Hi! PLEASE Read These 3 Things: 1 - If you're upset or frustrated about these changes, please make sure to finish the *whole* video - it ends on some uplifting stuff that you really need to hear, especially if you've never gotten a job in the animation industry before, or are just starting out. 2 - If you currently have an educational license to Maya for 1-3 years, or whatever you've been using - it's still going to work until it expires! No need to panic. These changes are "effective May 14th 2020" so this applies only to newly created licenses, and you'll deal with it after your current license expires. When that time comes, you can still use Maya on the Indie license or use one of the alternative options. 3 - Cracked or pirated software is ILLEGAL and is NOT a viable alternative solution. As I stated in the video, the entire reason for this change is to reduce the misuse of people abusing Autodesk's licensing system. Obtaining and using the software without the proper licensing is literally the reason we're having this whole change happen, so if you're thinking of going down that path, you are only pushing companies to raise software prices and limit public access - so don't do it. Either validate your student status, pay for a license, or use a free alternative. We will thank you, and so will the developers who want to create affordable alternatives. Thanks for watching :)
Just to let you know a good person to learn blender for someone starting out would Grant Abbitt ua-cam.com/users/mediagabbitt brilliant teacher. Taught me media many years ago. There is a nice Blender Beginner Series that can get you up and running
@A.C G autodesk really does not need more money cuz there got all that Disney Money coming in. They should of made it free. Maya is a fantastic Animation Program but hopefully we can get people more into Blender for them to include the Maya features into Blender like better animation tools.
Just came across your channel. I like your videos. Frankly, software companies are not the only problem. I know you love AM but let's be honest here, education is overpriced, unfairly overpriced. Expecting people to pay over 2k for an online class is ridiculous. I made even bigger mistake. I went for a college degree, computer and traditional animation. I haven't done it in almost a decade. Life has taken me elsewhere. At some point I couldn't even afford a copy of Windows. Eventually I switched to Linux just so I can get basic online work done. Now I can afford Windows, I bought a copy last year. And I am yet to install it. I just have no use for it. Makes me sad but it's what it is.
Hey, a great resource for learning blender is a youtube called Royal skies LLC, he makes like 5 minutes or less tutorials for blender on everything that's easy to follow for new and experienced users. also, I'm sure you know flipped normals but if you don't they have a great series to point new users and a great video for experienced users of other programs looking to switch. check them out, it's the fastest track to learn blender.
Yeah exactly what are you getting with a subscription nothing might as well let us buy the software . speedtree is subscription only so I am looking for alternatives and found some that I will check out.
@@NihongoWakannai I agree, a subscription is a better option if: 1. You can't afford the full amount up front 2. You're a freelancer, and only need a specific program for a short contract 3. Your school or employer pays for your license But in the long term, a perpetual license is always a better investment, and usually pays for itself after 2.5 years, even for the most expensive programs. That's why so many people are ditching Adobe for programs like Affinity Photo or DaVinci Resolve. In fact, some professionals are still hanging onto their old CS6 licenses, because that was the last version before Adobe switched to subscription only.
subscription does not make sense when you download program that stays on your computer. I guess I would for instance understand why backblaze or google only using subscription model for their cloud storage because harddrives need to be swapped to maintain data. What is there to maintain once I have downloaded an app and started using it nothing the program just sits on my computer like any other program I guess I like options provide subscriptions for people who wanna receive the latest updates and a perpetual licence for people who are content with the software for what it is right now. I personally would buy 3ds max and speed tree if there were selling a perepetual license however right now I guess I am either looking for alternatives or sailing the high seas.
If the company is still developing the software it makes sense that they would want some sort of compensation for continuing development. It is not a scam, it's a less risky way of monetising software that you are still providing support and regular updates. It's not a scam. SaaS does not mean there isn't a perpetual license. You might just be restricted to using the last version that you downloaded. That means you don't have access to support and future updates which seems reasonable.
@Adam Gibb yea exactly if you don't have free software to learn, people are not gonna use it. and I don't think Autodesk is hurting badly without this revenue. in a sense, it shot in foot.
Basmati Ryze true but for the self learners. This isn’t true for institutions really because institutions will pretty much always have the software on their computers for at a special discount for students. So looking at it at an institution level people who go will learn the software still & they’ll go off into the workforce knowing it
I still rather pay for Maya subscribtion than use blender, luckily i don't need to do either. Houdini & UE4 ftw Blender 2.82: VFX - Partial support/capability Fluid simulations - Partial support/capability Particle System - Super basic, heavily limited even with plugins ( mediocre ) Modeling - Great, one of the best softwares. Rendering/Lookdev/Shading - Great Animation/Rigging - Not my speciality but i'd say OK. Motion Graphics - Mediocre Architecture - Mediocre Maya: VFX - Great Fluid simulations - Great Particle System - Great Modeling - OK Rendering/Lookdev/Shading - Epic Animation/Rigging - Epic Motion Graphics - OK Architecture - Great ( script support )
@@ExacoMvm Blender script support is rather epic. It's Python. In fact Blender's insane Python support is one of the thing it's loyalists hold up as the reason they use it.
Tony AnMckay no animation layers, no time editor and stuff like that. in general the animation workflow is not as sophisticated as in maya yet. but it’s evolving fast. there are no limitations in blender that would completely prevent you from achieving the animation you want.
