I’ve been trying out Maya LT 2016, hands up I’ve never used Maya before as I’ve been a Modo user for a couple of years and before that I used 3DSMax. Some of the animators on the team use full blown Maya but with Modo 901 coming out and the cost of the upgrade I decided to check it out.
Firstly smoothing (SubD) works great in Maya, it’s easy to fix little issues with edge flow tools. Menu’s and navigation is pretty intuitive, 2016 version comes with some sculpting and additional rigging tools. We all know Maya is great for animation, but it’s nice to see they are continuing to improve in this area…
I’ve not quite gotten the hang of UV mapping and the shader setup yet, but from base use with SBAR (substance) integrations it’s been a pleasure. I’ve found little need to use third party tools to bake, turtle for the most part seems up to the job. Although I’ve not done anything really complicated yet and still new to Maya as a whole so I’ll keep slugging through.
On the whole so far, it seems in some area’s simpler to use and more feature complete than Modo. Factor in the cost and I’m very excited to see what it’s truly capable of, if I really get the hang of it I might consider switching all together.
One thing, it’d be nice if UE4’s ART tools worked with it. I understand it doesn’t work with Modo either, but it would be the icing on the cake…
Yep the UV tools, even though they have been greatly improved in the latest version, are still pretty basic compared to ones i’ve used in other packages.
There is a page on the autodesk website (maybe maya website) where people are voting what features they want to be included and I know one of them is for support for plugins such as ART and a couple of other i think aimed towards game creation. There was another forum on here with a link to it asking for everyone to vote that one up in particular. You could probably find it by searching the forum, I don’t think it was too long ago.
Thanks I’ll check it out, yeah not gotten too deep with the UV tools they do seem a little basic. One of the main reasons for checking out Maya LT was the FBX pipeline in Modo causes some really odd issues in UE4 which don’t happen in Maya.
I think in a small amount of time it’ll “get there” to the point it’s a bit of a no brainer unless you’re happy with the likes of Blender.
Plus they seem pretty happy to help out, I had an issue with exporting scenes from UE4 into Maya LT and one of the dev’s are looking into it which is pretty awesome.
I’m loving Maya LT at the moment, much quicker to get to the end goal… I’ve learnt most of what I needed to know in a night, of course I’m not new to the concept of modelling but it’s working a treat. Mesh reduction tools (reduce) could do with some tweaking, I prefer to keep everything in quads and it has a tendancy to split into triangles. Not a massive issue and the UV mapping / smoothing / geometry tools are much more accurate then Modo… I’ve not really had to tweak much and no overlapping bounds which is sweet…
Press 1,2,3 to see your geometry smooth for cage baking, you don’t get any of this in Modo. I’d recommend for games, use Maya!..
