So there’s only subscriptions on buying Maya or 3DS Max or are there unlimited purchases? If it’s the first thing, then boy, is Autodesk greedy af.
You can get it free with a student licence I believe but as I’ve never been a student I don’t know how you’d go about it.
But yeah far to expensive for a indie/hobbyist to buy a single licence. There’s always blender which is free. Or more nefarious means…
But is there a single licence that you own forever? Or they only offer 1-3 years of owning?
Ah right I’m with you. I believe it only lasts a limited time. I’m not sure if you can carry on using it after the licence expires and just not receive updates. Been a while since I had to deal with Autodesk I’m afraid.
Yeah, Autodesk has moved to time limited licensing completely now, something I do disagree with, especially with the prices they have (almost monopoly kinda does that) for some of the programs, especially 3DS Max. Mudbox is much more reasonable in price.
You might want to look at other alternatives such as Blender or Modo.
In February Autodesk switched to a subscription license only for most of their software, you can no longer buy a perpetual license of 3ds Max or Maya. And yes, the subscription prices are insane.
I’m surprised how nobody boycotted their anti-costumer policies. You pay thousands of $ and you don’t even own the software. And after the limited period, you lose access to it. Even Gabe isn’t that greedy.
A lot of people have considered moving to other programs, the issue is if your studio has been using the software for a long time it’s difficult to switch. 3ds Max users have been wanting to switch for a while since they’ve been doing pretty poor with new releases where they have very few new features.
I do believe you can still buy the Maya Entertainment Creation Suite Standard or the Entertainment Creation Suite Ultimate (with 3ds Max as well) as licenses and not subscriptions. But those are ridiculously expensive (between 8-10k € in the EU shop), which puts them way out of reach for just about everyone.
The subscription only payment method has put me off both Adobe and Autodesk products. I’m still looking for a replacement for Maya though, because it is very difficult swapping from something you’ve used for years to something completely new. Probably going to see if I can get used to either Modo or Blender.
Blender is kind of sad if you’re used to Maya. A lot of Maya’s workflow is simply not present in Blender, making for some very awkward transitions. For instance, UV’s… if you thought making UV’s in Maya was bad, oh ho, just wait until you attempt making them in Blender! Seam marking is a great UV technique for organic objects, but not hard surfaces. Your options are seriously limited. Something else that’s annoying, instead of just selecting which edges you want to soften or harden, you must soften or harden the entire object in Blender, which makes no sense at all whatsoever. If you want to bevel an edge, you can’t just select an edge and bevel it, you have to add a modifier to the whole object. There are parameters, but… see the problem? You can do anything in Blender as long as you do it everywhere on the model and you’re perfectly OK with sloppy work. If you do use Blender the Maya interface option is nice, but if I recall, you lose the ability to scale all 3 axes of the object at the same time. It will take time to adjust.
You can’t use Blender to retopo, you can’t use Blender for APEX anything, you can try to use Blender for hard surface, but even for characters it’s a pain. Maya had Epic’s A.R.T, Blender has nothing. I think if you were desperate, you can use a separate tool by NVIDIA to make cloth, but I’m not sure how robust it is. I just know I did it once before.
I just wish Autodesk didn’t do what freaking Adobe did. They kind of just stabbed everyone who ever loved them in the back. I bet even studios are scrambling to find the last hard copies of these programs so they have something solid to work with. Subscription for software is a joke, glad I got CS6 before they went to the cloud. I wish I was able to purchase Maya…
What about Modo? Is it great?
Its great, but the workflow is very unusual from a Max perspective.
In max you have your modifiers and each does one specialized thing.
Im modo you work more with basic functionality and create your own modeling tools from that.
Also viewport navigation is a bit different (workplane).
Im not sure about the FBX export/import workflow though…
I will keep hanging on my 3DSMax 2013 for quite a while…
Lucky for you to have a Max before this subscription ********. Btw, how much did you pay for it?
