I Wish Autodesk Would Not Buy Alias

[ricgreen]

Thats right I am a autodesk hater!
This is the worst new ever!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[joojaa]

Oh god dam it.... well time to strat using xsi then i guess.

on second tough houdini is closer to maya for me

[hansesurfer]

joojaa, even you are thinking about leaving maya..

I know this is not the right place to say that:

It seems that now the time has to come for the change to XSI!!

You dump and silly Alias: stop that Acqusition, if you ever want me stay with Maya!

And thats my wish!!

[joojaa]

well ive been tooling up to the possibility for a year now. Mainly because there are some stuff i need to use prman that maya does not realy cut it in. Tough with sufficent dso writing i can prettymuch stay on whatever system i like.

But im not going to jump the gun. But problem is if maya gets consolidated in the max code then its not going to be pretty. However autodesk is a wierd company that can compeete with itself even.

But hwt more worries me is what happens to aliases close ties to the real prduction comunity. Will that mean no more mtor? Or what theres plenty of thinsg to consider

[theplu]

Dont worry,
Autodesk released Maya 8 today.

[superegophobia]

QUOTE(DaSeitz @ 07/31/06, 02:35 PM) [snapback]243920[/snapback]
Dont worry,
Autodesk released Maya 8 today.

Yeah but the new features are weak. I guess we'll see what kind of benchmarks the new version does but as a Mac user I'm very very disappointed. No 64-bit (OS X), no Universal Binary; and since speed is their main selling point, what incentives do Mac users have to upgrade?

[joojaa]

QUOTE(superegophobia @ 08/02/06, 10:43 AM) [snapback]244043[/snapback]
Yeah but the new features are weak.

Well actualy multithreading some of the operations gui IS a big deal, actualy proabbly the biggest deal EVER in history of maya uprgades. Tough grantted you could see them tooling towards it in several versions. This paves the way for continued maya lifespan, if it wouldnt have come i would have had to declare mayaa dying prog.

You can finaly benefit even modelling form all thise new quad and soon hepta proc qorkstations.

Well, what can I say theres allways been a big downside to usng maya and mac. Any 3d infact, but comp is macs domain.

[pandusen]

Why is this so bad..
Of course alias was a superior company. and the name is nicer than autodesk.. but its still the same people behind it. not all of them, but allot of them. then there is the bonus of sharing technology between the packages. guys its not all that bad.. and the update in a matter of amount of cool new features and toys. its no different from 6.0 to 7.0 maybe there was a little feature in there but not much. if you remember when alias released 7.0 they said that they would focus on improving what was there already rather then implementing new stuff. and maya really needed that! so its the same.. i think it would have been the same update if Alias was still its own. look at how fast this one came out! i think that many of these updates was made while still under Alias!

[joojaa]

no no 8 is great but its suffereing form misundertanding maya brand a bit. However the terading conversion is better then 64 bit support, even if no one says so, it makes maya stand tall.

bu the shorlist is:

For one now we have less support whan it was Alias, this is fact ive hard this form 10 people areound the globe allready. I hopre they fix tihis ASAP!

[davesrose]

Was anyone else surprised where Autodesk put Maya at their booth during this year's Siggraph? At my local Maya users group meeting, an Autodesk representative said that Maya is going to be in tandom with Max. But Autodesk dumped a tiny little Maya showing in the back of their floor space, and mainly highlighted Max 9 (many new features for it seemed to be age old Maya tools). Even on this site, Autodesk seems to be pushing Max 9 more then Maya 8. I had to actually ask the reps about the next Maya. Former Alias reps said that Maya's still being well developed, but their faces seemed sullen. At least 8 is worth the upgrade for 64 bit, multithread capabilities. Time will tell to see if Maya still gets developed. But Siggraph was reason enough for me to start learning XSI. I've started teaching myself some of its basic workflow (missing some quick features of Maya, and being dazzled by some ones only XSI has). If nothing else, I'll get used to using 2 programs! I'm not going to be mired by one program if its support all of a sudden goes away. sigh

QUOTE(Joojaa @ 08/17/06, 10:03 AM) [snapback]245394[/snapback]
bu the shorlist is:

For one now we have less support whan it was Alias, this is fact ive hard this form 10 people areound the globe allready. I hopre they fix tihis ASAP!

[joojaa]

Well yes its because nmaya has lot to give to ax but max has only a limitted amount of stuff it can give to maya (appart form some polytools). Character studdio for maya anyone? I mean its ridicuklous idea.

