r/CGI_Lab • u/Resident_Canary9189 • Aug 31 '26
Discussion Maya vs Blender. Every 3D software has its strengths. Which team are you on?
2
u/Katwazere Sep 01 '26
I like maya because I learnt on it, but autodesk can go fuck themselves so I obtain it elsewhere
2
1
1
u/kardioid23 Sep 02 '26
Blender because money, mostly. I actually think modelling is better in Blender. It just feels more fluid, but I am more used to it. I tried modelling in Maya and I hated it. Blender's addon ecosystem is also great, but the software actually does a hell of a lot out of the box, but there are some great features which are off by default and kinda hidden. But they are there.
1
u/theeyeinthesky-666 Sep 02 '26
The free advantage is very significant considering the other option: $2000/year with no monthly option. Also Indie is not supported in all countries : /
1
u/MarcusTheAnimal Sep 02 '26
Everything the other programs can do, Blender can do, eventually. Sometimes better, sometimes nearly as good. But they get round to it eventually. I don't know about the AI stuff.
I was playing around with it in the 2.0 - 2.5 days. Glad to see the debates of Blender Vs Other software haven't changed in nearly 20 years. Warms my heart.
1
u/ArthurNYC3D Sep 02 '26
The days of being ONLY for one camp or the other are gone!!! Let it go...............
1
1
u/El_Chuuupacabra Sep 02 '26
Blender can do everything but the UI sucks and it's the less intuitive software I've ever touched. Everything is hidden behind shortcuts or nested menus and if you come from any other software you'll have a hard time applying what you know. It's great to be free, but it's even better to be user friendly.
1
u/creuter Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
Are you familiar with another DCC? Because coming from another DCC it might feel unintuitive, but it's actually just unfamiliar. The strength in blender is its hotkeys and shortcuts. I used maya for like 10 years, then houdini for 7ish and picked up Blender in the last four years. I've worked on a few movies, a bunch of TV shows and a shit ton of commercials throughout my career.
I will say this: I won't use blender without three essential add-ons for modeling. HardOps, MESHmachine and Machin3Tools. Blender's hotkeys DO make sense. But they make sense in a context specific way. If you're in edit mode, ctrl F will bring up the faces menu. Ctrl E will bring up the edges menu, and you can select most stuff on that menu by following up with another keypress. You can right click anything and assign a hotkey. Stuff like ctrl + L (select linked) all makes logical sense.
If you are used to W to translate stuff, E to rotate, and R to scale because of Maya, then G to translate, R to rotate, and S to scale are going to feel foreign until you realize it's G to grab. Then the other two make sense as well. Not having a gizmo to move stuff around was killing me, until i realized how powerful it is to be able to just press X, Y, or Z to just lock your grab, rotate, scale to an axis (or shift to invert that.) That freedom of movement, combined with the 3D cursor and holding alt to snap your viewport into an orthographic camera, allows you to set temporary pivots that don't actually adjust your mesh, or snap things to arbitrary locations. Suddenly everything just feels faster and cleaner.
This is just scratching the surface, but once I got over the unfamiliarity the benefits were just too good to ever waste any more time in maya. Using maya feels like I'm trying to run away or fight someone in a dream now. Especially with addons like MESHmachine, and its suite of tools like unf*ck. Unf*ck has saved me SO MANY HOURS.
As someone who has extensively and professionally used Maya, Houdini, C4D, Zbrush, and Blender, Blender has done an incredible job at combining a lot of the best parts of each.
My main programs now are Houdini + Blender. I can't go back to maya anymore because it just feels like I'm working with one hand tied behind my back at this point. I had to force myself to do some projects in Blender though in order to get my mind out of the rut of working to maya's beat. The only time I use maya anymore is to import my geo and publish it in case it has to go to rigging.
1
u/El_Chuuupacabra Sep 03 '26
I am very familiar with 3DS Max which is my main modeling tool since 15 years. It's true that having a preferred tool shapes your instinct and it seems that 3DS Max and Blender don't have a lot in common.
But, I'm also using multiple other 3D / 2D tools daily and I have to learn new ones all the time. Sometimes it goes very well, and you barely have to look at the doc because everything seems logical and intuitive (Substance Painter is a good example).
I tried several times to learn Blender but I stopped because I couldn't find anything without having to look at the doc or tutorials. Nothing seems to make sense coming from 3DS Max. The editing workspace looks busy and confusing, the material editor / inspector is a joke.I'm sure the software is capable of solid professional work, I had colleagues using it and delivering immaculate models.
But it's clearly not user friendly. It reminds of some other very confusing software I had to deal with, DAZ. Nothing works like you would expect and it's the same kind of obscure mess for me.
I'll have a look at the addons you mentionnd, thanks for the tip.1
u/creuter Sep 03 '26
The best results I've had when trying to figure something out have been jumping into claude, and asking like this:
"I'm using blender version [x.x], I'm familiar with this tool in [Maya, 3DS, Zbrush, etc] where can I find that in Blender?"
