In Maya, you are time locked. Each edit you make to your model piles up history, which you need to delete to free up memory and sanity... but that means you are left with a collapsed model. It is a fucking pain in the ass.
Modifiers are applied ontop of your model, making changes like doing the symmetry, relaxing, triangulating, making tweaks to the geo and subdivision.
They are not time locked, and can be quickly moved around, toggled on and off, instanced and reordered.
Max defeats Blender because it's modifiers stack vertically and can be passed selections from the previous modifier below. So as topo changes, those selections can.
In blender you can pass vertex sets to modifiers, so you are essentially time locked under the modifiers
As an example, I can model a shoulder plate, apply a subdivision, a shell modifier to add thickness and a spline to add trims, that can set material ids, which I can then pass to a volume select modifier to apply further bevels to the visible plates.
In blender you can't
Blender beats max on the modernity of the tools, but has a middling modifier set.
Maya is based on nodes per action, not modifiers, and is therefore terrible for dynamic non destructive modelling.
If you are an environmental artist, I strongly recommend 3dsmax. The modifier stack combined with reference clones (instancing a mesh but letting modifiers ontop) and instancing modifiers across objects is the best system out there you can have.
Why? Say I am building a dungeon level. I can draw a spline of the room layout then feed that data into a bunch of modifiers that not only generate all my walls and floors, but UVmap them, seperate out the trims and give me exportable geo.
I can make splines to draw trim profiles, and feed them into modifiers that I can instance in a bunch of places, then toggle on and off the modifiers to pick a trim look.
I can automatically make doors that have a volume mesh that cut into the walls behind them that they are placed in. That mesh can also distort the door like a cage, so changing that will automatically shape the door and doorway.
It can then trim it.
If you know how to use 3dsmax modifier stack to its full potential, you can automate tasks across many many objects, letting you adjust and tweak and have those effects ripple along your modules.
Simple things like ensuring the same mesh density at the edges of a tile so there is no background sparkle between them, or making mirrored corner parts that contain bits that aren't flipped (sign posts or trim patterns).
3dmax is my environment tool of choice.
But say I am doing characters. How many times have you had to change a character design after you have baked and skinned it?
You can easily adjust a model in zbrush, bring it back into max and use modifiers to refit your low res dynamically without destroying it.
I always had 3dmsax on my laptop whenever I went into studio work at Maya studios like Zspace or Fuel, because it solved problems very quickly.
I had to make a jigsaw puzzle sphere that flew apart once. The maya geys spent three days on it and where panicking. Max could do it
I am looking forward to blender expanding vert groups to face and edge selections, and adding more modifiers so it comes closer to 3dsmax, because the rest of the package modelling tools are fucking ace. Especially with plugins.
But, that said, it doesn't have the paradigm of each modifier taking selections from the one below, and the modifiers do not include things like edit poly, which can hold mesh edits down the line.
Maybe soon. Maybe Blender next gen.
We can't let the modifier stack die with max
Any questions? There are no dumb ones if it helps you get ahead in your craft. X
Since I am pooping on maya lt me be kinder and say the UV toolkit is my fave uv editor, and the hotbox and marking menus are still the most natural feeling gestural commands (even if they aren't easily configured).
My view is that autodesk should retire maya and max, after taking the best elements of XSI, Mudbox and Toxic that they own the codebase for and bringing it together into a next generation package.
Less upkeep, a stronger front against blender and the best of the best.
Autodesk media and entertainment own so many cool little things but they really could do with a unified package to consolodate all this down into a single tool that brings all their strengths.
You can only bolt on new features for so long.
Lets do it!
(In the meantime of @autodesk comp me a 3dsmax Indy license I am more than happy to put together a series of videos showing you all the power of the modifier stack mentioned above.)
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The verification fails #gamedev games developers as it requires fifty IDBM credits. We do not work on films, but are involved in the entertainment industry.
You cannot also be an entertainer and an activist at the same time.
Verification assists in stopping individuals like myself who are subject to harassment, false flagging and other issues where our identity being verified as true is important.
This system is elitist and does not serve the intended requirement of protecting us.
Having a tick shouldn't be for megastars. It should be for people who are real and can prove it.
Gender identity is the hard wired part of your brain that tells you what gender you are. Cis people aren't aware of theirs, as it matches their body and their day to day experience.
It isn't a preference or something you can change through therapy.
Because they cannot feel what it is like to have dissonance with gender identity, it makes the concept a little hard to grasp.
I find it easier to give the example of colorblindness.
A color blind person exists in a world where, say, red and green are the same thing. They can't tell them apart. This isn't a preference or them being difficult. They aren't crazy. They just can't tell them apart.