🧵 What (important) animation tools Maya has that Blender lacks?
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 15:27:11 UTC No. 996424
Yet another annoying Maya and Blender thread.
What tools does Maya have for character animation, which Blender does not have, or has them, but in much worse state? I've read plenty of articles on the subject, but didn't manage to get a clear answer.
What I've gathered that Maya has an animation layers built-in, while Blender requires an addon for it. Also Maya has animbot script, which, people say, very powerful? What other important, big animation tools Maya has, but Blender has not? Also, what kind of stuff Animbot has, which Blender has not?
Asking because I work in Blender myself, got some experience in it. And during my work, I often encountered various problems with gimbal locks and graphs (like handles suddenly shifting in an unpredictable way), and I wonder if Maya has something to counteract those, and other common issues animators encounter while using other software?
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 15:36:34 UTC No. 996426
>>996424
Maya doesn't use typology unlike Blender. So you can get much better animation-ready models without any artifacts that could come form "bad typology". Like a butt not becoming flat when raising a leg.
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 15:57:26 UTC No. 996429
>>996426
I don't think I understand this. Can you elaborate? If you meant "topology", then all models consist of vertices, edges and polygons, which form topology, which is deformated by the skeleton.
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:04:08 UTC No. 996431
>>996429
It's a troll. Don't know why someone would be retarded enough to try and bait people on the slowest board on 4chan, though.
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:04:22 UTC No. 996432
>>996430
Blender has Rigify, which has all the tools needed, if I understand what you mean. What exact advantages Maya rigging system has?
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:35:39 UTC No. 996435
>>996432
watch a couple of Maya vireos on YT and you will know what I mean
plus, from what I remember they tried to make riggify modular but you couldnt do basic shit like having a two headed rig
I gather it's successor "cloud rig" still hasnt been completed either
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:44:15 UTC No. 996437
>>996435
but you can make a two headed rig using rigify
I'll have to watch some maya videos, I have no idea what animation in maya is like, do you have a specific video you can recommend?
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:49:22 UTC No. 996439
>>996437
not really, sorry
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:53:06 UTC No. 996440
>>996437
NTA but Maya’s learning videos can show you features not found anywhere else: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?li
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:59:20 UTC No. 996441
>>996424
its hard to answer that because its not a single tool or set of tools. maya can make infinite rigs. theres nothing you cant relate to something else. theres no curve it cant draw. you can make rigs that do all the animating for you. important because animators only have the brain power to animate. if they have to "figure something out" they jave to take a 3 hour break and cry before they can animate again. all of maya is MEL commands and for a ling time it even has python support so your rig can also utilize logic.
i onow blender is oython based so you could also script python rigs but its more like opening the case and rewrining the thing where are maya is like a ready to modify bread board with all of its commands readybfor you to manipulate.
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:01:30 UTC No. 996442
>>996437
the series "the art of rigging" really shows you that maya is an infinite colliedescope of power with rigging. there is nothing you cannot do.
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 21:53:33 UTC No. 996475
>>996424
The biggest thing for me is that Maya has around double the performance compared to Blender when it comes to animation, and can handle higher polycount/more complex rigs much better. The other big thing is Maya's graph editor. Most 3D software has some form of a graph editor of course, but Maya's is considered the best and fastest to use by most animators. A good graph editor is important, since usually animators spend most of their time looking at it, while animating. Although there's some crazy exceptions, who don't use it for whatever reason, but it's rare. For me personally, not using the graph editor would almost be like working blind.
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 21:56:10 UTC No. 996477
About graph editor - what does Maya's graph editor has that Blender lacks? Why is it better?
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 21:57:16 UTC No. 996478
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 22:55:39 UTC No. 996482
>>996477
Now, I'll admit that I've only tried animating in blender for a bit personally. But some things I remember hating when doing quick tests was that even if I have only a specific channel selected, I can still see the other curves, if I'm isolating a curve like that, I obviously don't want to see the rest or be able to accidentally click them. You can of course click the small eye icons to hide them, but that's a tedious extra step that adds up in time taken. Same with having separate x and y keys for constraining the transform tools to a specific axis, compared to just doing everything with shift in Maya. The pop-up dialogue boxes I also hated, just create the damned key on the active curve, instead of asking me whether I want to key every channel or just one specific channel every time. If I want to set a key on all channels, I'll have a separate hot key for it. Basically it's little things like this and useless extra clicks that make it feel sluggish to work with. It's of course entirely possible there's ways to customize the blender graph editor that I just couldn't figure out in my short tests with it. The problems is, that I'd need to know that it's better, for me to put in more time to give it a fairer shot, considering I'm so used to Maya's graph editor and tools. A lot of it is probably going to be subjective preference as well, like I greatly prefer painting my channel selection, instead of the rectangle selection that is used in Blender. But in general, stuff like this is hard to answer, it's like asking someone why they prefer a particular hammer over another. It could be something as simple as it feels better in their hands, and they couldn't be able to elaborate why that is. One more thing that comes to mind and I at least couldn't find, is a way to explicitly transform multiple keys with an absolute number in the graph editor, for example increasing the value of all selected keys by exactly +2.5 units.
Anonymous at Wed, 25 Sep 2024 23:20:53 UTC No. 996486
>>996477
>>996478
>>996482
I forgot about this one: there's no "stacked view" in blender, pic related. Which can be very useful in many situations when working with multiple curves at the same time. It's much more clearer than having for example normalized curves overlapping each other. Of course there are situations where you do want that, or absolute curves, but it's quick to switch between them, with the default hotkeys when needed.
Anonymous at Thu, 26 Sep 2024 12:16:41 UTC No. 996503
Never used Maya, but I've seen it's possible to tweak motion paths (motion trails?) in 3D space, whereas in Blender you can't do that. There are/were Blender addons for this like MotionTrail3D, and the Blender devs have been considering adding this to Blender eventually, but it's probably years away as it's not a priority it seems. I always wanted to have the ability to move the motion paths of character bones in 3D space rather than toying with multiple curves in the curve editor for hours just to get the proper path and motion.
Anonymous at Thu, 26 Sep 2024 12:40:25 UTC No. 996506
>>996503
>adding this to Blender eventually
two more years...
in all seriousness, either use blender as is (that includes whatever addon you want) or find an alternative. dont fall for their lies
Anonymous at Fri, 27 Sep 2024 19:01:26 UTC No. 996613
>>996486
what? why dont they have this?
Anonymous at Fri, 27 Sep 2024 21:26:46 UTC No. 996649
>>996613
Who knows. It's been requested for a while, and it's in development from my understanding, but no idea when it'll actually be introduced.
Anonymous at Wed, 16 Oct 2024 08:15:52 UTC No. 998513
Interesting comparison.