@@tonymc293 That would require me to write a long long list but i give you few examples. * everyone know about performance, Blender doesn't perform well on highend rigs, put more than two in one scene & you'll see. * rigging in Blender is very limited and can't handle highres meshes, i am talking feature/VFX quality especially in the face, some complex setups causes Blender to hit dependency cycles quickly, found this on RCS by someone else and this is just a simple FK-IK switch blender.community/c/rightclickselect/c7fbbc/ * Maya has many tools for rigging especially with Nodes, what you can do with tens of drivers & constraints in Blender can be repalced in Maya with just couple of them........they both offer python API but Blender limits you to only using what it ships with you can't make your own modifiers, deformers, RBF Solvers, Floating windows/ editors...etc you can only make addons that use the UI code like buttons,panels, menus but not low level stuff. * I also made a feature request for the 3d Manipulators, most animators prefer to use them instead of the G.R.S (x.y.z) which are spread out and require too much clicks for simple transformation, Maya also has some very nice smart features for Manipulators and they added tons of animation features in the 2020 version. blender.community/c/rightclickselect/67fbbc/ * Blender modifers & constraints are slow since they're in a modifer stack that run on CPU and there is no GPU accelerated Skinning or Deformers, Facial rigging in Blender is not high level but saw few people trying to improve that like this guy which he bumped into many issues and someboy else is trying to help him with patches twitter.com/Muream. * the Animation workflow of autokeying/keying-set in Blender is cumbersom, Blender keys everything and it has no concept of non-keyable/locked attributes which makes it messy in the graph editor and forces you to clean it up in each setp, the graph lacks quality of life functionalities like auto-framing,stacked curves...etc the timeline doesn't display waveform with proper sound, tried the VSE but the audio comes out janky. * in Maya you can make custom shelf with your own tools,hotkeys..etc whether from someone else script or yours while Blender you have to write an addon for that which fills up the sidebar and makes it even bad. * Blender rigs always look busy & unprofessionally made and they have issue of too much controls in the viewport with bad color scheme, someone else complained about it too on RCS :) blender.community/c/rightclickselect/95fbbc/ There are tons of request on RCS for rigging & animations tools from Maya which shows how much more advanced & intutive in comparison.
Adam Smith i agree with most of what you say here but i want to point out that yes you can lock channels in the graph editor, when you make a keyframe, it asks uf you want the location, rotation, or scale channels keyframed (or any combination of these) and only keyframes those when autokeying too there are 3d manipulators most people just don’t use them. for me the g. r. s. commands make a much faster workflow, since they’re hotkeys instead of clicking and dragging manipulators. also you can type numbers after them which allows a fast and precise workflow. the snapping rotation in maya just never does that i want it to do, it starts rotating the other way and everything there is a quick favorites menu. when you hit q, it appears (i never used it so i don’t know if you can add custom commands too...) other than that, yes, blender is not there yet but i’m excited to see how it continues progressing
"Autodesk remains committed to education" This is a joke, if autodesk ever gave educational licenses, it was only to achieve its objective of monopolizing the industry.
I think it's also why they bought Softimage and Maya/Power Animator and Mudbox. I gave up on Maya after it constantly crashed and would corrupt my file. And all of the hours and money spent on tutorials for Mental Ray and it's gone.
@Artisan "Money doesn't interest me" - Creator of Blender talks about its future watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg yeah, he dont care about money. and even if he wanted to monopolize something, he chose the wrong licence for doing so, anyone can fork an gpl code and create an competing product. what people like you dont understand, is that money is just the means to get something, whats your dream of consumption? if you want to buy an car, they you need money for that, but if you want to draw a painting, the ink and canvas arent your "dream of consumption", the final painting itself is your dream, your goal, and the ink and canvas are just the means for your goal. you need money to purchase ink and a canvas so of course you will want some money, but that dont means geting dirt rich at the cost of everyone quality of life, including your own while using the tool that you build.
@Artisan blender barely has any profit lol. Its development is mainly supported by donations and volunteers (open source extensions that get adopted into the main codebase).
But the thing is you were only suppose to use the educational version if you went to an accredited school. If you are attending an accredited school then I don’t really see a problem with this. The only real people who are upset are the ones who do not attend an accredited school or graduated. Yeah, $1,620 (USD) per yr is a bit but compared to other things & software it’s not that bad. However, Maya has the indie version for Indie Devs for like $250 (USD) per year. So there is also that!
@@PhantomGanhdi The thing is, I'm not about to spend $250 every damn year just to keep improving my demo reel, y'know? I'm sorry Autodesk couldn't figure out a compromise that handcuffs illegal freelancers without harming non-students who are legitimately using it for non-commercial purposes, but oh well. My reaction to that ain't gonna be to buy it. *shrug* Also...speaking personally re: education and colleges, after having gone through all that shit, my assessment is that it's all bullshit, and "accredited schools" are nothing but artificial gatekeeping to hold back people who can't afford it/forces those who can into unnecessary debt. But that's a much bigger topic than just Autodesk.
@@z-beeblebrox Yeah, I understand that but I can also see why auto desk did it because just like what I am assuming your case is you're creating demo reels to get a job? Which I can see them saying as still being under commercial because even though you are not directly doing work for a client, you are creating a portfolio so you can get a job and paid for it in the future. But I do wish auto desk had an educational version that anyone who wanted to learn the software could use even if it was a bit of a watered down version just so more people could get their hands on it. As well as a version that was around $12-20 per month for hobbyist if they wanted to use it while also make money from it.
@@PhantomGanhdi The problem is everything you make is Autodesk property by their license and you must be at accredited school. Just download Blender and your problem is gone.....
And Softimage is still more advanced and stable than Maya. ICE is a hundred times better than their new bifrost. Even so I am learning Houdini as it is a way better than both. I imagine a new Houdini / Blender Industry standard workflow at some point down the future. The ONLY thing keeping maya viable is animation. Softimage is much better at character animation though.
@@MeshVoid this is pretty much the conclusion I've come up with as well. I'm a long time Maya user, and I'm amazed about how easier it is to do a LOT of things in Blender as opposed to Maya, and with the wealth of educational resources available for Houdini, it does not seem as scary any more. The moment Blender integrates good CHARACTER animation stuff, Maya will take a HUGE hit. Even Cinema 4D is taking a hit from HOudini specially with the 3rd party plugin for MOPS operators. Now if after effects could have some decent competition...