[davesrose]

Tell me about it! I could only stand watching Autodesk's presentation for so long....trying to wow a probably ignorant crowd with things Maya has had. The one selling point they tried to give Maya users was integration with Max.....whoppie! Like I want to backtrack with animation tools. I've wondered if Max still has the edge with poly tools, but I'm not going to try learning it. Maya's tools have certainly come a long way (finally an integration with edge loops!). If I'm going to have to get used to a new workflow, might as well upgrade and not downgrade. Since I'm an artist, and not programmer, I'm going with XSI over Houdini.

[rob-bateman]

I've started tooling up to make the switch to Xsi. I'm really not happy with Maya8. The threading is nice, the MPxImage stuff is all good, but there are more than a few things that annoy me - One of them is that Maya features have never been removed before, without at least a version in-between deprecating the features that are to be removed.

The buttons to switch between the graph editor, dopesheet & trax sit nastily on the right and obscure the underlying icons.

They've messed up the API help docs so that now i have an additional bar down the side i can't get rid of. Makes it painful to navigate.

The new create polygon primitives is rubbish, and is a broken metaphor. The volume primitives don't work in the same way, and the poly/nurb implimentation sucks. I keep creating a polyQuad rather than a cube. Rubbish. At least you can turn that off - but it does beg the question, do i re-write all of my tools to use their new broken-metaphor, or do i just ignore that idiocy.

I've now got the joy of re-learning the shortcut keys i've become accustomed to (ctrl+d can't be used to create an instance).

MPxMayaAsciiFilter scares the hell out of me. Why on earth would i wan't to mess with the way Maya saves files? I want that to be a fundamental thing that just works, don't let some plugin writer mess me about.

Why on earth would i use MCommonSystemUtils::getEnv(), when i could just write getEnv() ?

To quote the API docs, "The MGeometryManager provides an interface for loading and using hardware textures.", to which i have to say WTF???? That's not entirely obvious given the name and the function getGeometry() that it defines. Again, WTF?

Why split modelling into 2 menus? I know that max does this, but why do i want to do it? I keep hitting F5 and i don't get what i'm used to getting.

If you go into the script editor, type a few lines of random rubbish, then do Ctrl+Shift+L a few times, you will get 2 sets of line numbers. I guess that feature was added by an Autodesk guy who did not RTFM.

Anyone else find that the poly messages obscure what the hell they are trying to click on?

I'm also interested why pluginInfo -dependNodeInfo would ever be useful? Why the hell do i want API side node ID's in mel? Not really sure, and what does it actually give you?

And, don't even get me started on Autodesk's support (or rather, complete and total lack of any support whatsoever). 3 days to reply to my support query? Well it's now been a week, cheers Autodesk.

[davesrose]

me shrinks back in terror!

Haven't looked at 8 yet (was thinking of installing it on my rendering computer and going 64 bit). But I didn't know Autodesk has been up to no good monkeying with Maya's API already. And that was the best thing about Maya....the GUI stayed constant and Alias/ Wavefront only added things. I also like the fact that Polys were polys, Nurbs nurbs. So many programs like to use their own names for things. Rob's description is good enough for me to figure that Maya will be Max by the next upgrade.

As for XSI, I don't know if you've looked at it yet. I've been messing with it this week....getting the basics. They like to have all sorts weird names for things (not a mention of Nurbs anywhere), but have some really great features. I've heard from one XSIer that they completely changed things with the interface when Avid aquired them (guess it's a never ending pattern!), so some things seem less streamlined and so many redundancies all over the place. I haven't got much into the Nurbs modeling yet, but it seems like there's less seams when deforming. The XSI guy also says that while XSI doesn't have as many Mental Ray nodes as Maya, it's better integrated. I'm looking forward to learning about that. Hopefully their interface is better with final gather and global illumination.....sometimes I spend so much time trying to tweak my renders to look pretty, but not take so many minutes to render a frame.

QUOTE(Rob Bateman @ 08/18/06, 09:19 AM) [snapback]245532[/snapback]
I've started tooling up to make the switch to Xsi. I'm really not happy with Maya8. The threading is nice, the MPxImage stuff is all good, but there are more than a few things that annoy me - One of them is that Maya features have never been removed before, without at least a version in-between deprecating the features that are to be removed.

[joojaa]

Yes i agree with bateman why would they mix with our wortkflow. Its like teking 5 yeras back in time on all peoples workflow. Stop touching tools that work.

IT just shows they dont uderstand maya. YOu cant just add all requested goodies. Because youll end up with 3dstudio MAX syndrome. Wich i dont expect developpers of said program to unsderstand.

