So, I have finally given up on Maya. After years of using it, I’m finally done with it. Mostly because I see better options. It’s just way too expensive to try and manage a subscription. Maya LT doesn’t offer the tools I need for my work, otherwise I may have gone with that version of Maya. Another reason I held out for such a long time was because I didn’t really want to have to relearn another software package. To me that was valuable time I could be using for development. However at the end of the day it was just too expensive for an indie developer (185 per month). I can see how this would be beneficial for a studio for short term use, but not for an indie.
And then I saw Houdini….200 dollar annual subscription for indies and it offers everything I need and more. I am pumped. Haven’t used it yet though, but from what I read online it’s pretty awesome. Most of all though, I’m saving a ton of money and that feels good. Feeling the pressure of not getting enough work done every month because of the amount of money I’m paying for the software was not a good feeling. I think with just a 200 dollar annual fee, I can rest easier. Still get work done, but now I can enjoy the process a little more.
There’s always Blender… It does 99% of what you’ll need to make game assets. Some things might not be as easy or elegant, as they would be in something like Maya, but you can still do it. The UI takes a little getting used to, but Maya’s UI is already a clusterpluck and if you can get used to it, you can definitely get used to Blender. It’s free and has a million and one addons that can help get back some of the key tools you might need out of Maya.
Blender is also very close to releasing their eevee viewport version(you can try the latest experimental builds for it) and it’s basically a real-time wysiwyg view for PBR so you could even paint/texture/mask in the same program; without having to use substance painter or similar programs.
I’ve been using 3ds Max since 3.5 and with hindsight I would have gone Blender, and so would a few others on the team. Top $$ paid for 90% worth of tools you never use.
From what I have seen and heard, Houdini looks to be a very good piece of kit! Let us know how you get on with it as I am interested in swapping over as well.
Foundry’s Modo is better alternative than Houdini; Houdini serves very different purposes.
$1799 you get a lifetime license (that is a perpetual license), if you wish to upgrade to any new version you pay $400 to upgrade (if you’re on Modo 10 or something and want go to Modo 11+).
That is way cheaper than even keeping a license for Maya LT since a game project will always last more than 1 year in development.
As a non modeler who always wanted to do some modelling. I have found 3ds max to be the best for what I needed. However, for character models, I used iclone suite. It uses multiple SW to do different things, one is for importing, another for animation, another for modelling, for the total price of $300 one time.
Then you can move the asset to blender or others.
I’m just saying that if a non modeler can use it, then a modeler can make lots of things quickly.
I liked when Maya used to have perpetual license agreement where you would pay full-price for their software of that year and keep it forever. Then they ended up switching to a monthly subscription before this Adobe was newly adopting into pay-per-sub model which also angered me because I was saving up money to buy photoshop full license.The model suck! If there are competition that matches over Maya I would switch in a heartbeat just like how I switched from Photoshop to GIMP and other software that offer similar service.
And then Unity follow switch right after then me goez forced to drop Unity too :3
I have perpetual licenses of Unity 2, 3, 4… said goodbye when they removed licenses on 5.
Subscriptions are the lootboxes of game developers lmao
There are plenty of Photoshop-like software that are pay and use forever or opensource like GIMP, but I am still able to make simple textures for my video-game on a budget scale. In the case of Maya I’m currently transitioning out of it because for some reason i am not able to find the perpetual license for Linux version. Autodesk used to have perpetual license for Linux on their Maya software and I was like “Oh cool! I don’t mind switching to linux and pay full-time” then few months later I can’t find the page.
I actually need a general purpose 3D application for more than game development. For some side work, I’m going to be rendering some artwork for some books an author is working on. What render engine(s) does Blender use? Also, does it have a hair and fur solution? Those two things are particularly important to me. Houdini’s hair and fur module looks pretty good. I’m planning on using Redshift for the render engine. I like the idea of a GPU powered renderer. I used the demo in Maya, and I rather liked it actually.
Blender has hair/fur can be a little fiddly but I have seen some good results with it. It has a GPU renderer (Cycles) which is now also used in other DCC tools - you can get it for Cinema4D etc. Coming in 2.79a (and already in the nightlies) is a GPU/CPU combined rendering which appears veto be quite performant too.
Maya is a fantastic solution for creating scenery and if you’re doing it for artwork I would suggest investing your money on that particular software. Maya has a great tools for creating hairs which is why a lot of people use it for creating landscape for grass, and import them into Unreal Engine 4 to create realistic scenes just that you need to get familiar with terrain generating software such as Terragen or World Machine. Terragen is a bit pricey so go with World Machine beside it does the same job for scenery creation.
I hope I have given you some insight on the types of software you could be using. Good luck!
So, I just bought the game Rise of the Tomb Raider from steam. This game is absolutely amazing. Visually it’s stunning. I haven’t actually played too many games lately, so I can’t say it’s “the best looking game out there”. However, from what I have seen, it certainly is. I was surprised to find out that my GTX 1080/ Core i7 combo was struggling to run this game with maxed out graphical settings (4k). This game is a beast.
They mention in there that Crystal Dynamics actually used Houdini to do offline rendering for some of the effects in the game which they merged into the real time cutscenes. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to pull off some of the water caustics in real time. This makes me want to get Houdini even more now!