Comment Re:How do Maya and Max compare to Blender? (Score 1) 325
To sum up my response to the whole, "Is Blender up to it?" question.. the answer is a resounding, "No."
3D Studio Max and Maya have millions of dollars of research and development invested in to them. Feedback from the game and film industry as to what to add and what to get rid of.. and extremely useful scripting languages (MAXscript and MEL respectively) that allows people/companies to cater the program to their specific needs. "Ok, we need to get Maya to do this specific task that it doesn't do right now." "Ok, we'll write a script to do this for us." Stuff like that is a life saver in production pipelines. Being able to modify the programs so heavily that it's not even recognizable as the out of the box software anymore is extremely useful.
It's been a long time since I've played around with Blender... but can it animate fluidly? Can it render using the latest and greatest renderers? (RenderMan, MentalRay, Maxwell, Brazil, VRay, etc) Can it do dynamics and simulations? Does it have complex textruing utilities and abilities? Can you set up complex rigging solutions with it? I'm guessing the answer is no to a lot of those questions. And even if it does do some of that in some fashion or another.. I guarantee that it's not nearly up to the quality the people using Max or Maya would expect.
Now, this acquisition doesn't mean the end to either program. Autodesk has stated that it's not going to interrupt the progress of either line. I know that's kind of a bullshit line most companies would give right after acquiring something... but Autodesk has done well in the past with not screwing things up. Look at Combustion for example.
If anything, I view this as a good thing. This coming from a former Max user who was converted years ago to Maya.. but I use both in my every day production pipeline.. I hope that everything will "stay the same" or "business as usual" or whatever Autodesk has said.
Personally.. I'd love for Max to start being geared more towards the game industry and Maya geared more towards the film industry. That's how it already is basically.. but Maya has been taking over a lot of ground in the game industry as of late.. and I can only thing of a few places that use Max for feature films. (not that it's not qualified to do so, just the flexibility of Maya is more of a selling point for effects studios)
3D Studio Max and Maya have millions of dollars of research and development invested in to them. Feedback from the game and film industry as to what to add and what to get rid of.. and extremely useful scripting languages (MAXscript and MEL respectively) that allows people/companies to cater the program to their specific needs. "Ok, we need to get Maya to do this specific task that it doesn't do right now." "Ok, we'll write a script to do this for us." Stuff like that is a life saver in production pipelines. Being able to modify the programs so heavily that it's not even recognizable as the out of the box software anymore is extremely useful.
It's been a long time since I've played around with Blender... but can it animate fluidly? Can it render using the latest and greatest renderers? (RenderMan, MentalRay, Maxwell, Brazil, VRay, etc) Can it do dynamics and simulations? Does it have complex textruing utilities and abilities? Can you set up complex rigging solutions with it? I'm guessing the answer is no to a lot of those questions. And even if it does do some of that in some fashion or another.. I guarantee that it's not nearly up to the quality the people using Max or Maya would expect.
Now, this acquisition doesn't mean the end to either program. Autodesk has stated that it's not going to interrupt the progress of either line. I know that's kind of a bullshit line most companies would give right after acquiring something... but Autodesk has done well in the past with not screwing things up. Look at Combustion for example.
If anything, I view this as a good thing. This coming from a former Max user who was converted years ago to Maya.. but I use both in my every day production pipeline.. I hope that everything will "stay the same" or "business as usual" or whatever Autodesk has said.
Personally.. I'd love for Max to start being geared more towards the game industry and Maya geared more towards the film industry. That's how it already is basically.. but Maya has been taking over a lot of ground in the game industry as of late.. and I can only thing of a few places that use Max for feature films. (not that it's not qualified to do so, just the flexibility of Maya is more of a selling point for effects studios)