Softimage was in a dead end anyway stop blaming autodesk for others problems, it's the main Devs of Softimage who sold it right & left before truely abandoning it, Autodesk took the chance & made it's code part of it's library which is a smart move from a company that wants to dominate & make money......it's just buisness in the end :)
@27 confirmed kills in Al-Qaeda Its a big loss in their community... all of the previous artist will use blender... they will make great job using Blender which will attract more companies.. the community is the true treasure Not YOUR MONEY....
@five seven they are future customers. If you make them pay, instead of paying they'll turn to other software. If you let them have a free trial, they will have a much greater chance of making a purchase.
Which are not that great if you are not typing on an qwerty keybords ... I prefer sticking to logical "capital-of-the-option" shortcuts style Blender has.
Nah autodesk is nowhere near the clown levels that is adobe. I have a lot more respect for autodesk for making the software free for so long, this was expected at some point.
That's great in all still many developers like me who are low-funded do still rely on Autodesk Maya and 3DS Max that included other industries net worth around $100M+ annually. We are not simply just going to make a switch to Blender just because the community is huge on the other side. If I'm looking for 3D artists and the pay is $75k to $150k annually I demand higher quality of work from a higher quality of tools and software I can provide to my paying clients as a service.
@@johnenerio6453 i understand, my line of work is more flexible with my client, they don't care about the software i use as long the end result is reached. its unfortunate that some of the creative industries still tied to a software these days
Sir Wade, you said you're considering to learn Blender now. I just downloaded it and I thought it would be really helpful if you as a Maya Animator would do a tutorial at some point, like "From Maya to Blender for Animators", in which you would explain where things are in the new environment and how the software differs in that regard. I think that would be really helpful for many people!
Yeah, quite a few other artists have already made the switch over the years, and there are any number of videos on UA-cam comparing the two. You are not breaking new ground here.
lol the guy didn't even open Blender for one hour and you expect him to do "tutorials" right away & he still has Maya student version & it'll probably never expires since he's a former Animation Mentor alumni which gives them a lifetime access to everything in the school inclduing the software but i do hope that he digs deep inside Blender & show the community the real difference between maya & blender when it comes to animation it's the only way to convince stubborn heads if you know what mean ;).
I've been on Maya for the since 2010 and I lived by Maya. However, I am currently transitioning to Blender and I couldn't be more happy. Blender is really simple once you figure out the differences. Plus the Blender community is really huge and helpful.
Can Blender be as good as Maya when it comes to rigging and animation? I have heard Blender sucks when it comes to comparing rigging and animation with Maya.
@@asifjaved7672 No, blender still has to work on it's animation pipeline and it will arrive there one day, given that the blender foundation has started working on making blender more industry compatable. Meanwhile, it doesn't suck at rigging and animation per say, it's just missing some tools that you can acquire from installing some addons anyway. You can make it work. Just give it a try and see
@@asifjaved7672 My animation experience is pretty limited, but overall, I've found it to be easier and better organized than Maya's workflow. I'm currently learning a rigging course in Blender, and overall, it's much more straightforward in terms of bone hierarchy, constraints, drivers, weight painting, shape keys, pose libraries, actions, etc. As for animation, one major criticism Blender receives is the lack of animation layers. However, I've heard it's possible to get similar results via the Action Editor.
@@atoaster2070 Blender can't handle thousands of Blendershapes, constraints,Drivers..etc without having huge performance impact & what you can do in Blender with those can easily be done in Maya with couple nodes & of course many features are lacking like Pose Space Deformer, GPU accelerated skinning, No GPU opensubdiv yet, attributes spreadsheet, deformers,Set Driven Keys...etc it seems that the dependency graph is more limited , i have hit so many cycles that it's not easy to over come them like in Maya. Here is just one example where a simple IK/FK visbilty switcher is hard to do in blender, you end up with tens of drivers for just basic ik/fk chains & there is no way around it besides what Blender riggers do which put dozen of custom properties for them & clutter the sidebar, that's why most Blender rigs are unintuitive and very messy........i got more complicated stuff for facial rigging which i am still exploring myself.... So to me Maya still wins in this area big time blender.community/c/rightclickselect/c7fbbc/
i went to the Maya community in reddit, the community there is dead, + i got attack by people and called me spoiled and more, wtf, Autodesk Maya is overprice. now i am learning blender. and the community is a million times better,
They timed it perfectly too, Blender's 2.8 seams have been ironed out mostly and its features are piling up. They really shot themselves in the foot. Needing to prove eligibility for the free version will even deter people who are eligible. Those people will go look for an alternative, and Blender's limitations can be worked around. Gotta say those prices are utter extortion. You could BUY similar software in the past for those prices, and now they want to milk companies annually for this price. Imagine needing to lease the new version of your car all of a sudden for the same price as you bought it for years prior.
"Maya", means, literally, "illusion", and, like all illusions, is subject to sudden disappearance. Or, they got ya hooked, so they're turning the screws...
@@not_herobrine3752 - Yeah, All I remember is little self-important A-holes at Maya seminars smuggly saying that training was only £1,600 and that'll get you 20% off the gazillion quid the product cost, if you have a certified workstation with the right GPU (facepalm). So I used LightWave and SoftImage instead! :o) Now I use Blender and get things done way faster.
I can't believe this happens to me as soon as I graduate this year. I wasn't intending to work at home on Maya and get a job in a studio. I was hoping to still learn maya at home. This is just so ridiculous. I bet free educational versions of software improve the amount of people using it. Blender's business model has worked so well and I'm surprised Autodesk has decided to make this stupid decision. They are shooting themselves in the foot and more people are going to be using Blender. Moronic decision making, ESPECIALLY during a global pandemic where people hope to teach themselves.
I COULD be wrong, but if you have an account with Autodesk, and you sign up for your educational license, you can hang on to that and download it on to a computer whenever you have one (if you don't already). The expiration date, I believe, will be 3 years after your initial sign up, not the download date. I could be all wrong. Worth checking out. I JUST got the 2020 version, and if you sign in to your account and look in the My Software tab, the version you're allowed to install will be listed there along with the expiration date. Aw man...best of luck!
