Anonymous at Wed, 29 Dec 2021 08:47:29 UTC No. 872664

>>872662
Because they actually work. C4D's mograph tools, Houdini's simulation tools, ZBrush's scultpting tools, SketchUp's CAD tools and Premiere's video editing tools are also superior to Blender's. Because those are dedicated tools with more development time, funding and research behind them.

That's the kind of question someone who hasn't spent a day using either software would ask.

Anonymous at Wed, 29 Dec 2021 10:45:07 UTC No. 872668

>>872662
>Maya has a much better graph editor
>Maya has better animation plugin support such as Ziva (powerful FEM solver) and Animbot (slick animation tools on steroids).
>Mayas "animation toolset" is meant to be extended by the studio. It has a rich C++ and python API and there exists even such things like 12+ hour video tutorials on how to create custom deformers using a user defined algorithm that utilize the full power of the GPU. Its easier to build what you really want, starting today, even if it doesn't exist yet, using the API because the documentation is so extensive. Once I started creating custom nodes and behaviors I got really hooked at how nice the workflow is

Anonymous at Wed, 29 Dec 2021 22:24:21 UTC No. 872761

95% of everything you see was animated in Maya, the onus is on you to prove that other software is as good

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 01:38:26 UTC No. 872799

>>872662
hey actual animator here. Recently switched from maya to blender just to try new things.
My main 2 main complaints would be:
1) Mayas reference system is superior to blenders linking system (this is important for large projects, and in animation projects often span over a year).
2) The graph editor, and the way to select curves feels extremely unintuitive. It's hard to pin this to a single problem. In maya I click on a controller and my graphs are there, they are easy to distinguish and easy to read and edit, while in blender it feels clumsy to isolate curves, scale them to fit the viewport and make adjustments that 'make sense'.
Other than that, I'm having a lot of fun. Playback seems more fluent than maya, and RT playback really is a must these days.
Honestly, animators could do with whatever, the idea of movement is the same, getting there is always somewhat possible.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 07:21:50 UTC No. 872833

>>872668
I mean blender is entirely open source so in theory you can also code just about anything as an addon, though the fact Maya had been around much longer and has much larger 'professional' addon support makes sense
>>872799
>1) Mayas reference system is superior to blenders linking system (this is important for large projects, and in animation projects often span over a year).
Can you elaborate on this? What's the difference?
>2) The graph editor, and the way to select curves feels extremely unintuitive.
I think graph editor had been on blender's to-do list since 2018 and for some reason they keep delaying it, hopefully it'll get done some time soon because it is universally accepted as just being subpar. Not outright bad maybe but it does need a lot of work.
>Honestly, animators could do with whatever, the idea of movement is the same, getting there is always somewhat possible.
Yeah this is the main thing, like with most art the artist is more important than the tool, but the software cultists on this website really make me wonder if even half of what they proclaim 'X does better' is really true in a meaningful capacity for end-user.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 10:02:03 UTC No. 872839

>>872833
>I mean blender is entirely open source so in theory you can also code just about anything as an addon
That's not how addons or source code work. Blender being open source would only matter if you wanted to create a fork of it and edit core C++ functionality that you wouldn't be able to access with an addon. Which 99% of addon developers don't do, nor should they have to.

>Can you elaborate on this? What's the difference?
Maya: Works
Blender: Doesn't work

Unironically just try it. Get a Blender character rig from somewhere and try linking it into your scene. You'll notice that nothing works, you'll need to create a weird proxy object, then you'll notice half of the character model didn't get imported because everything has to be under the same hierarchy, then you realize you can't edit or override anything, then you Google the issue and find a forum post telling you "yeah nobody does that, just append the file dude".

>I think graph editor had been on blender's to-do list since 2018 and for some reason they keep delaying it
So has the outliner, and the retarded 4x8 tile based layer system (???), or the fact that every rig that gets imported into Blender looks like pic related because of the way it handles bones. There used to be an initiative literally called "Animation 2020" - guess what happened to that.

