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 =)
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)