Such a strange decision considering how many alternatives their prospective customers have to explore! Still, Maya seems to have the best tools for animators regardless for now :P
Sir Wade Neistadt They have to be careful to not alienate people though. You don’t want a split between students and professionals in terms of Software. It’s great that you don’t have to train people in Maya when they get hired.
@@jeandenishaas I've been thinking of going to the high school I went to and doing a presentation for the students but I'm really not sure if I can recommend using Maya because of this.
daaaamn... blender here I come! Been wanting to learn and make the switch anyway, and this is the push I needed. Wonder if my 3 year licence still counts🤞If I ever got a job in the industry I'd be using Maya day-to-day anyway, it's just annoying having to use/learn a different software for personal projects...
14:41 It's because they've done the maths and they see that they're on the way out, so they've calculated the maximum milking ratio and set their policy to pursue that.
I kinda hope you are right. Ton talked about this too, Autodesk effectively makes nothing from their VFX monopoly, it's like 300K a year, all the money they make is with CAD ~4billion, maybe Blender got to the point where Autodesk realized they didn't care enough to compete, what a strange way for Blender to win in the end.
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA No, but seriously though, when I saw the title of this vid i ACTUALLY let out a maniacal laugh, no bs At this point they're making it too easy, lol Ton Roosendaal, Godspeed, you magnificent bastard !
@@__w__o__w__ Agreed. Blender can and is used by a lot of great animators, so it's definitely a valid option. But it simply doesn't compare to Maya (only talking about animation tools, nothing else)
@@hectorescobar9450 for heavy VFX & advance character rigs it's a lot behind but of course Blender doesn't have ILM,Weta,DNEG,Disney,Lucasfilms.etc supporting it , so lets see what will happen after this.
You can also customize the hotkeys or use other keymaps, like this one I made with Maya ALT camera & QWER transforms and otherwise mostly defaults: blender.community/c/rightclickselect/w0fbbc/
It also has a secondary shortcut layout called "Industry standard", which probably can be helpful. Though I personally find default Blender shortcuts to be a bliss lol
I just landed a job on an animated series produced with Blender, so I'm currently making the switch, and it made me realise how most of what I like about Maya is actually not the software itself but what's been built by the community around it. I mean, Blender obviously can't match the tools of Animbot, or the great diversity of awesome rigs developed for Maya, but other than that, so far I actually like Blender much better. I like the flow, the menus, the interface graphics, and the fact that it literally takes a minute to install and a second to launch. After Using Maya for years, it's just a joy for me to open Blender. It's always a pain to change software and loose you automatism, and I'm sure I'll find more things that Blender doesn't do as well as Maya, but overall I'm really glad to make the change. And as more and more people go to Blender in the coming years, we'll probably see much improvment both from Blender itself and the scripts and rigs developped by the community
I've always been on the fence about switching, but if you recorded yourself for a couple hours just using blender for the first time I'd love to follow along!
Yea this is just a huge bummer I'm just worried about what will I do after AM since I'm in Class 6 now I should still have 2019 till the next two years or so since I haven't even got it for a year yet. but still I do hope in that Time Blender revamps their animation pipeline because I saw some tutorials and boy do we have it good on Maya not a big fan of what blender has in terms of animation but we can deal with it. I'm going to try to learn Blender as well it is going to be a learning curve but who knows Blender might get even better with all these creators switching and giving blender feedback. The only thing that causes a problem with switching over from Maya to blender for animators is that there really isn't a lot of rigs out there for us to animate to and with barely any rigs or even if there are good quality ones it's really going to be hard for animators.
I agree, years ago CGCOOKIE released a flex rig similar to the Bishop rig, where there are a lot of customizations to the character's looks... But right now it's really outdated and things like hair and the eyes don't render properly on the latest versions of blender. I do hope someone comes out with more free rigs. But there is also the blender cloud, where you do paid subscriptions and you get access to all of the blender institutes project files. So like rigs and assets from blender's official short films.
I've been using Maya since 2012 and I can tell you, Blender is a much BETTER option with it's tools and recent animation set up than Maya. Plus, it's free, so complaining about the tools is like complaining about getting free water
Toybanaza oh for sure I’m sure blender has a bunch of amazing things and I’m all for it but as an animator point of view we can’t animate if there are no good quality rigs out there to use. There is the shorts rigs that blender created but that’s locked under a subscription which I understand why they did that but most other rigs are either Anime fan inspired or just not as appealing and good as the library of maya rigs out there. Now I could Model and rig my own rig but that is not my field I don’t want to have to model and rig just to animate a face test nor will I even get the quality I need. I’m sure more rigs will come in due time and animators can really make the switch it has nothing to do with the tools or anything just the lack of a rig library and resources. I can’t make animation without a rig. If you know a place where I can get really good rigs from blender please let me know would love to test them out
This really hits hard, but what can we animators do about it. Had no idea about the indie version but transitioning from paying $250 to the full $1600 automatically is a shady move. Sounds like Blender will eventually become a bigger competitor with Maya. I do hope Maya makes a better move in the end.
I work as a freelancer using Blender. I have never used Maya but I know a friend that does. It seems from what I know is that Maya has better animating tools than Blender, but Blender has the better modeling tools. Better doesn't mean "crushing", you can do most of what you can do with both softwares, it is just some things will be a little easier in one of them. Also the undo system of Blender is currently broken for large files but hopefully with the frequent Blender updates it will be fixed soon. Although I am not that experienced, my opinion is for people to use Blender to learn or even start making money with it until you feel confident enough that buying Maya will improve your work and is worth the money. Learning a new software and adapting to it doesn't take more than a couple of weeks. Modeling and animating principles are the same no matter what tools you use so these will always be with you.
