Differences between Maya and 3DS

The price of these softwares is the same. 3ds is used mainly for modeling and Maya mainly for animation. Can I work only with one of them, and halve the cost?
If I use Maya, will I be able to create high quality 3D content and animate them for Unreal Engine?

There is nearly no difference between them -> it’s all about your preferences. I would recommend you to take a look at both and then decide :slight_smile: You can create hight quality 3d assets and animation with both programs

You could also use blender which is for free -> even with that program you can create high quality assets (it all depends on your skills) :smiley:

There’s definitely a difference between them, but they are both capable of doing both modeling and animation, people just seem to prefer modeling in 3ds and animation in Maya. Most things will have a similar counterpart in the other program, but there’s a few things that one has that the other doesn’t. Not that you can’t get around them, they just make some things easier.

Does Unreal Engine support animations, skeletons and simulations from Blender?

Yep ^^

e.g my team and I are currently creating an entire RPG game with the UE4 + blender :slight_smile:

Yeah, thank you all.

@, I sent you a request on Skype about one month ago :slight_smile:

When you have any questions you can also write me a message on skype :slight_smile: -> mostly I’m offline, but I write back when I’m online

way back when I was going to art school we used maya, at the time (2003) Maya had a far superior material system than , and the animation system was a lot easier. But for polygon modeling had much better tools and workflow.
FF to 2014, autodesk now owns both titles, plus Softimage and Motionbuilder. I no longer use maya (havent for years) but I do notice that now has the all things that I recall Maya did better (remembering from the past).
I kind of expect that at some point these programs will merge into one, and/or perhaps get a new name so that legacy users wont have feel they’ve had to ‘go to the dark side’.

Maya has a bigger following in the film and television industry, while tends to dominate in the game industry.

Since I mostly just do polygon modeling I dont use most of the rendering stuff and only a some of the animation features in . 99% of my time is spent drawing and moving vertices, edges, faces and such, so is my choice for that. I do my UV work in Headus UVlayout and I use Mudbox for fine details that will later get baked down in Xnormal or Substance Designer. And am trying to learn motion builder for animation. I use Worldmachine to generate terrain heightmaps. And finally I use Deep Exploration when I need to convert file formats, or just for quick viewing things (especially downloaded models I like to inspect). I’m sure I forgot a few apps in my toolchain but basically I use what I think does a particular job best for me, one app will not be the ultimate solution for something as complex as game asset creation.

and Maya more or less do the same stuff when it comes to game-related work. is easier for modeling by a longshot, but Maya has every capability that has in that regard. Regular animation tools are about on par, though Maya has a few plugins like The Setup Machine that make rigging a breeze. uses Maxscript for scripting (an awful language) while Maya uses MEL and Python. 2015 I believe uses Python now too, but I’ve yet to upgrade to test.

Maya has a much better (and faster) dynamics system for cloth, hair, fluids and other things, but these generally don’t transfer over to UE4 or Unity without external plugins that may or may not exist, so that’s largely useless for game creation outside of pre-rendered cutscenes.

While I love and use it primarily, I’d say that if you have to go for one, go for Maya. There’s almost nothing can do that Maya can’t, and I myself am doomed to forever buy both - for 's workflow and Maya’s extra dynamics tools - because I learned first and that’s what I’m comfortable with.

Of course, if it’s all the same, you should go with Blender. If you have no habits formed by knowledge in other 3D packages, you should go with Blender. It’s free and philosophically I want to use it, I just can’t justify the loss of productivity trying to learn how. If you’ve gotta start from scratch, I’d strongly recommend Blender.

Intel/AMD, Nvidia/AMD, Coke/pepsi and last but not least … /maya.

Usually comes down to what you learn on, it’s not hard to carry the skills across but you still have your favourites, both have positives and negatives, just seems this question always get asked and answered on personal experience. Always love the camp saying it’s the industry standard and the Maya camp hitting back with the animation tools. But it comes down to what ever you are going to be doing with it and what you’re most comfortable with. There are also a good few other contenders, namely Modo and Blender. The former being my favourite (better imo for hard-surface work which is my mainstay).

It comes down to price for indies … and Maya has it all beat right now (unless you want to endure blender :P) Maya-LT although stripping back some features is the best cost vs package ratio right now and if I didn’t own a personal copy of Modo I’d seriously think on Maya.

For games there aren’t a ton of features of either program that matters–like rendering or materials since very few material features transfer to game engines and of course rendering doesn’t matter since you’re not doing that. Other things like dynamics and and simulations don’t matter either since those don’t transfer to game engines. It all comes down to modeling/texturing/animation and both of the programs do those things well.
Though one thing is really great about those programs–FBX support is the best on 3ds and Maya (and softimage) other software doesn’t have as good FBX support.

Maya is more suitable for complex modeling.
Well, that is just my opinion.

No, not really. has had much better modeling tools in the past, especially because of the Polyboost tools that was integrated a few years ago. Maya has since had some similar features added, though I don’t know if it matches what can do.

I always have a hard time modeling complex shapes in Maya if I’m not using the paint feature, but that may be because I’m just more familiar with .

I know because of my job but if I had a choice and wasn’t budget constrained I would pick Maya, simply because its animation features are far more acclaimed and UE4’s own animation toolset is ART for maya. IMO there are lots a great modelling tools out there but not as many animation/rigging tools. If budget is a big concern download blender :slight_smile:

People always say this, but after years of using both I’ve never found any evidence to support it. I’m not trying to be inflammatory with this post - I own both, so if there are better tools for regular humanoid animation, I want to know about it. As a person who uses both, what kind of stuff specifically does Maya do better than on the animation front that is applicable to games?

To be honest I don’t do to much animation and never really used maya, I guess I’ve also heard this so much from various forums that I assumed it to be true, so my apologies for spreading an idea I really can’t confirm or anything

Ah, bummer! Oh well, I guess my quest for knowledge on this front continues!

If you’re doing this indie style, get into Blender

Maya application has been widely known for its robust rigging and its animation friendly workflow while 3Ds has been known for its powerful modeling tools, enabling users to create complex 3D models at a very fast workflow & robust modifiers. Also 3D’s has some really great architectural visualization capabilities that Maya doesn’t has. Differences & Similarities between Autodesk 3Ds and Maya