Maya LT is not that expensive;
I also have also felt like, Blender is very unproductive. I mean… Example, I used to use an old external application called Unfold3D to do UV mapping fast, because ALL major toolsets had terrible tools to do it, but Autode$k bought the company responsible for Unfold3D and incorporated that tool inside Maya.
Now unwrapping this simple Mesh, took little more than 30 seconds for me to, UV unwrapping is not a “science” anymore nowadays thanks to tools like this. But, Blender is stuck with the same old unwrapping methods and for me it feels like there’s a lot of little details like this case, where Blender can’t deliver it quick enough.
If you attend a college (of any background) seeking a degree in gaming Autodesk gives you Maya latest version free of charge. That’s how i got my copy. their website doesn’t ask for grades or company background as a prerequisite. not sure if the promotional deal is still going but i hope this helps.
Funny thing pretty much everyone of those Android games being sold on google store made in Asian countries were made using those student copies of Maya. lol
Where people tend to catch Autodesk is that many countries don’t have copyright laws and even then most of the games sold don’t even make back the cost of the software to begin with so Autodesk loses because its pointless chasing after them.
This also raises more questions, if you buy assets from online, 3D models made by people in Asia and South America being sold at very affordable prices how do you as a westerner know if it was created with student copy or not? I tend to think Autodesk has realized this and simply isn’t bothering to hunt down anyone unless its some big company. To Autodesk, as far as they are concerned if a developer can afford they would pay the $30 a month subscription for MAYA LT which is suspect is the reason it was invented in the first place.
They started doing that in like 2009 I think. You get a free student license if you can provide a valid student email address. But it’s not supposed to be used for commercial projects.
Max/Maya files created with a student license show a message to indicate that when you open the files
Maya was always been about cramming the most amount of features to specific price. This was the main reason of its success.
Blender on the other hand is a free software, as such it does not have the amount of developers that Maya has to provide the quality and the amount of tools Maya provides but it has the freedom to decide to do thing that are not profitable like rewriting its GUI.
Till version 2.49 Blender had probably the worst GUI in the market but in version 2.5 GUI was rewritten fixing many of the flaws, and it went from last to second best , Softimage being the No 1.
Rewriting code is something companies rarely do as it is very expensive and it usually bring no increased sales to justify it from a commercial standpoint.
Bare in mind also that just because getting Blender costs nothing that does not mean if Blender decided to go commercial it would not have a similar price as Maya.
3d apps are expensive because they are insanely complex and it takes highly specialized coders to produce them. Also a professional artist wont care for the price if the tool helps him to be more productive as this will return him a profit in the long run far bigger than 4000.
The nice thing about Blender is that for us blender users and developers there is no such thing as “VS” , actually if you go to the blender forums you will rarely see blender being compared to other 3d apps, mainly because many of us have experience with using other 3d apps, and many also use Blender together with other apps.
Blender is far from perfect the same as Maya, but none the less in the end , the choice comes to personal taste.
For example I was a huge fan of Softimage, the moment Autodesk bought it , I knew its days were numbered so I went with
my second most favoriable software, Blender.
Choosing software is like choosing clothes really, there is some practical need, but in the end its just personal taste. Of course assuming you work alone and have the choice. Because if you work in a company the company will choose for you.
The good news is that Blender is becoming much better in supporting other 3d apps, so nowdays you can use Blender for everything.
The example you used is a simple case of a few seams and unwrap for blender , which should not take more than 30 secs. No idea why it would take you longer.
this is because 99% of the click in this video are not needed to unwrap the head. For example he uses the lasso tool to select half of the mesh and spends several clicks doing so, a box select would be far faster. He chooses edges one by one to mark seams when a ring select would have done that far faster.
The actually unwrapping , if you exclude all the pointless click and actions, took 10 sec if not less.
Hey guys, programmer guy here. I personally chose Maya because it works seamlessly with 3ds max and also has official ART (Animation and Rigging Tools) support (used to do animations in UE).
I had to use C4D a while back, although capable it does lean itself more to animation and motion graphics compared to the other major packages. Really the preference for software usually comes down to what you are used to. it really is useless trying to convince someone who is completely used to working on a specific package that something else is so much better.
Ooh I see, I have one more question if anyone here can answer. Is there any point in having a render in a 3D modeling software if you are making games for UE4?
Or in other words is there any point in getting 3DS MAX or Full MAYA over something like say MAYA LT? or any light 3D modeling package? because as I understand too much can be a problem as full MAYA has lots of stuff people would never use for creating 3D models? hence makes the UI cumbersome?
My blender has a big issue right now the UI text looks really nasty, like low resolution it seems to be some sort of bug maybe. Thinking of switching to another software. Maya LT looks good for $30 a month on Steam but need to know about what its missing compared to the full thing that a solo dev like myself would ever use.
I use 3ds Max for baking normal maps, it can get pretty high quality. Also, sometimes you want to render some things for textures, like hair for instance. Depending on your game you might even want to bake a complete map texture with lighting and all that.
Would you recommend 3DS Max or MAYA? I hear 3ds max comes with Nvidia Iray built in since I have a GTX 760 Nvidia card I could take huge advantage of the CUDA cores. Since my CPU is only a 3.7 GHZ core i3 haswell. The difference with rendering in cpu and gpu is massive for me in blender. But things like Cinema 4D does not come with CUDA rendering.
Yeah, pretty cheap move. I don’t do actual stuff for production ready game though. I may do some simple **** to test out some funky material or mechanic
Well, using the Default Scanline Renderer with supersampling set to Hammersley you get a very high quality normal maps and it’s fairly quick, with full control over the cage.
Using something like Vray to bake textures allows you to bake high quality lighting to a texture map, or reflections or whatever depending on the look you’re going for–note that it’s not possible to bake your lightmaps in another program and use them as lightmaps in UE4
Honestly either program is fine if you plan on going that route for a more expensive software. If you want to get into film though, Maya is dominant there. In gaming I’d say at this point that it’s 50/50 between the two.
People who dont use most of the software are beginners who dont realize that the rest of the software contains tools that will make their life far easier. No user ever sticks to a set of features.
rendering is very useful to render stuff you would not want unreal to render because of speed or unreal simply cant render. You can import those renders back to unreal as baked textures, backgrounds , matte paintings, video walls etc to create the illusion that the engine is far more sophisticated than it actually is.
So yeah leaving everything to the game engine is not a good idea.
If you switch 3d software because you found a bug, be ready to not last long with Maya. Its better to post your problem in the forums, and if it is a bug, open a bug report. I never had problems with blender and fonts, but I have other problems like CUDA being super unstable, which is unrelated to Blender but still does not let me to use GPU rendering.