>but the software cultists on this website really make me wonder if even half of what they proclaim 'X does better' is really true in a meaningful capacity for end-user.
Yes. A tool that makes you just 5% faster means you'll be able to earn thousands of extra dollars over the course of a year, save hundreds of hours of unnecessary work, or create an entire extra episode of your indie series.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 11:03:37 UTC No. 872848

>>872839
Update: I just had a look at linking in 3.0 and holy shit, it looks like this is one of the few things that might actually get fixed at some point. The new system is still unusable obviously, and God only knows what it has to do with libraries, but it's a massive step forward compared to what they had before (i.e. nothing).

Give them a couple more years and we might finally have access to functionality that should have existed in 2005.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 15:19:08 UTC No. 872888

>>872833
that other anon isn't me, I'm:
>>872799
but the other, slightly more angry anon did describe the linking vs. referencing system problems quite well.
In maya you reference an entire file and everything that is in it. You have control over it through the reference editor, where you can turn on and off references, turn them to proxies or unload them. You'd have the environment in one file, each character in it's own file, some have the lights in a sepereate file, some ref files are just for materials. All that goes into an easy to use reference editor.
In blender you load sub files from within the blend file, and sometimes you need to load different subfiles from the same file. Picture this:
Load a character rig:
- load collection with character in it
- create this weird proxy rig link the other anon mentioned
- load text files to execute while having the rig selected because otherwise the rig scripts don't work.
I don't even want to know what happens when you change shit in the rig around.
Funnily enough, I ended up just appending my characters instead of linking, just like the other anon mentioned. This isn't the worst thing to do when working on personal projects or learning animation - but it's unacceptable when working in a team, and any kind of profitable animation is created in a large scale team.
Sorry for the word salad, hope it makes sense.
Blender is still a lot of fun to play and animate with, just append and get used to the clunky graph editor (I find myself fine tuning the controllers rather than graphs, which is ok too for some rough polishing if you know what to look for).

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 15:27:23 UTC No. 872890

>>872888
to explain the maya reference workflow in a real world scenario, lets say the art direction wants the eyes of a character to have a different color:
- material get's changed on the rig file.
- via email you get told to now use v.002 of the rig
- you go into the reference editor, in the file path you change v.001 to v.002
Your animation is still there, everybody working down the line sees the new eyes, it took you 3 clicks. It's clean and simple for everyone involved. Obvsly sometimes this fucks up and don't let anybody tell you otherwise, maya is a giant shitshow of it's own lol

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 16:10:11 UTC No. 872897

>>872888
>>872890
That sounds more like file management issues than animation related issues.

Still, good insight. Thanks for clarifying! That does sound like something every software that wishes to function on a professional level should work on.
>Obvsly sometimes this fucks up and don't let anybody tell you otherwise, maya is a giant shitshow of it's own lol
Its the main reason I, as basically just someone who wants to animate for fun / maybe freelance a bit, don't want to spend months & years learning maya because despite like you said -some- superior toolsets, I did watch and read a lot of stuff about how maya is very lacking in many ways (such as the UI or the fact it crashes a lot / auto saving is unreliable).
...and its honestly hard to go from real time pbr viewport back to mid 2000s graphics in pre-rendered view.

feels good to have an actual conversating about these things on this board, for once. Thanks for that, as well!

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 16:12:03 UTC No. 872898

>>872897
>read a lot of stuff about how maya is very lacking in many ways (such as the UI or the fact it crashes a lot / auto saving is unreliable).
what? Maya has the perfect ui. 2022.3 I havent had a crash once.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 16:14:03 UTC No. 872900

>>872898
>what? Maya has the perfect ui. 2022.3 I havent had a crash once.
it might've also been the other side of paid shills talking out of their ass about maya 5+ years ago and ignoring everything about how it improved, which seems to be a pretty common thing in software cult fights.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 17:55:03 UTC No. 872908