Ive been tooling for houdini. Since after maya houdini has the best renderman inetrface.

Anyway i think we should write a open letter to autodesk to let them understand.

But i think the most sgnificant downgrade is the HELP, maya again. I mean its SLOW now. Otherwise i can live with it for now.

Anyway, i must say autodesk has a problem at hand here, they can either keep the maya customers or they can ditch them, thing is i dont think poeple who have choosen maya as their platform realy would switch over to max, because theers a reason they use maya and max just does not cut it here. Maya and MAX represent the ultimate opposite ends of 3d onlook and thats not easy to do, without breaking on or other.

QUOTE
Why on earth would i use MCommonSystemUtils::getEnv(), when i could just write getEnv() ?

BEcause you want to develop viruses!

the filter on the otehrhand could be used as somesort of on render insertion fo stuff to the scene?!?!

PS. the thing that hurts me most s that the downgraded gui changes market themselves as new features, wile they arent they are just downgrades of old ones.

[pandusen]

what the freakin hell... they changed the GUI??? who in there right mind would do that... this is weird. i dont beleave that autodesk programmers are doing anything in maya just yet.. its way to soon it must still be former alias people programming it. and then again.. the Maya API is easy to change.. but why change the thing that made Maya so perfect.. THE LAYOUT & Workflow.. my god.. if this is true then they are realy screwing it up. why turn Maya in to MAX? i mean shit,.. it cant be don.. you will end op with frankenstein. i hope this is not the way things are going..
BTW im also having a look at XSI. and so far its way to difrent from maya to start working with it... would like to se some Maya2XSI migration videos! I have been with maya sence the very beginning.. i know every corner af that program.. getting to that level in XSI would take years.. :s

[yashu]

relax man, the layout is exactly the same, only the menus changed.
And i have to admit that now the commands are MUCH MORE LOGICAL PLACED into menus than before, they've got rid of menus in menus in menus (aka submenus biggrin.gif) and duplicate commands (such as extrude vertex, extrude edge, extrude my ass; now it's simply extrude). Aswell the new menusets configuration is wellcome, it's much better now, in my opinion. Most menus have been restructurated, and it's good they finaly did this, it was getting really bad to see select loops tool into the edit menu or who knows what other tools scattered all over the place.

And about the new OPTIONAL poly creation way:
you can simply click in the viewport to place the new object with the default settings
you can drag to place the new obj and change width, height, etc
you can create new primitives on LIVE objects, and they get aligned by the normals (pretty cool to fastly create greeble like scenes)
AND this is OPTIONAL as i said. you can turn it off with one single click if you can't get used to it.

all the changes they've done are wellcome, and waited for a very very long time. And it doesn't take much time to get used/adapt to the changes.

Now if they can only implement the loop/ring select tools directly on the select tool and soft sel on move/rot/scale tools... dreaming hehe

[pandusen]

Ok.. im cool
Just dont hope that they are going to change it to be as MAX.. aaarrh.. thats where i came from in the first place.. long time ago.. dont want to end there again..he

[joojaa]

QUOTE(yashu @ 08/24/06, 02:24 PM) [snapback]246041[/snapback]
you can create new primitives on LIVE objects, and they get aligned by the normals (pretty cool to fastly create greeble like scenes)

Actualy maya allready had this admittedly hidden (even the tool click building but that was not activated). Anyway the new structure is actualy worse in many respects. Since now you neeed to hunt for thigs in much more menus than before (sure if you only used polytools for polygonel modelling, but thing is you dont since you use nurbs to build up the gaps, wich are now inconvinently placed)

Besides if you want to do greebling for gods sake Maya has a even better tool for that (that was there even in maya 7), thats about 10 times faster. Its like comparing a bicycle with a jetplane. But yes for you what seems like e upgrade ensures your using the suboptimal way.

Try to use geometry paint next time you greeble (if you have s tylus its liek taking candy form achild compared to doing them one by one), note i did this without much tought on the pattern i could have done that too.

Heres a video!

Faster greebling to you all! (by the way if you didnt know maya has had this tool form maya 1, 2or 3)

Now for example the extrude options while superficialy more compact are WAY MORE COMPACT, for example compare the old extrude options to the new ones! THis is bad you can n longer work in a no history mode. Or go areound g cliking stuff.

Also collapsing the tool into one is a slight dowgrade if atleast before you knew what you got now you can think you can do this.

[user_deleted]

hey joojaa what do you use to capture those videos?