Blender is improving faster than a profit driven company like Autodesk ever can, and I think in most areas it will overtake Maya soon. For everything else, it's already past the "good enough" point. As you say, the differences aren't crushing. It becomes simple math at that point. Do you want to pay four figures every year for the rest of your life doing what you know, or spend a few weeks of downtime learning something else that will be free forever? I'd say there's actually significant opportunity cost from not switching to Blender ASAP. If you can still make rent if you spend those weeks learning Blender, why not just do it now? If you can afford Autodesk's yearly tax, think about what you could do if you invested that money in better hardware instead while using Blender. Faster renders mean more time can be spent making artistic decisions, which get you better results and help you learn quicker too so your skills improve faster. Or invest that money into some classes or one-on-one mentoring.
Wow, this news just ruined my day!! I'm a 3rd-year animation student and this sucks big time. One thing I wanted to ask though, what happens to the existing Student License users? I love Maya, especially the UI and the fact that it's so userfriendly but since Autodesk has made these changes I think I'll probably switch to Blender for good, cause it's just as good as Maya and in some cases ever far superior. Thankyou for the update btw.
The basics are the same just a different UI. Plus the community kicks ass, so it's easy to reach out and figure how to do complex stuff. My school used Maya only, and with that knowledge learning the UI of Blender was easy.
I just got a job to work on a Feature film in Blender and now this happens... well I am happy that gonna be trained to Blender.... Still am gonna miss Maya... But I hate what they have become. Part of me wants Blender to be as big as Maya so they could start treating their customers with respect!
This has been a requirement in Canada for a while. When I started relearning 3D animation about 15 years ago, I had access to the student version, but within a very short time, they made this same change for Canadians and I was forced to use Blender... which I've always had trouble with, not just because it's cryptic, but because I have a mental block against having the z-axis as up.
So many thoughts and emotions are running through my head right now. I'm studying to be a background modeler and special effects artist for animations and video games, and for the past 3 years of college, I've spent my time learning maya and zbrush for modeling and houdini for special effects. But I mainly focused on maya because I was constantly told that maya was the industry standard and that's what I needed to learn. And I was told I didn't have to worry about paying for it after I graduate because it was still free, plus my license was going to last 3 years anyway and hopefully by then I would maybe have a job in the industry. But now everything is slowly changing to blender. I know of a couple of small game studios that are switching to blender because it saves them a ton of money and it does basically the same thing as far as they are concerned. And my brain gets all emotional and upset that blender is even free, how can they afford to just give away software that is close to the level of quality as maya, for free and still keep there business going? It just doesn't make since to me. Plus it sets this idea in peoples heads that these high powered softwares should just be given away to people for free? But someone had to put in the effort to make it? And maya still has a lot of things that blender doesn't, if your a student or even just a normal person you can get the pixar renderman plug in for maya and it changes the game in terms of rendering animation and texture work. I'm scared that i'm going to graduate and all that time I spent learning maya is going to go to waste because everyone has switched to blender. And i'd like to actually get into the entertainment industry. I just don't know where the entertainment industry is going in terms of software and it kind of scares me? Sorry for the rant. This just really scares me right. And I know in the long run we will all get through this.
Blender is graciously given free to us but the community does give money and support the development, so while its free it doesnt mean that people arent paying for its development, it sucks about maya tho
@@samueltavarez2819 Thank you so much! The reason maya took me 3 years to really get the hang of, is because I had never really 3D modeled before, so im hoping that those skills translate im just not looking forward to learning all the blender short cuts. And I do worry that blender being free gives people idea that all programs should be free. But if all software is free there is no money to put into development? I actually don't mind paying $1,600 for a program, I mind paying $1,600 for a program every year. Other programs like zbrush, you can just straight up buy the license to the program for like $1,400ish and then you own it forever, now if you want the most up to date version you gotta buy it again. Idk I understand that programs cost money because there are so many things that maya has that blender doesn't have. I just worry that because blender is free that a lot of game design and animation studios will transfer over to that, and while blender is on the right path to being industry level quality, it's not quite there. Thank you for the encouragement! I hope you have a wonderful day!
@@beacreates4370 Blender has been free for years, but it's only getting better because people are paying for it to be better. Software like Maya have been used because it's always been really good, that's why it's expensive. Blender on the other hand wasn't always good, but the community has been donating for it to be better, and the devs working on it aren't working for free btw. So I would say its fair. I doubt companies like Pixar would make the switch, cause compared to the budget they use for their movies, it isn't much to pay for Maya.
@@BergsArt well, Pixar and Dreamworks have their own proprietary softwares, but Disney does use Maya and it's unlikely they'll just switch. Smaller studios, however, are probably far more interested in blender
I will say that any animators reading this that are trying to get into videogame development... If you have to switch to blender to be able to animate at home, that's fine, but be aware the majority of the big studios use Maya or in some cases Motionbuilder, so just be aware that you'll have to be flexible and change/learn for that job. Guaranteed people will pass on you if you insist you only know blender. As the video says, you have to be adaptable.
When you open Blender for the first time, you can specify your control preferences. They have added 'industry standard' (same as Maya or Substance Painter) controls
The Industry Compatible keymap is really good, though it makes tutorials confusing since they tend to use defaults. If you want something that's somewhere between that and the default hotkeys, try this one : blender.community/c/rightclickselect/w0fbbc/
I actually just noticed 2 days ago, that my student version Maya required me to now provide a license, which was weird. I'm currently working on a paid for license by the company I work for, so I didn't notice that right away. What a bummer... I'm really tempted to go the shady route to still be able to access Maya for my private/learning stuff, and I think a lot of people will too...
I think Autodesk needs our shady roads. In the end, when you earn money you will not want to have legal problems and you will continue using it but paying what they ask for.
EDIT: Hey everyone! I don't think you need to panic about your current licenses right now :) Like I say at the end, I'm fairly certain your current Maya license will be allowed to finish out its 'timer' before you need to choose between options 1-3. And if you're currently a student about to graduate, grab a document that's as late-dated as possible so you can get a new 1-year license at the end of your school year, and you'll be good for awhile after leaving school. ALSO I do NOT condone any illegally obtained software, Maya or otherwise. So no talk of cracked licenses or anything like that, please. Illegally obtaining or using software is what causes the prices to drive so high for so many products, and hurts smaller developers who could otherwise create new tools for us to use.
