3d max and maya. Remake and recap. They have a lot of overlapping features, like 80% of features. Why release producsts that are almost similar with slight differences? Can’t you just make them like one software instead of 2?
Probably those questions should be made at their forums for a proper answer… here you will get only speculation or maybe from old users some historical facts, but the last you can get from there too.
Well they had 3 until they killed Softimage.
I guess I will be banned from their forums for asking that 
ReCap was Remake, which was 123D Catch, which was whatever it was when they bought Realviz
Maya was purchased because it was their biggest competition vs. 3ds Max, they wouldn’t want to keep both but they have enough people using each that there’s not enough reason to drop one at the moment. They also own Softimage XSI but have since stopped support for it since it didn’t have enough users (and they’ve been gutting what they can out of it).
Thanks for a history lesson! Good to know
Autodesk see a competitor:
#1: Buy them.
#2: Extract features.
#3: Kill the bought tool.
#4: Fire developers of original tool.
#5: Merge extracted features into larger softwares.
They didn’t kill Alias Maya simply because the whole VFX industry was heavily dependant on it before Autodesk bought it, 3DS Max wasn’t successful in that area, and many high profile companies such as ILM have pipelines based on Maya.
Many of new tools Maya and Studio Max have today were extracted from software that once were standalones from smaller companies.
The speculation is that after buying Maya they put more resources into it because they could sell more new licenses that way. 3ds Max has the largest userbase but they can make more money if they get some of those people to buy Maya licenses, so they had a big push for Maya. It’s one of the problems they had with the development of Mass Effect Andromeda because someone at Autodesk convinced some clueless person at Bioware they needed to switch to Maya from 3ds Max. 3ds Max isn’t used as much for Film VFX since Autodesk has been pushing studios to move to Maya. I’m guessing they won’t be doing it as much now that they’re on subscription and they’ve got a steady amount of income coming from the software.
And with Lightwave coming back since Dec 2017 they might buy that too, lol
Blender is moving towards 2.8 and is becoming even more powerful and easier than current 2.79 and no forcing do things like Autodesk.
The real question/ hassle with blender is adapting to its workflow when a lot of people have pipelines customised solely for Autodesk products. Even I’m seriously considering switching but the learning curve is just too steep.
Everyone considers switching, but it’s just blender’s interface that keep people away from it. It’s a huge barrier.
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That could change as they have big plans for 2.8 but time will tell now, check out blender.org and code.blender.org from time to time.
For most modelers, Modo seems like a better alternative to Max and Maya than Blender, at least if you are already used Max or Maya.
To me at this point learning Blender would be like learning Kanji alphabet… it’s just too hard.
I have used 3DS Max for quite long time and I have switched to Blender and I don’t regret… more money to spend at Marketplace. It is just a matter to find the correct tutorial to teach in a less painfull way possible, which I can recommend two individuals: Andrew Price (BlenderGuru at Youtube, fierce blender defender, he models everything possible in a very good and simple way) and Darrin Lile (same name at Youtube, mainly character modeling, texturing, rigging and animation).
I do believe in favouring Blender to at least made the prices at Autodesk, so for everyone Im the one to say: “You’re welcome!” because thats what Blender users will cause someday, price dropping at other tools.
I was trained to model in Maya, but Blender has 99% of the features I’m looking for: mark UV seams and unwrap, assign materials to faces, separate and join objects, basic sculpting tools and hard-surface extruding tools, slicing, insert edge loops/rings, merge vertex, bevel, subdivision, and even decimation modifiers, soft select, vertex and texture painting, etc. etc.
The few things I miss from Maya are the ability to move individual vertices according to their surface normal (Blender has the inflate option for entire object and sculpting, but not just for selected vertices with precision), and hard edges. For some reason, while Blender has the ability to author hard and soft edges, it never imports properly to UE4. So you have to make the entire face hard or soft, not just the edge. Pretty much everything else is in Blender as far as I’m aware.
People are scared of trying something new. It takes them back to square one. I know, I get it. And some processes were made specifically for Maya or 3DS Max, like UE4’s ART rigging tools, or the pivot painter for Max. But Blender has its own neat things, like the Sapling tree generator, which is a lifesaver for me. There used to be a point in time when UV unwrapping in Maya was about as easy as giving birth to a child, but Blender’s UVs are very easy to work with and were designed to handle organic objects extremely well.
I don’t believe that the change will be drastical, noticeable, and useful. Tho I want to believe.
They’ve done this with all their software lines. In AEC (Architecture Engineering Construction) they are famous for it. They want to become a monopoly.
These are the AEC companies they have bought, (that I know of):
Revit
SoftDesk
GRAITEC
Micro Engineering Solutions
NavisWorks
It’s definitely been a trip watching the industry change - back when I started, there was 3D Studio Max, Lightwave, the Wavefront tools, Softimage 3D, PowerAnimator, PRISMS, and a handful of smaller packages.
The fractured market meant people were even more fanatical about their DCC of choice - when your continued career depends on a specific software package, and each one is pretty different, you’re going to want yours to be the most used. The cost also factored in; only studios could really afford them, and with hundred thousand dollar investments into a specific package, there wasn’t room for experimentation.
While I’m not a fan of Autodesk or their business practices, the consolidation of the industry and features like path tracing/PBR helped close the gap, and skill sets became easier to transfer between software. It was less about what a DCC was capable of, and more about how well you clicked with the interface/tools.
You can see this really well with Max and Maya - two packages with similar tools, but very different interfaces (though there’s now more crossover than ever). While everything could easily be done with one or the other, many of those early “fanatics” are still working, and aren’t likely to ever switch. And like it was said, pipelines have been built and hardened based around Max or Maya over 20+ years, and the cost to switch could be immense.
Of course, if Autodesk had their way, they’d probably only sell one DCC (with a dozen different industry variants), and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But we owe it to the people that took sides (as absurd a concept as it is) for helping keep the software sphere a little more diverse in the face of a corporate behemoth that kills properties left and right.
Myself, I just use Blender. I’m lucky that I’m able to use it professionally, especially considering I do VFX, Animation, and VR/AR - the studio I work at is one of the few that is mostly Blender-based. It could be a while before we see greater adoption, but even just having some big-name shows to point to has helped show it’s possible.