What Maya Release Is Most Reliable

[dwgregg3d]

I've got Maya 8.5 and a couple of Maya 6.0 licenses too, but I find myself working back in 6.0 most of the time now. Maya 8.5 just has lots of things that don't work reliably and most of them work when I convert the files back to Maya 6.01. Since I jumped from 6 to 8.5, I'm wondering what is the most stable release of all stable releases?... Was it the last official release of Alias before the big staff cuts? The first joint release or something before that?

For most of what I do, I could be running most any Maya version from 3.0 onward and have licenses from 1.0 through 8.5, but I'd like to find that sweet spot where features and stability are at a peak. I've never driven around 6.5 through 8.0. I have very low confidence that Autodesk will prove willing or capable of rectifying the many instabilities, quirks and bugs that plague 8.5 or that future releases will improve more than degenerate.

Perhaps when the next generation merge of Maya, Max and whatever results in a totally new product, but between now and then I want stability.

[dryodryo]

From my experience post 6.0, stability from best to worst is as follows:

7.0 (best)
8.5
8.0
2008 (worst)

[dwgregg3d]

QUOTE(DoctorYo @ 01/09/08, 04:26 PM) [snapback]279464[/snapback]
From my experience post 6.0, stability from best to worst is as follows:

7.0 (best)
8.5
8.0
2008 (worst)

Thanks. Sounds like it is as I feared regarding stability. Big staff cuts to squeeze profits from a big purchase is not unusual, but Maya is a big piece of code and it is running on quite a few platforms too. Just feels like a lot of stuff is falling through the cracks.

It was a bad sign when we ended up with a devil for a logo! I just didn't know if it was a Max designer expressing his view of the former rival Maya or whether it was a Maya designer symbolically expressing the take-over, layoffs and changes. The devil is in the details...

Meanwhile Maya 8.5 just threw a low memory error on a scene that isn't all that big. I think it doesn't like the fog effect.

I'll dig up a copy of 7.0+ release notes to see what was new from 6.0.

[dryodryo]

QUOTE(dwgregg3d @ 01/09/08, 03:11 PM) [snapback]279466[/snapback]
It was a bad sign when we ended up with a devil for a logo!

It's a dragon, not a devil.

Anyway, the vicissitudes of software version stability are not necessarily dependent on corporate culture. In this case, I wouldn't be too quick to lay the blame at the feet of Autodesk. They can only work with what they inherited from the Alias guys. And look at what Autodesk has done with 3ds Max: stability and performance has increased, not decreased, over the last few versions.

[dwgregg3d]

QUOTE(DoctorYo @ 01/13/08, 07:03 PM) [snapback]279587[/snapback]
It's a dragon, not a devil.

Anyway, the vicissitudes of software version stability are not necessarily dependent on corporate culture. In this case, I wouldn't be too quick to lay the blame at the feet of Autodesk. They can only work with what they inherited from the Alias guys. And look at what Autodesk has done with 3ds Max: stability and performance has increased, not decreased, over the last few versions.

Looks like a devil to me, but I've never heard it speak ;O)

I started out somewhat hopeful with Autodesk as a kind of infusion of tools that might be interesting, but experiencing ever more bugs, broken tools that have worked well since Maya 1.0 and other signs of decay that my confidence and hope is depleted. A piece of software like Maya running on so many platforms that is very complex is not apt to improve with a big staff cut. Just looks to me that a lot of basic stuff is falling through the cracks and the cracks are getting bigger.

[joojaa]

My experience is that the order of things is

8.5 sp1
7.0
8.0
8.5 without sp1 (theres a HUGE bug in there and a major release procedure glitch)
2008

However always your mileage varies depending on what you do.

QUOTE
I started out somewhat hopeful with Autodesk as a kind of infusion of tools that might be interesting,

Like i said when they merged. Maya has little to gain form 3ds max or even the cad tools autodesk has at its disposal. You cannot merge the ideas from max to maya without causing very much havock because max environment is essentially broken.

Alias had a policy of not adding functionality just for the sake of ease of use, but rather if it could be done it could be no point in hastily making change that overall makes EXPERIENCED users frustrated.

So its a tradeoff between ease of use and stability which one do you choose? Oh sorry your using maya seems obvious.

Anyway if alias would have been back on helm the progression usually was.

stable .0 version
cycle starts

unstable .0 version
stable .5 version
stable .0 version (usually api upgrade to tie things up no major user update)

HOWEVER, i think the migration form single threaded environment to a eventually fully threaded environment is the key issue of the stabilities here. Because they are in ESSENCE writing things thst workeed in maya 1.0 right to a much more complicated threaded model which is MUCH MUCH harder to do. But on the long run MUST be done.

[dryodryo]

Regarding Maya 8.5 SP1... Autodesk silently removed SP1 due to the major bug, the nature of which escapes my memory at the moment. What I remember was that a few days later they replaced it with 8.5 SP1a. That's the version I am running at the moment and it is pretty stable. That is, stuff still breaks, but at least I don't get sudden fatal errors. Much.

[andreasaxelsson]

maya 2008 the best one
up in all the ver

[vakont]

In several studios I worked with, I laid my hands on Maya since version 2, with my favourite being v7. Since Autodesk went on the helm of the product, things have started to go downhill from there. I've been around in 3D for approximately 19 years and it's the first time I am uncertain as to which direction to follow.

Maya 8.0 was totally unacceptable as a product and it was done in a very short time, throwing everything around, just to have an Autodesk logo on it. Failure.

Things started to be a bit better, stability wise in version 8.5 (and SP 1a), but still, no substantial new functionality. Crashes didn't take long to appear.

Then came 2008, which re-introduced us to the downfall. I've been working on some quite demanding projects, and the 64 bit edition of Maya 2008 just can't handle it when a scene exceeds a certain amount of memory requirements. I remember Maya 7.01, which was 32 bit, used to feel a bit stuffed up if one was trying to work on scenes larger than 1.5 GB in RAM (not file size). Beyond that, it couldn't handle them, because naturally it was running out of permitted 32bit memory.

In Maya 2008 64bit, the problem remains. Once a scene requires more than 1.4gb of RAM, crashes occur like rain and I find myself spending 80% of my time looking for workarounds and 20% for actual work.

At the moment, I do what has to be done, but I am seriously considering a jump. Autodesk killed Maya and that is the hard truth. I'm saying that because I've never seen a mega-powerful 12k euro Linux workstation crash under Maya... but Autodesk did it. Repeatedly.

[pdipierro]

In my experience, 7.0 has been by far the best. With the exception of a couple useful new features in 8.5 and 2008, things have gotten pretty shaky.

Seams like most of the effort so far has been just rearranging the menus and hotkeys, much to the ire of those of us already experienced in Maya.

Of course, it's unfair to write it off entirely, cause I was using 7.0 on XP, and now I'm using the later versions on Vista, and that's just a whole different can of worms...

[joojaa]

But just out of stability standpoint 7.0 is quite close to the last patched version of 8.5 on xp.