As someone who worked in a similar section (animation), this is great news. Autodesk tools (especially Maya) are way too expensive in what they deliver. I'm glad many big studios realized this in that they either build their own tools (Pixar/Dreamworks) or they adapt Open Source (Blender) and help improving it.
There is still other tooling (Cinema4D, ZBrush) but those are actually working.. Maya has failed me so many times, I cannot recommend it in any way other than it is still (sadly) used very commonly among studios. And artists do not like to learn new toolings, that I also know from experience..
edit: grammar
I’m quite excited about Blender’s growing popularity.
But, FWIW, I used to animate effects at PDI/DreamWorks, and we were using Maya. Today I think it’s Houdini. In my time, modelers were using Maya as well. We had an in-house character animation tool mainly because the character rigs were custom, evaluated with an in-house scripting language, and Maya couldn’t evaluate them.
While costs are always scrutinized, the decision to use Maya had very little to do with the price of a seat of Maya. It was just a tool that many people knew already (which is a huge factor in cost, BTW) and it also did most of the things we needed to do.
All the in-house tools were constantly scrutinized for cost, and usually the question was not whether we could reduce costs by building in-house, it was the other way around: can we reduce costs by purchasing off the shelf software. Remember that each and every developer is a 6-figure salary, which can buy a lot of seats of Maya. Note this applies to contributing to Blender too... it’s very expensive to contribute to Blender, so it really has to be appreciated when it happens!
> I'm glad many big studios realized this in that they either build their own tools (Pixar/Dreamworks) or they adapt Open Source (Blender) and help improving it.
Places like Pixar/DreamWorks developed proprietary tools because they didn't exist when they started. Disney/Pixar heavily uses Maya. Disney was one of the first places to use Maya before it was released in the late 90s. Like many other places they heavily modify it. DreamWorks uses a lot of Maya and Houdini, but have proprietary rigging, animation, and renderer.
I haven't seen any of those places contribute much to Open Source unless they're driving development.
I haven't used Blender much at all. Apps like Maya, Houdini, and Nuke have a lot of under the hood architecture necessary to use in large studios that I hope Blender has, too. Photoshop, for example, is very difficult to build that kind of pipeline around.
Good to know that they're working on it more. I used it the while back trying to learn digital sculpting.
I remember reading that Blender's Sculpt mode was far behind the commercial sculpting tools such as Zbrush because they have things like Sculpting Layers.
> Autodesk tools (especially Maya) are way too expensive in what they deliver. I'm glad many big studios realized this in that they either build their own tools (Pixar/Dreamworks) or they adapt Open Source (Blender) and help improving it.
Cost isn’t the issue, it’s mainly the fact that Autodesk effectively put Maya on life support. Pixar is paying hundreds of software engineers in the Bay to develop their proprietary animation tools, which is most definitely not cheaper than a few hundred Maya seats per show.
This is a gross misunderstanding of everything in the industry.
Maya is far, far from being on life support. There are hundreds of studios around the world that use it, and autodesk do substantial development in Maya till date including updated adding USD, Bifrost and parallel graph evaluation.
The fact that Pixar have their own animation package (Presto) has nothing to do with Maya whatsoever.
The first ancestor to Presto effectively predates Maya. They've developed a lot of custom tooling and workflows around it for animation. They still use Maya for many aspects outside animation like modelling etc...
Similarly DreamWorks and rhythm and hues also had their own proprietary animation software (premo and voodoo) for similar reasons but still use Maya for other purposes.
Autodesk laid off the entire R&D staff of Maya (outside of Bifrost, which was an acquisition a few years ago and is now a one person show, mainly) and transferred ownership to their maintenance engineering division, if that isn’t life support I don’t know what is.
I think saying it's far from being on life support is really pushing it...
Maya's USD support so far is effectively just Animal Logic's open source stuff bundled with Maya, Bifrost is indeed the one place they're actually still doing development (as they still have that R&D team), Parallel graph evaluation in 2019 and 2020 are really just riding the coattails of work they did a few years ago.
Improvements to rendering infrastructure (Arnold) are orthogonal as far as I'm concerned as it's done by the SolidAngle team they acquired a few year ago.
They're effective keeping it running (moving to newer Qt versions and the future Python 3 version for VFX platforms in line with other DCCs) as far as many people are concerned, which at a stretch could be construed as "on life support".
> Cost isn’t the issue, it’s mainly the fact that Autodesk effectively put Maya on life support.
Maya isn't on life support, it's simply that so many studios augment Maya with their own tools & pipeline that it's not necessary for Autodesk to update it with the same frequency that Alias did. It's effectively an OS for 3D content creation for some of the larger shops.
An interesting point of view, which entails an important question: in which ways is Maya superior to Blender in such a platform role? Is Blender going to catch up?
If Maya is only adopted because of habits and ongoing projects, investment in training and customization, and network effects it has no future.
Autodesk is doubling down on CAD and engineering (their leadership has even said so publicly) — VFX and animation is just a much smaller market. I personally think this is very short sighted.
Pixar have always developed and used their own in-house animation tools, it's a big part of their culture. I seriously doubt they'd be using Maya (or anything else) regardless of how advanced it was.
Very cool! Glad to see Nucleus still getting some love, Jos would be happy — I was talking to a Pixar effects fellow at SIGGRAPH and was under the impression that Houdini’s constraint solver thing had spread like wildfire in that department.
Maya is a huge program. So any frustrations will probably be around which parts you use. There's a quippy quote about programming languages, "There are two types of programming languages. Those people always complain about and those nobody uses."
Often at large studios, the pain points I've seen with Maya are scaling. For rigging it can be difficult to manage complex rigs. When the number of nodes in the scene increase things slow down a lot. The architecture isn't that great at being procedural or modular compared to something like Houdini. There's similar scaling issues with lighting on a large project (I haven't used the new render layers, but I doubt that will fix core issues). The larger studios have spent years working on their own wrappers to manage lighting large shows, but they're still are looking to other apps like Katana or Houdini.
I was recently talking to an fx artist who started in Maya and moved to Houdini about 5 years ago. They were saying the number of times they got corrupt scene files (on crash) was breathtakingly smaller in Houdini--I think they said 0 or 1 ever. That alone was a huge win for them.
Personally, I hate opening a geometry heavy scene (or one that requires computing a lot of things) just to change an attribute and resave. I've been on a few projects where it'll take an hour or more to open a scene to start working. (here and there if it's a MayaAscii file and I can edit the text)
Yep. It's not like "scaling" is a 1 dimensional thing, either. On one project it'll be 1000s or millions of space ships, on another it'll be 1-5 photo real creatures with closeups, on another it'll be an environment the size of NYC. You do you best to cheat, but often you get handed something awful from another department with no time to redo it.
Just never close Maya and pray it doesn't crash or leak too much memory =)
There is still other tooling (Cinema4D, ZBrush) but those are actually working.. Maya has failed me so many times, I cannot recommend it in any way other than it is still (sadly) used very commonly among studios. And artists do not like to learn new toolings, that I also know from experience.. edit: grammar