Sir if people go to the Lt version the AMD Pro Render is a freaking fantastic free PBR render engine. I've been testing it and I'm shocked with the quality
You'll be fine! :) Your current license should keep going until it expires, and if you're in school now, you should upload your documents and get an extra year starting when you validate your student status.
5 years of Blender use has taught me that basically any and every feature of other 3d software already exists in form of add ons and scripts, you just have to do some research and some extra work to get the exact tools you need. Yes, that process is extremely time consuming but the software is still open source and full potential in regards to other Softwares.
I changed from 3ds max to Blender and am really loving it. There are things that I really miss in 3Ds Max such as Arrays, Garment Maker, Particle Flow, etc. However I am enjoying the shift especially for dynamics such as Rigid Bodies, Soft Body, Sculpting and knowing this is all free blows my mind especially as I am more of an indie animator.
You mention digging in into Blender; There is that question as to whether Blender stack up in terms of saving a lot of time and money on animation production. I'll be creating a video series about getting mixamo animation into a library directly inside of Blender that you can edit via the rigify addon. It's something I've done professionally in a corporate setting, so It's been industry tested. I'll even demonstrate how to make plenty of layers of animation editing via the NLA editor, so we can blend together different actions to make new ones. I'm interested in gauging interest on this, and feedback is welcome. I'm about halfway through my first episode. Kudos Sir wade, It's not easy to design a good tutorial!
Take ANY class at a Community College ($46 per unit, $140 per class) With the proof of enrollment, get the FREE one-year Maya license. Repeat after one year. You get a cheap copy of Maya AND you can learn great stuff at Community Colleges. I went to Gnomon, Animation Mentor and iAnimate. After 20 years in the Animation Industry, I now teach at a Community College in California, where your first two years’ tuition is FREE!: edsource.org/2018/getting-free-college-tuition-in-california-a-quick-guide/599039
Wow, can't believe it! I actually use Blender to do high quality animations and Blender does work well once you get used to it. You get used to the graph editor changes you mentioned. TBH the biggest complaint I have is honestly the undo tool is very slow in comparison to Maya. Give Blender a shot though! My whole studio uses Blender!
jesus they are so god damn stupid it hurts. The one way to get people committed to your software is them actually using it as much as possible. The more proficient they get at it, the less likely they will change, because you know, they don't want to waste the time invested learning your software already switching to something else. Even if someone was to use Maya student version unauthorized for a few years, it would absolutely gear them towards becoming an Autodesk customer eventually. Whether that is through buying a license of their own or them being hired at a company that then needs to buy a licensed version for them. Putting this huge hurdle right at the start of someone's animation career is literally the stupidest thing they can do, especially with such complicated software that may take literally years to become proficient at. What do they think they can possible gain from this? A few thousand freelancer licenses suddenly buying it? Not a chance, if they were using their license illegitimately to begin with nothing will stop them from continuing doing that. And thats not even where the big money is to be made anyway, that has always been the big studios with dozens if not hundreds of licenses; companies who could actually be sued effectively f they don't license correctly, so they make damn sure they do. Like seriously how difficult would it have been to make a limited version freely available, that beginners can at least use to get themselves started with all of the basics (and trust me that takes enough time) but that professionals couldn't abuse due to certain limitations? Autodesk is digging heir own grave by driving away a complete new generation of potential Maya users. It just boggles my mind how they can be so inept... It really is time for me to move away from this dinosaur of a program...
I was already considering jumping ship, I'll keep maya around this summer to help teach a few classmates how to model in it. I hope the indie version of Maya will be available when I needed it to brush up on, once I get a job.
That's the thing. I'd love to jump ship and get on blender but the fact is that when I'm being interviewed for a job my interviewer will tell me they use Maya. So either I won't be employed or they will employ me but I will have to get use to Maya again
@@southpaw9041 I mean I'm fine with using maya, it's something that was mentioned in the video. You can't tell your employer sorry the company is garbage so I don't use this software. I've also heard some (most) companies give you about 2 weeks at least to get familiar with any new software. All companies also have you use that 2 weeks of time, to adjust to there workflow
I expect that a lot of online schools will start to reword their website to say "...such as Maya, MODO, Blender, or other appropriate 3D package". .. It's Autodesk. Anyone who 'trusts' AD to seriously take into consideration their customers who don't pay them a $100k or more per year is fooling themselves. Personally I use MODO. Tried Lightwave, and while I do like a lot about it, it's age shows every 2nd or 3rd thing you try to do. I still use LW, but MODO is an amazing piece of software. .. (PS: I learned Maya back when it was "Maya". That's it. As in the first one. In fact, it was a Beta, iirc (I was in an actual 3d school in Vancouver, BC...'CDIS', which got bought out by Art Institute a couple years after I finished). I liked it well enough, but was infinitely more happy with Softimage|3D...which I actually bought. The AD bought Softimage and said, "Don't worry...we aren't killing Softimage in favour of Maya or Max. We just added it to our portfolio so we could offer our customers more". ..er....oookkaaaa.... Then big features of XSI showed up in Maya. That was the point all us Softimage users had no doubt; "They're just gonna canibalize it and toss the mangled carcass of XSI into the ditch". A lot of us XSI folk jumped ship then. A few years latter and..."Sorry. We're discontinuing sale and support of Softimage|XSI. Thanks for your money. Now give us more, every year, for Maya or Max...or eff off".) .. (PPS: Yes, I am STILL P'O'ed at Autodesk for killing Softimage! 🤬 ).
