I have been using Maya for 2 years now and am considering doing a degree were they use soft. I was wondering if anyone has learnt maya and changed over to soft, i know its good to know a few different tools but did anyone have any problems, found it easy etc etc ??

Any comments welcome...!


jonathan

well lets say learning maya is easier coz its more userfriendlier.

maya got shit load of popup windows with huge amount of options but most of them don't even have to be there. in soft you don't get much options coz everything you need is already done automatically. that's the beauty of XSI, do whatever you want, what you want and when you want and it doesn't scrue your workflow.


taughts of an 8 months XSI and maya user.

The only thing i can say is that i only meet a guy that *really* knows what maya is doing under that mess.

And that is because, although easy to start, is very complex to get deep into it, while XSI is clearer and more powerful in its concepts and foundation (ActiveX technology in not the holy grail, but is going to make the different very soon).

Ive been learning XSi for jsut over 5 months and Ive found it very straightforward! .....once you've found where all the buttons are

to rtfm or not to rtfm, that is the effin question, no?

Definitely to rtfm
There are many hidden things both in xsi and maya.
_________________
Andyba, 3d artist
skills: 3d modeling, texturing, rendering, 3d character animation, compositing
3d software experience: 3ds max, Maya, Softimage XSI, Deep Paint 3d, Body Paint 3D, Wings 3D, Z Brush
2d software experience: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After effects, Macromedia Flash, Freehand

I think xsi is easier to learn.

I've been using Maya for years and believe me. It's a piece of crap. It's WAY buggy. You can't do anything really complex on it otherwise it keeps crashing. It's a wonder anyone can get any work done on it. It's UI is crap and inconsistent. It's over engineered ... and not in a good way. The design underlying it is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED. And it doesn't seem like there's any one design philosophy. Think: bunch of chimps. The absolute WORST THING: Maya likes to create a lot of things behind the scenes that are not represented in the UI. You have no way of knowing what's been generated, no way of managing it, and no way of deleting it, except with it's craptastic scripting language PyMel (forget Mel, Mel should be put to death) or perhaps going into the ascii file and surgically removing the offending data (which I've had to do countless times). I like to compare Maya to a dog overdosed on ex-lax. Believe me, you don't want that hound on your desktop.

I've been taught both maya and xsi. I am currently using maya because I have to for my job.

Maya is garbage compared to xsi. If you used both extensively, you will think to yourself, why can't maya be more like xsi. Only idiots think maya is better because it is more customizable. It simply is not, all the things that you can customize, is already built in and fully functional in xsi.

When I am working there have been A LOT more "wtf? Why isn't this working?" moments with maya than with xsi. Especially with animating, the graph editor is much better in xsi. In modelling, there's a really cool tool called the M tool in xsi, that maya doesn't have.

I have used Max, Maya and Softimage within the last one year and I have to say Softimage is way ahead of it's competition. Learn Softimage, you will thank yourself later for relieving you from the torments of Maya.


And that M tool is actually called the "Tweak component tool" which btw, Maya lacks as result of which some one had to develop a plugin for it called NEX.

It surprises me that Maya with so many deficiency is still the most popular 3D package among the peoples.

I think it is popular because the old guys who are teaching 3D are using Maya. Those old guys are lazy enough to learn a new 3D Package and so they are stuck with Maya. But we, the younger generation need to know, that like the old guys, Maya is getting old too, perhaps a bit too old, at least for me.

I am not saying that the elders should be thrown away, all I am saying is that the great elders need to rest as they have worked really hard all their life and truly deserves some rest.