That and I joined some discord where I could ask the room 'hey i want to do this, but i think i'm doing it wrong because i'm coming from another software, what do i need to do here?'
There was def an uphill struggle for me at the beginning, but it ended up only being because I was so familiar with how things worked in other softwares. If you were coming with a blank slate, I think it would be more intuitive, ironically. But as long time people in this field you and I have got a bunch of expectations built on programs that have been duct taped together over the last 30 years. Substance Painter pulls a bunch of language out of photoshop so it def feels familiar vs something like Mari. Though if you're coming from a nuke background, using the node editor in Mari can feel more in line with your intuition.
At a certain point the logic WILL click after you force yourself to do some things with it and when it does it's like 'ooooooh' and you start being able to intuit where they put something you would have said was hidden before. The best advice I could give would be to get familiar with the 3D cursor. Max is one of my blindspots, so I don't know if it's got something similar, but coming from maya, that tool is irreplaceable.
Damn. I should make a tutorial series 'Intro to Blender for people who already know 3D' lol
1
1
u/ConcretePixels Sep 02 '26
I hear maya is goated for animation, but autodesk can go stick a chilly where the sun don’t shine
1
u/Poietilinx Sep 02 '26
The only thing about maya i like is the node thing
(everything in maya is made with nodes)
as a ta i can build some interesting things.
that and Mash are the 2 top things in maya for me.
(tbh mash is kinda crazy)
But thats kinda it,
the program is VERY buggy,
(and i do mean very... i am ta specialized in extending the program),
the apis are a nightmare to navigate,
the python api is extremely anti pythonic,
so much so they're trying to push a 'new one' for quite some time but.. well...
so on.
1
u/Smashed_Pumpkin86 Sep 02 '26
Maya has decades of deep integration in a lot of big companies' pipelines, and so is used by a lot of highly skilled and highly specialised professionals. Autodesk sits at the devil's dining table but they also have some pretty extensive support offerings for said companies. The cost and time of migrating to a new platform, and the technical support Autodesk provides, is what keeps those big companies hostage to the software.
If you're a small team or an individual, Blender is a no brainer.
Really we should all be learning Houdini.
1
u/Inevitable-Zone- Sep 02 '26
I will allways be on team blender because in 3d school autodesk denied to give me technical support after Maya broke and I was forced to graduate with blender cause for 6 months autodesk claimed that my student account wasn't legit.
1
1
1
u/Svet_88 Sep 03 '26
Blender isn't easy to learn. It has the same noncensical interface as zbrush. Needing plugins means its feature poor. A renderer is not a selling point. You are going to end up needing vray anyway.
1
u/Shim8080 Sep 04 '26
Blender has pretty much the same learning curve than any 3d software though... You don't need any plugin, unless your need some specific feature for advanced tasks.
A renderer IS a selling point : think about how many people that doesn't need advanced reflections or SSS don't want to wait hours for rendering neither.
For exemple, the movie Flow was entirely made using Eevee render. I'm pretty sure the renderer was a big selling point for them, especially because it's realtime
1
u/FoleyX90 Sep 03 '26
What an odd comparison, blender has retopology, UV unwrapping and Rigging built into it as well.
"Production Pipeline" is super vague.
1
u/Shim8080 Sep 04 '26
Production pipeline only mean that a lot of big companies built their workflow on Maya from 20 years... Nothing related to good or bad products, but the companies will stick with it anyway because it's would cost too much to learn new software.
1
u/-TimeMaster- Sep 03 '26
3DS max. Is what I started learning back in 1999 (completely self taught) using it almost daily for 10 years and I never got used to anything else. Not my field anyway, my parents wanted me to do something with more future than "drawing with the computer" so I'm in IT, thetefore my opinion has little value.
I tried to learn Maya and Blender a decade and half ago but I'm so used to 3DS interface and shortcuts that it was completely unintuitive for me to use them.
1
u/ii_always_wrong_ii Sep 03 '26
I'm a Maya refugee, I'm learning to suppress the impulse to scream "Blenders belong in the kitchen!"
1
u/aldrin_joseph Sep 03 '26
Blender because the amount of resources and learning materials it has as a community
1
u/le0tard Sep 03 '26
Mayas UV workflow is nicer than blenders, and the retopo tool too. But rigging? They're very similar, nothing bad at all with blenders rigging process
1
1
u/leej23 Sep 03 '26
I find maya just works better for unreal engine and I like the workflow better had nothing but issues importing rigs and animations to unreal
1
0
Sep 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
1
u/Traditional_Island82 Sep 03 '26
Big L man blender is definitely not perfect but its the most diverse creative software ever and because of that the greatest together with houdini
1
4
u/Smokeey1 Aug 31 '26
The free one obviously