[Bf-funboard] from Blender to Maya - little "review"

[Sangwoo Hong]

There are two reasons why Maya is the "standard" in the film industry
neither of which has anything to do with the quality of the product which in
my opinion as well as that of several posters on this thread is that it's
not really all that good.  The first reason of course is as stated below by
the previous poster to this thread.

Keep in mind, maya is the industry standard not because it's a good
> piece of software (it's not) but because it's highly extensible.
> Studios can extend maya to do whatever they need, and they like that;
> it's almost more of a software platform then an artistic tool.


The second reason which a lot of people over look is the fact that the
marriage of Alias and Wavefront which gave birth to Maya pre-dated the
existence of "professional" 3D software running on PCs running windows.
 This is why Linux is the OS of choice in most of the big effects/animation
houses in operation right now because the facilities themselves pre-date the
existence of professional 3D software running on PCs running windows and
have always run their business on machines running Unix variants.  There was
a time when things could have gone either way between Maya and Softimage as
the dominant 3D package in the film industry. We all know how that turned
out with Microsoft buying Softimage and forcing them to become windows
centric.  VB scripting in a 3D package?  Like we really needed that.
 Microsoft might have brought "pro" 3D packages to the windows platform
kicking and screaming but of course most "high end" film/effects facilities
ignored them for various reasons, hated of Microsoft being one of them.  (I
once had a manager of mine make fun of PCs for using alphabet letters to
designate drive name.  This when my home PC was running circles around the
piece of shit SGIs I was straddled with at work.  WTF?)  Anyway, now
Softimage is but a shell of it used to be back in the Jurassic Park glory
days and have actually been absorbed in to the mothership that is Autodesk,
the purveyor of "pro" 3D packages on, you guessed it, windows PCs.
How things change in just 10 short years...

phong.
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