I'm jumping from Cinema 4D to Blender, I love C4D, but it's been getting too focussed on motion graphics for many years now, which it's amazing at, but which isn't my area of interest, and a lot of its other tools are being severely neglected and becoming outdated as a consequence, plus I don't support their new Software as a Service model. Like you I hadn't looked at Blender for years and when I last tried it it did things so differently it was a pain, but having taken another look at it after the 2.8 update, it's truly amazing.
i have been following your channel with maya tutorials although i am a blender user bcoz there is no animation community in blender and now we have got a tutor for blender
Scared me for second there, I'm a heavy Blender right now and the college I'm going to be teaching Maya & ZBrush. For a hot second I thought I was going to pay for that on top of everything else. As a Blender diehard, this is fantastic news!
Seeing this, Blender should focus more and modelling/animating instead of trying to do everything. If they can focus on those 2 things, ppl would be more pleased to go for it. Especially animators since I see a lot of them wanting to do so but the tools aren't as efficicent compared to maya.
completely disagree. I love that blender can be a onestop shop and I think that the way they organize the tools into different workspaces provides sufficient "focus".
The Blender Foundation might want to spend more time on those things in the short term if they're getting useful feedback from artists about areas that need improvement, but Blender is open source and there are always going to be contributions coming in from everybody for every aspect of Blender. This isn't a zero sum game. All aspects of Blender may be improved each version that gets released. I always see a ton of new features in the release notes on parts of Blender I have never touched or didn't even know existed. I'm still getting lots of new stuff in the areas I use every day. It's also worth noting that Blender isn't a profit-driven enterprise that is trying to take market share from Maya at major studios. That doesn't really do anything for them. Their objective is to bring the best tools to all artists everywhere for free. It's completely irrelevant if the studios don't use Blender. It's completely irrelevant if all the studios use Blender exclusively. Making the best tools for artists naturally will lead to greater industry adoption, and features that make Blender more easily integrated into pipelines, but that's more a side effect than a specific objective. There's artists that want those features, and coders willing to do the work, and if enough artists are clamoring for those things more than other things, the Foundation will pay somebody to work on it specifically.
Wow, they also hiked up their month-to-month subscription. In my country it's almost double what it was in January and it's not all due to the exchange rate. At least they are creating jobs for people to do the accreditation, I think. Edit: nice shirt!!
Not really even cinema 4D is expensive so 3D was never cheap until Blender came so paying 150 a month for a license where most 3D projects are 1000+ it id a fair price
@@mayanachiappan7625 thank you hopefully they don't continue with this hope they can do something for students to still use it because seriously they will lose so many users to blender
Though I like that your gonna give blender a try, cause the Blender community has an abundance of free tutorials about everything else, but severly lacking in tutorials about character animations specifically (talking about tutorials thats free, cause there are a lot of paid Blender courses for professional character animation)
I had an account with maya eduard license that i created in 2019 and i just check and maya is gone. I think i will go back to my origin, blender here we come XD Edit: I still have my license but idk for how long, but i think i have the 3 year license from 2020 to i think 2023
In my opinion this change is a big problem. If you are a self-taught animator you have no way of accessing Maya to learn their platform. Nuke, Houdini, and a whole other host of software provide non-commercial versions completely for free for anyone who wants to learn. Maya takes years to learn and it is unreasonable to expect someone to pay for a license to learn the software if they aren't able to turn it into a career yet. Basically this move is restricting learning Maya to people who can afford to license it and people who currently attend university. I am 23 and 2 years out of college. I am still learning 3D. I was using Maya student license for a while, but now I use blender because I cannot afford the expense of a Maya license purely for the purpose of learning the software. I think in the long run this will force more people to move to blender and Maya will eventually lose market share.
Makes you wonder if art schools are giving Maya a kickback. Anyway, the only winner in all this is Blender, and the studios that want to hire Blender artists.
@@fakecubed I highly doubt Autodesk did this to get extra money from schools. It is more than likely just a crackdown on freelancers who didn't want to pay. I just think Autodesk's calcuation on this one is completely wrong and Maya isn't good enough to justify it's price. It takes years to learn 3D and not all people have the luxury of getting a college education for art. Blender is beating them on almost every front, but there are still a handful of tools that makes Maya better for big studios. I think it will still take years for the majority of industry jobs to switch to blender.
I'm actually quite surprised that it's all new in the US. I clearly remember having to send official school documentation for my student licence 5 years ago (in Belgium). I had to wait like 4 days before receiving a mail confirming my licence activation
I see a time in the future when I won't even be able to load my old Maya projects. I really can't justify investing any more time in Maya. Hopefully by the time I learn Blender, they've upgraded their undos and their rigging. Anyway, at least it's got a guaranteed future.
Like some artist say "Blender has already caught up with Max and Maya in the eye of the industry at a very high level. There is no point in discussing if or when, it has happened."
"Personally I would have waited until after a global pandemic to confirm that you're part of this big Jumanji game, but, you know, do your thing AutoDesk"
I live in Scotland, we had to sign up with Autodesk with our student email and that was confirmation that we were eligible for the software. So, technically, this was already in place for my university.
I switched to Blender 2 days ago. If you were comfortable with Maya, the transition takes about 8 hours, is not as painful as people make it out to be and is not even frustrating because of how pretty Blender's UI is compared to Maya's. Never thought I'd say this, but I'm 100% team Blender now.
Lightwave to Modo to Blender. Couldn't be happier. Know what the best thing about Blender is? It can't be bought up by another company who shoves a subscription down your throat, then refuses to bother to make any more progress because they don't have to entice you to upgrade.
Blender is making giant steps to become the new standard in the near future, I would say that with the new support from Epic, AMD and Nvidia, and the incredible dev plan, they have smooth sail for the next years.
Unfortunately, AMD has not shown much with Blender yet. If you are working with Blender as of right now, the choice is using an AMD CPU and NVidia GPU.