>>872662
Let me add some stuff most people don't talk about (especially here).
Maya, while being better is also more complex, meaning if you want to rig/animate a low poly Chibi character like this >>872881 you have to do more steps in Maya (like 30% more) to get to the same result.
Also when doing simple stuff like this, the advantages of Maya will never be visible for you, its full potential remains unused.
With more possibilities comes more responsibilities to work correctly and Maya can be pedantic and throw you some curve-balls if you don't know what you're doing. Better also doesn't mean its more fun or easier(!) -Its not!
So even if Maya is "better", depending on what you are doing Blender might still be the more sensible choice, especially if you take the learning curve and time needed to learn into account.
That being said, the additional complexity is absolutely needed when dealing with complex creature rigs and humanoids for animated movies or VFX shots.
The absolute undeniable big phat pink elephant in the room is performance.
Maya has GPU accelerated deformers/skinning which make a HUGE difference and this is what breaks Blenders neck (as well as other DCCs) in comparison - this can be THE deal-breaker.
I have made some tests some years ago in Cinema4d, Blender and Maya - the same rig ran with 12fps in C4d, with 5fps in Blender and with 120+ fps in Maya. That's an 10 fold increase in speed in comparison to C4d.
I immediately lost all motivation to ever want to animate in anything but Maya. This effectively means you can animate a character with 1+ Million polygons (after subdivision) and still have it run with 25+ fps in the viewport. No proxy animation meshes needed.
New Maya versions have a pretty well working cache system, even if you have cloth sims and other sim-stuff added on top of your rig, you can write it into cache by letting it play once and then you can see it in real-time - no matter how heavy it is.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 18:15:18 UTC No. 872912

>>872908
>Also when doing simple stuff like this, the advantages of Maya will never be visible for you, its full potential remains unused.
I think that's the main point a lot of people are missing, 99% of people on this board just want to do game & anime waifus / memes / low tier porn, rather than make the next lord of the rings, and for that purpose blender is more than sufficient, with all its downsides not really being a major factor
>Maya has GPU accelerated deformers/skinning which make a HUGE difference and this is what breaks Blenders neck (as well as other DCCs) in comparison - this can be THE deal-breaker.
That's a good point, I had also noticed blender beginning to chug with 100k+ tri models, and for some reason normal maps just killing FPS if you use them with skeletal animation.
>New Maya versions have a pretty well working cache system, even if you have cloth sims and other sim-stuff added on top of your rig, you can write it into cache by letting it play once and then you can see it in real-time - no matter how heavy it is.
Blender has that as well but I had probably experienced the most crashes with high density simulation data, though there's just no argument that blender's simulation tools are mediocre, they just about do what they should but nothing more.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 18:17:32 UTC No. 872914

>>872908
cont.
>Or is it just a bunch of larpers and oldfags parroting something that's been repeated so much everyone just accepts it without questioning it?
Both, on both sides. There are larpers parroting it without knowing for sure, as well as Blenderfanboy larpers who deny any advantage Maya has because they don't know.
Truth is, Maya is truly mighty in the right hands, more than anything else on the market, as evident by the fact that it has been used for 20 years in the movie industry as the absolute favorite by all studios worldwide and Autodesk took the Oskar home for animation, 20 years without a break.
You have to acknowledge that Maya was created FOR the movie industry and it fulfills its role, not flawlessly (Maya isn't perfect by all means) but measured by the results people are able to get out of it.
I am not an animator (I just do it for fun) so take this with a grain of salt, but there are tons of animation and rigging tools that Maya has that you might find elsewhere, but Maya has probably the best versions of these tools integrated.
You can find stuff like Voxel heat diffuse skinning or Animation layers in Blender as a paid addon, but Maya has them integrated since over a decade, and they probably are better there. There are also tools you wont find in other DCC's.
I know for sure that the animation layer system in Maya is top notch, while people bitch and moan about the absence of these in other programs.
Take a look at this rig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfExejqdr5w
I am pretty sure a competent rigger can do it in Blender, but here the situation is reversed. Blender might take 30% more time to get it done and then it wont run as nice and might need tons of workarounds.
In the high end segment of rigging and animation the advantages of Maya add up and the weakness of other tools make them unpractical in production.
Animators are also a weird bunch of entitles bitches, they refuse to work with anything but the best.

