Maya LT Is Limited?

[neighborlee]

@AntonBoiko;160470

Well, I guess you’ve never worked with Blender =) There are things it can do which Maya still can’t. For example if you bake normal map using midpoly (highpoly > midpoly > lowpoly) you just can’t do it in Maya (or Modo) because it doesn’t bake applied normal maps from mid- to lowpoly (Blender does). Blender has cage baking where you can adjust cage extrusion per vertex and bake directions per vertex, where Maya just has a uniform cage extrusion. In fact there’s a plugin for Blender which will soon allow to create baking “sets” so you can save your settings individually for your high- and lowpoly sets of meshes if you split your mesh for baking. Like 3dsMax does you know.

And you also have sculpting tools with adaptive subdivisions (subdivides and cleans up your mesh as you sculpt and adds details where you need it) and a nice set painting tools in Blender.

But, to be fair and not start an app war I’ll mention a thing where Blender sucks =) It has no normal map bake antialiasing. It can bake lots of other maps, with antialiasing. But not norma maps. Yeah, that’s dumb and Blender developers don’t bother fixing it for ages. So you need to bake your normal maps twice the size and scale it down to get some kind of “antialiasing”. It’s not terrible but still so lame…

About Modo. Well, it’s good for modelling, it has nice sculpting (no adaptive topology) and painting tools, it has a superb render engine. And very poverful viewports. For non-skeletal objects. As soon as you add deformers (joints and weighted geo) the viewport dies to 5-7 fps. And I’m not talking about characters like Ceasar (the ape, you know) =) You just can’t animate characters with more than 10-20K polys. Even if you turn off subdivisions. Even if you have (like I do) a GTS680 GPU, a decent HDD and 24 gigs of fast RAM. As you would expect – in Blender you can not only animate such characters, but even turn on subdivs on it and still have your max fps.

This is all from my own experience working as a cg-artist in a mid-sized advertising studio (8 cg-artists and designers), not just quotes from forums. Blender is much more mature than most people think, there’s just not enough promotion from the devs and community (which is another dumb thing).

So, there’s no reason to use Modo or even Maya LT instead of Blender. At least try Blender yourself. It’s a bit different in the way it works, compared to Maya or Modo, but you get used to it quickly =)

Cheers,
Anton.

Blender is coming along, but lets be honest here; its has horribly subpar viewport rendering. It does this on one slightly older computer with a amazing gpu and one newer with a slightly less capable gpu but very close to other one. I avoid blender because of that, and I can just hear all the blender zealots getting mad, but sorry,its the truth,and even the blender artist website says upfront and factually, that he viewport IS slow; and yes, I mean vs 2.71 which I have. I cant move the prefs.windows without horrible lag, slow viewport mainly in edit mode ( only 128k mesh) and choosing a material color is also,horribly slow. Some might consider that too picky, but when maya , max, art of illusion and anim8tor do not do this, you have to ask whats wrong with blender.

Sculpting in blender and maybe maya or others I don’t know, are NOWhere near what sculptris is,not even close. BLender trys to be all but sometimes it just can’t atm. There is a reason sculptris exists,and this is ONE of them I’ve tried the supposed adaptive thing in sculpting, and its a nightmare compared to sculptris, which I use daily and this isn’t a war, its about facts.

I get its used by many who may not have this issue, but my systems are running absolutely perfect with ALL other modelers, so do not tell me, its ME )

People deserve to know these things, instead of thinking its their system, when its likely not .

Blender is a godsend for those who can’t afford autodesk tools,we all get that, but people need to know these things too.

thx
nl