the amount of resources he has. We must remember that autodesk has much more money and resources.
Now that they have retired softimage, the developer team will probably focus even more manpower into maya.

So it looks like they are extremely competitive and not stupid at all.

Maya has always been a great program, but it also costs more than blender.
i like free, so blender for me.

I do agree that Blender has done fine, especially when you consider that one Maya release is done in the space of at least three Blender releases (combine the release logs of three 2.6x releases and it will not look very small compared to the Maya logs).

But the sudden surge in Maya development seems to indicate that Autodesk is serious about keeping their marketshare and Blender will simply not be able to attract a lot of people from Maya unless it can provide a fairly even match in functionality. One might see it as plausible that Blender can become a major part of the pipeline of small studios, but anyone who thinks it will ever play a major role in sequels to franchises such as Avatar and Iron Man are likely delusional (bar a massive breakdown of innovation all across the CG market or a global revolution that breaks down the modern monetary system).

Even XSI was not able to cement a major role in the movie industry despite its advanced technologies, it would be even more difficult for Blender to do so (even if project Gooseberry is successful).

I really wish I didn’t hate working in Maya so much, because 2015 admittedly has some AWESOME new features. I can’t believe you made this post without either of the BiFrost example vids!

Now I’m depressed… Still, modelling in Blender is faster. And it’s free. And it has a nice community.
BTW, WTF is going on with Blender and OpenSubDiv? Wasn’t there a project to implement it?
Anyway, don’t lose courage people, we have project Gooseberry! (That was kind of ironic…)

Last I heard, OpenSubDiv is not on the fast track to implementation in Blender because it doesn’t yet have support for subsurfed UV’s and non-manifold meshes (the last one especially being a showstopper).

So in essence, right now you would only be able to use it if the mesh is a solid volume (and not on something that usually makes the use of planes such as terrain).

Not bad, but we’ve been there before. Having used Maya for many years I’ve learned from their marketing strategy: The new flashy features always look amazing, but the tools that you use every day stay pretty much untouched. Try using the split polygon tool in the middle of a face… :wink:

Blender holds up pretty well compared to other commercial tools, and it surpasses them in many areas. It’s by no means an inferior product. Just a different one with its own particular workflows.

I believe in blender…

The only thing that blender cannot to add is the OpenSubdiv for the non-manifold meshes. The rest of things could be improved in future tools.

The problem with blender now is that they have really few developers and they are adding a lot of things (remember the new features of the last two years and compare with the new tools of maya in the last 2 years) from zero, meanwhile autodesk are adding technologies from third parties or existing technologies. Maybe now is difficult to compare some system of both programs, but in two or three years, when blender will have all the base system really polished we only will see new tools like we see in some updates of autodesk.

For example… cycles, two years ago was a experimental project, now is a really good render engine, in one year will be perfect ¿In two years? maybe a completed standalone version with plugins for maya, modo or max… and when we will have this, we will see a lot of resources for cycles.

Or, depending on where Autodesk goes, Blender goes back to the bottom of the ecosystem of its type like every other fully-fledged FOSS program after it looks like it’s getting somewhere.

Do you think Krita for example would be even close to having the level of use it has today if Adobe didn’t lower the development rate of Photoshop and force everyone onto the cloud?

Now if I start hearing professionals start saying that they’d rather stay in the same room as Justin Bieber than use Blender, then you know that trying to attract that crowd is now a lost cause (hopefully that won’t be the case). I do hope that Ton has a plan that involves shelving the Gooseberry project for another year if the funds don’t get there.

yeah new features looks really interesting. Problem is, I work with maya since some month at the new studio, and many of the basic functions are broken, buggy, and do not work. I mean yeah, what I see it is really cool, but then I would like the more important features to work well, and often this is not the case. Moreover I hate maya workflow. I am used to blender, that’s true, but I don’t like to work in maya… This do not mean maya is a total crap, but do not think that in the studios they use maya out of the box. They heavily change it with in house tools. Even at my small studio we have tons of in house tools.

I wounder what would happen if a big studio would take blender and develop in house tools for it… (just saying… don’t think is gonna happen soon!)

By the way, project gooseberry… yes. I have (had? no still have) a lot of faith in the project, but the blender community is a huge disappointment. Everyone crying for features on a 200000 users forum and just 500 people are backing up the project. A lot of people here do not deserve blender.

thats right DcVertice and one other thing the ui appearance icon are inviting too explore.

having the same set features doesn’t mean the same fluid integration between them, max had a NLE but with a very bad UI, maya is good but interface is not as good as blender, it’s actually depressing working in it, and as been said many times blender is FREE maya isn’t or the blug-ins it uses or …

I don’t think many studios use Maya as-is out of the box. A lot of them write their own shaders and their own tools. professionals pick Maya less because of the built in features and more because it’s an already established part of their pipeline and many of their in house tools already work with it. That kind of entrenchment is pretty hard to fight. so yes, for now, blender can’t get bigger studios to switch over unless it can offer a really compelling enough reason.

Maybe if the movie funding falls short, the people who contributed would allow the money to be used for more development. Make the stuff already in blender work better. Improving the viewport performance would really help . Sculpting needs some solid development time. Cycles still has missing features. some solid funding for developers would really help inch blender up over the rest.

Ton is Blender
Blender is Ton
Ton dont change mentality ?
So Blender… well…

Maya actually has one of the best viewports in the industry right now, you can pop in custom shaders or just enjoy direct x in viewport 2.0. It can handle large scenes with ease. That alongside its snapping approach are probably the two things I miss most after moving away from Maya.

also extended watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRVwjgBAuR8

I think anyone can change their mentality if you give them a good reason to.

Part of Ton’s strength is that he has been keeping his ears open to the community, he has been following trends and also keeping close attention to competition. So his mentality is adaptive and it does change over the years.
Somebody has to steer the ship and quite frankly I can not think of a better man to do it. :stuck_out_tongue:

On the viewport stuff> maya uses OPENGL as well as directx. So the viewport can do all that awesome stuff on both linux and mac. Blender uses glsl and could maybe do this as well in the future and if a prodigy shader developer was part of the team? I’ve been yapping about it for almost a year now and every time I bring it up some of the older users tell me why it’s impossible or not really useful.
In conclusion Blender has performance issues to iron out before it can even start to think of catching up on the real time rendering front. Developers have their hands full as it is and they dont seem to like this topic very much :smiley:

In the end it is important to think about where blender is used in the most? Is it game development - independent or AAA? Is it VFX or animation? What would be the most beneficial thing for blender users at the moment? What would attract new users?

It’s about ressources.
Compare how much money Autodesk has to attract and hire full time developers and engineers or buy technology from other source of productions and how much money the Blender Foundation has to do the same.

All in all if you compare that gigantic difference in ressource, i would say that the Blender Foundation under the lead of Ton is doing really amazingly for the few ressources they have.