Anonymous at Thu, 30 Dec 2021 18:38:53 UTC No. 872919

>>872912
>I think that's the main point a lot of people are missing
Exactly, that's why I am writing the same shit for the 5th time in a thread like this. I am having a weird Deja-Vu right now. I should write and save it in a text file and copy n paste it next time.
>for that purpose blender is more than sufficient, with all its downsides not really being a major factor
Absolutely right.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
There are many cases where I would actually recommend Blender simply for the fact that it is easier and faster to do, works well enough (until it doesn't) all while having a much flatter learning curve.
Knowing when and for what a tool is better is half the deal.
I spent half a year learning Maya on the side and I can't say it was worth it for now because I am just an amateurish hobby animator who hasn't anything to show (for now).
But I am a perfectionist and I really dislike Blenders Armature system, even though I have to admit it has some really nice features that make some aspects of rigging very easy and comprehensible. Maya broke my brain in some instances with its unnecessary complexity (that I probably wont need anytime soon).
Good thing is that once you learned how to rig, the knowledge is fairly universal - the jump to Maya is rather trivial for the average use-case. Although Blender idiosyncrasy might confuse a noob when faced with Maya's pedantry.
>for some reason normal maps just killing FPS if you use them with skeletal animation.
I think that is just the viewport being slow, killing your FPS.
>Blender has that as well
Not really. In Maya this is build into the playback system, you just turn it on right next to the play button and it automatically caches all your data into a universal cache, ready for playback.
Its not really much if you think about it, but it is very convenient which makes all the difference. And it is fairly robust, never seen it fail so far.

Anonymous at Sat, 8 Jan 2022 22:08:05 UTC No. 874636

>>872914
>Animators are also a weird bunch of entitles bitches, they refuse to work with anything but the best.
That depends, the ones that do know about rigging arent too annoying, because they do know that making a good rig is hard and also takes a lot of time, most that complain are animators that dont even know what a blend shape is.

Anonymous at Sun, 9 Jan 2022 00:33:06 UTC No. 874673

I want to animate my furfag porn in Maya eventually. I hate how bones and curve graphs feel in Blender

Anonymous at Sun, 9 Jan 2022 01:03:25 UTC No. 874681

>>872662
>Or is it just a bunch of larpers and oldfags parroting something that's been repeated so much everyone just accepts it without questioning it?

Personally I hate Maya but it's been around since forever. Way back in the day it stole a lot of its features from the competition, then those features got texted and fine tuned over the years. Of course Maya's a great animation tool when literally everyone who wants to do animation uses it. It's the law of supply and demand, people want to animate in Maya therefore Maya will cater to their needs. People don't care about animating in any other software therefore why would the competition even bother with features its client base didn't even ask for?

There are valid alternatives like 3dsmax and Modo which are probably on equal standing with Maya but pro-animators won't bother with them because they invested too much time in Maya to do a switch. Newcomers will be at a loss when trying to learn animation in 3dsmax or Modo because there are no real tutorials out there like there are for Maya.

There's also Cascadeur which will overtake Maya some day. It's still in development and they have a very small team. It took Maya +20 years to get where it is now but it only took Cascadeur 3 years to gain up on it. The trend is clear.

I don't have much hope for Blender because it's trying to be a full package all at once. It's great if you need to do some casual stuff and don't want to get a licence for a pro software package. It's the poor man's alternative to whatever the industry standard is.

Anonymous at Sun, 9 Jan 2022 01:07:57 UTC No. 874683

>>872914
>Take a look at this rig

crazy technical- I am impressed ... that character design sucks, reminds me of happy bunny or something... just not my taste