Some more thoughts:
Wow. I just looked at the subsciption plans for Max. As I dont intend to get a new version, i never bothered checking…
That is really obscene. Almost 200 Euro per month for the simplest license without any support… (3 month for 595 EUR)
I guess Tim Sweeny is right with what he recentlz said about things going toward closed systems with huge paywalls or other hoops to jump through.
It seems the industry dont want people to use their computers to create, but just to consume.
Ironically, they cut off the indie developers and hobyists as well from which the industry used to recruit themself…
I mean, even some studios couldnt afford 1500 Euro per seat and year…
Clearly Autodesk only wants customers like ILM, Weta, etc. Peter and George sure have the money
What? UV mapping in Blender is good enough that some people use it for that only. I don’t see why seams aren’t good for hard surface UVs. Anyway, unwrapping isn’t the only option, you could probably get away with view projection for some hard surface models.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, you don’t need to use bevel modifiers to bevel something, you just select something and… bevel it. You can do operations on part of the mesh, I mean, that’s pretty obvious, you don’t really do stuff to a whole object at once (maybe scaling I guess). Blender does what it tell you to do so if you work sloppily you’ll get a sloppy result, but it’s pretty easy to get precise results. It’s probably harder to do something sloppy. Also even for Maya users I would recommend with sticking with the default keymap and then changing the keys yourself.
You can use Blender for retopo, there are a bunch of different addons (free) for that, and you can do APEX in the Nvidia clothing tool, as long as it’s one bone, there’s a bug with several bones (Apex cloth, 1 bone works but 2+ doesn't - World Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums).
Anyway, to say something on topic, yes, 3d suites are expensive. But Blender is free so you can at least try it out and ask on the blender artists forum or the Blender stackexchange if you get stuck. 
If you need something specific, like a perfect projection for lightmap UVs, Blender is really not useful for that. But if you’re just putting textures on a character and the exact dimensions and projection doesn’t matter, marking seams is actually better than planar projections. Perhaps there is a way to apply scaling to selected UVs, but I still have no clue how to use Blender for something like this.
EDIT: just as I am typing this, I am having difficulty UV mapping a plane. facepalm
You can do specific UVs for lightmaps in Blender if you want to, I’m not sure what you mean. Although if you’ve got decent UVs for the texture already the automatic lightmap thing in UE4 is probably good enough. For scaling you can just select the vertices and scale them (and translate and rotate…). Or average island scale if that’s what you want.
Autodesk have blinded themselves with the greed of big studio licences.
But they forgot that almost all game devs start out as Game modders /hobbyists and indie developers and they will use industry standard tools that are accessible to them, and if they ever do well and form a studio, which tools are they going to continue using , That right the same one’s that they feel comfortable with that they have been using to get them to that point.
But with this insane and anti consumer subscription model they are putting autodesk products far out of the reach of all the new talent at the foundation level.
Inevitably its going to feed into a loop of big studios suddenly Struggling to find people with autodesk skills and they will have to re-evaluate changing to other products in the future to have access to more Talent.
Seems Autodesk has forgotten that industry standard means what tools most studios use!.
They have basically cut of there own blood supply and as most indie devs and new talent grow they wont be continuing to use Autodesk products because they could never begin to.
I heard Z brush is a very nice program these days.
The way I see it, games in the future will com mainly from “Im-going-to-a-games-academy” kind of people who get a free version through their institute, (but pay through the nose for tuition fees).
The days where people could do this really as a hobby are over Im afraid.
When the day comes that my Max stops working, Im probably out of game design for good. It will have become a hobby that I simply cannot afford, like powerboat racing or collecting Ferraris…
Yeah, it is, but not really usefull for hard surface modeling. Its a sculpting software which favors the organic designs…
For me, blender is not an option. I find the Ui really counterintuitive and the whole thing looks a bit “just-patched-together”.
Im working with Max since the mid 90s. And you dont teach an old dog new tricks 
I only need 3DSMAX for short durations, using a subscription which runs a year just doesnt cut it for me. Seems even cheaper to hire someone for basic work then doing stuff occasionally. Also i would just need a slimmed down version, to separate meshes, rename bones, mostly.