In the light of recent events (freezing development of FBX exporter) I am wondering about the following questions.
What would I lose by switching from Blender to Maya indie ?
I assume modeling/sculpting/UV mapping can be done in Blender. However animation would have to be done in Maya. What would be the biggest disadvantages of going from Blender animation to Maya animation ?
Thanks.
P.S. Let’s not start flame wars here. This is a very relevant question as FBX is de facto standard in the industry (game dev specifically), regardless of how ugly the format is.
I use both Blender and Maya on a daily basis and find the two compliment each other fairly well. If you plan on using a mixed pipeline then I wouldn’t say your “losing” anything, but depending on what you want to do it can complicate thing. The biggest red flag for you would be rendering. Right now MayaLT is meant for use in indie game dev and doesn’t support offline rendering… So no Maya software, MentalRay, etc.
From a modeling & workflow perspective I like Blender. I feel I can do general modeling task faster in it. Sculpting in Maya is cumbersome, for now. But Autodes’k put out a tech demo over the Summer and it was pretty impressive. So more of Mudboxes tools may be heading to Maya. Honestly though I use Zbrush for 90% of my sculpting, some simple stuff in Blender. I do like Blenders Dynamesh over Zbrush’s though. But modeling Blender 100% for me. Losing modifiers is a deal breaker for me.
UV work is a mixed bag. Blender has nice unwrapping and the average UV islands works well. Maya has solid unwrapping but the normalize UV shells never seems to work… Or at least I’ve never had much success in getting it or anything in Maya to preform like Blender. The downside in Blenders UV workflow is that it only allows you yo modify UV’s on a single object at a time. It can display multiple object though. Where as with Maya I can modify UV’s across multiple objects at the same time. Autodesk also added some nice UV tools in 2016 that make using it for UV work quite nice.
Animation and rigging is where Maya shines imo. Although rigging in Maya isn’t the simplest thing in the world… And some of the simplicity Blender offers isn’t reproduced in Maya. So you may be searching for scripts for custom constraints. Right now only MEL scripts work in MayaLT. So if you find a constraint or rigging tool written in Python for Maya it will not run. On the upside you have Mays’s TRAX editor… Which is much like Blenders NLA setup. You can also use HumanIK which is great for targeting and transferring motion capture. Although I wouldn’t suggest the HumanIK rig for heavy lifting character animation work. When it comes to Maya .fbx exporter, Autodesk keeps all the past profiles. So in the advanced options you can pick which version you’d like to use. The 2016 standard breaks in Substance Painter, but simply switch it to 2014/15 profile and no issues. So having these options helps out as the format moves forward. Support goes pretty far back too.
The biggest issue here is part of you project is locked into a software package that’s now subscription only. At least you can stop paying when you don’t need Maya but its a nice a nice chunk of change when you do. Before pulling the trigger consider Luxology Modo indie offering, along with Sidefx Houdini… Although I have no experience with either so can’t comment on them.
So that’s a broad brush stoke. Hoped it helped. If you have a specific question or topic fire away. Curious, aside from the .fbx freeze are there other issues that are nudging you along to make the jump to Maya, or any other program?
Probably not much. I believe it still has a polygon limit on export (25,000 iirc), and it doesn’t have much sim stuff if you use that. It seems to have enough to get the job done though.
Maya LT does not have the component editor so if you want to have precision control over individual vertices like changing weights while skinning, you will be frustrated that it is so difficult to do a task that is trivial in Blender.
I’ll give a +1 for Modo Indie. The limitations are barely noticeable for my uses.
It sounds like Modo’s export limit may be a problem for you though, and the animation tools may not be up to the same standard as Maya. I have played with Modo’s animation tools briefly and I prefer them over Blender, but I think this is mainly a layout thing. I don’t animate professionally so it would be an unfair for me to make an accurate judgement.
If you take a look at this page from autodesk site comparing Maya and Maya LT to make a decision, you can have an idea of what you will loose.
For 3D Animation and Animation Rigging and Deformation, it seems that Maya LT does not have :
_Animation layers, TRAX non linear animation editor -> no NLA editor.
_Scale Constraints
_Geometry Constraints, Normal Constraints -> I am not sure. But from what I read on Maya’s online manual, it looks like Blender’s Shrinkwrap constraint or set-up with Shrinkwrap modifier.
_Tangent Constraints -> it looks like Follow Curve option of follow path constraint.
_Delta Mush Deformer -> Corrective Smooth modifier
_Wrap Deformer -> Mesh Deform Modifier
_Sculpt Deformer -> Cast modifier
_Soft Modification Defromer -> Hook modifier with falloff.
_Wrinkle Deformer -> I am not sure but it loooks like what can be done with Laplacian Deform.
Substitue Geometry Tool or Muscle System does not have equivalent in Blender if you ignore available addons that are not included in official release.
Added in MAYALT 2016 : _Spline IK, Cluster Deformer (Hook modifier without falloff)
At one point I think there were limitations to scripting with Maya LT. I’ve not seen if they have since included that into the LT branch.
It looks very tempting on one level, but there are loads of restrictions and so forth. Make sure you are very sure about what you will use it for and make sure the LT version will do what you want it to.
On that note, you can sign up for a month or two and try it out. If it dosen’t work out, then you’ve only lost a month or two of subscription!
Just read the link that Richard Marklew posted. “Nothing” isn’t really accurate, as Bastien Montagne basically states that he dosen’t like FBX, so he dosen’t want to support it any more. This is a very typically Blender suggestion. FBX is used as a standard exchange format by every other piece of soft out there. FBX is the standard import for both Unreal and Unity. Blender can’t really declare that it isn’t going to support FBX without also saying that it is cutting itself off from mainstream game production, just for a start.
If they stop working on it, and it breaks the next time they update Blender, then all the people trying to make a living with Blender suddenly get their pipeline clipped.
For game artists, it’s like not having a working Obj exporter. It’s how all the game engines import assets. If Blender can’t export to a working FBX file, game dev with Blender is over.
Well, with Blender 2.8 API changes, FBX exporter might no longer work. With Autodesk updating version, something can become broken.
It’s always an option to stick with 2.77x when it comes out, but if Autodesk breaks FBX again, you will be totally screwed.
So Maya LT doesn’t allow for plugins at all (native code, MEL or Python) ?
As for Blender, I don’t really do any scripting. Anything that I had to find / ask to make was due to either obscurity of the export formats I use or because Blender simply is not bothered to have certain tools that should be standard (like invert vertex colors option as one of the recent examples).
Money-wise I don’t see how I can lose money. I didn’t pay for Blender (although I did pay for some add-ons I needed). If I purchase Maya LT, that would be an investment I can write off at the end of the year.
I am mostly concerned about animation/skinning/rigging tools. If Maya LT can import OBJ, then I can still do all modeling/sculpting/texturing in Blender and then bring it into Maya LT for animation / export.
And since I’d be doing it for mobile VR, I don’t think I will ever reach poly limit (even for my current PC project I don’t really have any rigged models that exceed 10k tris)
For the scripting, MayaLT supports MEL scripts, which there are a ton of. But with them adding support for python more TA are starting to use that as well… Which is not supported in LT yet.
The component editor would be nice to have, but Mayas weight painting brush tool set offers a fair amount of control. Imo more so than Blenders. Grab the trail version and give it a go.
As it is skinning isn’t a pleasant task 
(even for my current PC project I don’t really have any rigged models that exceed 10k tris)