Maya lt 2016

Maya LT 2016 sounds pretty cool and seems to have some really cool tools. Also note the UI in the video. Looks a little Blenderish, lol.

I’m telling you Blender is going to miss the boat on the indie market. Autodesk is taking this segment really seriously. I mean they are announcing new Maya features in LT before they announced Maya 2016 proper.

Nice! So much good news in the industry today! Cool that they have some sculpting tools in there, Means it will be coming to Maya as well.

The truth to be told though, if Autodesk actually started putting much of their resources toward the development of their applications, then Blender doesn’t have a chance in heck to match it.

Why, Blender development in general might be able to make use of a few hundred thousand dollars a year at most (including cloud subscriptions), compare that to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Autodesk has at their disposal and their ability to have hundreds of developers working on their applications.

It all comes down to money, and Autodesk will always have a massive advantage in this department (Blender’s indeed been adding numerous features for game developers but Autodesk can add 12 times that if they wanted). The best that the BF can do if this happens is at least make a high quality solution for free that people can use if they want and save money in the process (but making it a major force in games or any 3D-related market in general? Not likely unless we find that Ton is actually a magician).

FOSS is nice, but unless you’re an idealist, you’ll find that it will almost be impossible for any application in that segment to surpass its commercial counterpart once you do the math on the availability of resources. (the only way really is if the commercial vendor becomes complacent due to its clout in the respective market and starts minimizing resources for R&D).

So, on the question of Blender missing the boat, the unfortunate truth is that Blender might end up missing the boat even if it tries. Such is the reality of the FOSS situation where resources are limited and you can’t do all that you want at once.

That’s true but the biggest draw of Blender in that area is price and the fact that it’s unlimited. With some more game content creation tools, better exporter, etc. Blender could be a solid contender against Maya LT. Indie devs who don;t want to be limited and don;t want to pay a subscription fee every year would be looking for something powerful yet cost effective. Blender has all the tools there, it just needs focus (I’ve said this plenty of times before).

That being said I’m really considering getting Maya LT because I need something that does the job now, and I can’t wait for Blender to get in the game.

The priority would have to be weighted with the dozens of other major todo items that is needed for Blender before we say that every part of it is now worthy of being called a truly 21st century application (toolsets, refactors, architectural changes, usability improvements, the mythical Blender 3.0 core rewrite ect…).

Unless the BF can find a way to double the size of the core team, it may take quite a few more years yet.

dictators always fall
sometimes free is more expensive, at least when you have work need to be done, but can’t …

800$ is not exactly indie budget friendly. :slight_smile:
Also the LT version is still only for windows.

Bringing the mudbox sculpting brushes to Maya is one hell of a move though! I wonder if it also gets sculpting layers and the other extras.
Autodesk is getting serious about competition lately.

Depending on what you qualify as indie. A lot of indies do have $800 in the budget, if that will help them making their game faster, easier. $800 will be recouped in no time.

However, isn’t Maya LT full of limitations?

Looks like a good release for Maya LT users, but I didn’t really see anything in the promo that’d make me want to switch to it.

Out of curiosity, does Maya LT have rendering capabilities at all? Say you wanted to make a game with prerendered backgrounds; would that be possible with Maya LT?

Blender just needs some love with Viewport :slight_smile:

Nope. They have removed all and any rendering capabilities in LT.

My two cents: The upgrades to ShaderFX look great. Autodesk is at least keeping up with the times. The sculpting is a nice addition too (does this mean that Autodesk will kill off Mudbox next? lol)

I m not seeing anything that may make me do the switch, i got them all in blender for free, hmm… may be like button for most wanted feature that every blender user would like, isn’t it :wink: ?

You know, I am starting to discern a pattern, Ace Dragon: your cup tends to be half empty, doesn’t it? This is not meant as criticism, merely a general observation after reading many of your posts.

Maya is so buggy it’s not even funny (Unsure if it’s same for LT). I’ve encountered way more bugs from it than Blender. But Maya’s animation and rigging is still better than Blenders from what I’ve heard (No exp in trying to rig stuff in Blender, only modelling so far). I also find Maya’s modelling tools to be really slow in comparison to Blender or Modo.

I still think Blender has a good future ahead of itself, especially with all of the recent updates happening to it. It has its flaws but so does Maya, Max and Modo. It’s not so black and white.

Autodesk may have more money at its disposal but I have not been all that hugely impressed with Maya since day 1 sadly. I plan on learning how to rig in Blender just so I can stop using Maya when it comes to personal work, that’s how much I am displeased with all of the bugs in it.

Although I do admit that Maya has some really killer plugins going for it, and if you look at Blender in that regard then yes Maya completely wipes the floor with Blender sadly. - Hell, Maya comes with Paint FX which is a neat little plant generator, I can only wish that the IvyGen plugin will ever be updated in Blender…

On animation, this is something that Blender can’t even think of matching until the Depsgraph Refactor is committed. Maya has long had a better architecture for advanced animation techniques in general, something that Blender will soon have, but not for 2.73.

Hopefully, we’ll see the floodgates open for massive animation improvements much like what has already happened for modeling when Bmesh came in. The development branch for it already allows quite a number of rigging techniques that can’t be done in Master.

What you also need to realise is that Autodesks entertainment programs, are probably about 1/10th of their main business. Their main business is AutoCAD / Navisworks / Inventor and to some extent Revit.

Bleh, that isn’t even worth bothering with then.

I am not that deep yet into Blender, nor I am in Maya, but I am deep into 3D since 2.5 decades…

All I can say is that its quite unlikely that Autodesk is putting millions of dollars and hundrets of developers on a product development, just to get rid of the Blender open source competitor, because that CAN NOT WORK.

Here is why:

If they make the best tool ever and need to charge for it, they will always leave out the users who do not want to pay something. At some point their might not earn enough money to justify the development anymore. At that point they could make it open source themselves. But all of that will never ever remove Blender from existing nor improving nor being used. Maybe the size of the user base and dev team might vary, but its impossible to compete business wise against freeware.

See what happened to Softimage. Gone. They still have Maya and Max. Which one will be killed next to optimize profits?

And none of those 3D apps ever had hundrets of developers. Maybe dozens, not more. Such tools aren’t usually written by hundrets of developers and it would be too costly to do so. Often small teams are way more productive, while bigger teams slow down by ongoing adjustment within the whole process. Ever heard of agile software development?

IMHO Blender has a brilliant approach.

Best
Axel

The problem for commercial companies is that everyone who is using Blender is not their (potential) customer. That’s why they have desperate plans to release these LT versions and also try monthly fee to squeeze out more money from their products. 3D programs are tied to past in a way that they were aimed for professionals and that’s why they cost so much that average people have no interest to pay that much. They can’t lower the price, that would be outrage for old customers. That’s why they end up with LT versions, but it must be painful to realize that if the price would be reachable for so called average people some of those 3D programs would sell like bread. The number of potential customers in hobbyists is huge I believe and I’m surprised some commercial developers haven’t figured it out to provide cheaper, better reachable programs. I guess they underestimate the need for such programs or they simply continue seeing only professional 3D artists as customers.

Wise words