@@KevinSmith-qi5yn completely true, yes what I meant is AMD is donating actively to ensure blender development on the future, which is really important
I've started 3d on blender a few years back (before 2.8) and switched to maya for almost a year and I loved it, the only downside was the price, although I was using the educational liscence I've made the choice to go back to blender 1-2 months ago and seriously for someone that is learning (3d in general) for fun like me I'd suggest blender a 100% especialy since version 2.8 👌
Sir Wide, I attended VFS where I studied Character animation in Maya 3d 10 years ago. graduated and never got a job...It was the biggest regret of my life. because of the cost. Hi hopes never paid off. And they boasted of getting people work right out the door. its now the year 2020 and we are smack dab in Covid lockdown. So I timidly decided to go back on my old workstation. And you know I'm rediscovering that I actually love animating. I want to pick it back up again, just for myself this time. I'm older wiser and not under the pressure of 'landing' the big job anymore I just want to learn at my own pace and get good on my own. Not sure if A.M is the way I will go. but your videos have encouraged me greatly. thanks Sir Wide. keep it up. ps.Bottom line wish I had studied with AM instead. now I my might have to look at blender.
I don't see the problem. Just use Blender. It is as good as any other modeling program. Its not the tool, its the artist. Bad artists will blame their tools and delude themselves that expensive software will make them go pro. I am happy to see that Maya is making room for Blender.
@yellow bees well, this is something they plan to fix until the end of this year. I saw some improvements in the undo recently. It is going really great
Well depends, Blender rigging/animations tools are still lacking behind Maya so Animators won't come unless Riggers & TDs also make the jump..there is the term "intutive rigs" & unfortunately Blender rigs don't fit well with it, tools play big role in your workflow and speed up your productivity. can you imagine not having IK or FK and have to counter animate in each step! just take a look at any Blender rig and you'll see that it suffers alot of problems because of how old & dated the design is while Maya kept updating and doing big changes in each step of course they have much bigger community/studios in animation helping them so they progressed faster If Blender really wants to take advantage of this situation then it needs developers like Pablo, who took on sculpting and he's making it much better , ask any Blender Sculpter if he wishes to go back to 2.79 & the answer is simply NO, sure the tools there worked but lacked tons of stuff even some were broken like the multires but now it's a whole new world that wasn't exposed to Blender users, same should happen for rigging & animation , better tools = better rigs = happy Artists :)
That's a shit argument. It takes time to learn a new tool and even than there are things that Maya has that Blender doesn't. It's unfair to throw blame at new users if Blender lacks features that Maya animators are used to. There are plenty of shitty tools that even the best can't make work.
Well being a high school art design & animation teacher perhaps it’s time for me to test out Blender, learn and apply a bouncing ball exercises as well as modelling a simple chess piece to give me a baseline for a comparison with Maya- this news is very disappointing many of my colleagues throughout the Province have always worked in Blender warning me that this day will come- even though my school will end up being on their list this new direction opens up doors to Blender as one all inclusive application, from 2D Sculpting Modelling Animating possibly having a game engine within the app...the biggest ease that I also online is the ability of rigging characters in minimal time which baffles my mind...I need to go and explore my options...take care everyone!
An Autodesk person in the Maya forums confirmed that Maya Indie will be an ongoing product, so hopefully they make it a permanent option soon. I like both Blender and Maya.
This was from a reddit post reply by a user named Autodesk_Amanda: "Autodesk is committed to providing lower-cost solutions such as Maya LT and Indie - to this end, we introduced Indie as a pilot last SIGGRAPH. The reason we launched Indie as a pilot was because we could not immediately make it a permanent offering for various technical reasons. We are working through these. The pilot uses normal Maya and 3ds Max licensing which is why it auto-renews at normal pricing. We are therefore turning off auto-renew (this should not be turned back on). Instead, customers will need to buy a new Indie license on expiry. This is because the pilot is being tested as a promo price on normal Maya/3ds Max licenses. Our goal is to get Indie licensing in place, but we don’t have an exact date for this yet and until we do, there is always some risk of changes in the offering. However, we are working towards full implementation as soon as we can."
As a UA-cam channel, you would probably reach a wider audience by catering to Blender users (being more accessible than Maya since long before now). It's not like the concepts of animation design are really that much different either - I wouldn't touch Maya but I still follow your channel and learn useful things for hobby game-dev animation. I've actually only discovered your channel a few days ago. If you do decide to pick-up Blender, your timing couldn't be any more perfect for me. :P
I switched to Blender from Maya a while ago, and I love it. Blender is even better than Maya in some ways, except it takes a lot of time to get used to it.
These days switching software isn't that hard. Blender has a UI setting specifically for users from different software, who wanna use these specific shortcuts and interface. I assume Maya has a couple plugins you can customize to fit users from blender and other software. So please have a positive attitude when it comes to switching software, cause that is what the industry expects especially now that it's changing a lot these days.
Not the same, Rigs in Blender & Maya are day & night also the performance, quality of life features, workflow...etc it will be hard to just switch , Maya has much more robust and powerful rigging tools that makes it the rigs intuitve, just pick any free rig from both Software & you'll see the difference that's why Maya is much loved by the Animators and there was no other software to come close to it except for Softimage.
@@xox8717 I didn't say Blender and Maya are on the same level . What I'm saying is that a lot of powerful software has UI presets for specific users so that switching won't be as hard. Which is a good thing for us Artists to make the switch as smooth as possible. And of course there will be differences, you still gotta make the effort to switch. Mostly for people who can't afford to pay for Maya.
I’ve tried dabbling in Maya in the past. I’ve always been a hobbyist. I have yet in years to see a profit from any of it. I wanted to learn CG from a personal perspective, just like someone who enjoys painting from home. I’ve made it a point to use Blender. Unfortunately I am not taking classes to afford any student version of anything. I’m absolutely certain you don’t need a formal art education to learn, and that you can learn from home.
Instantly clicked on this once that little bell rang! I am so surprised they would do this. I have used Blender in the past but prefer to use Maya as that is what I used at College... and you know, Industry Standard but I am VERY shocked to hear Autodesk would do this! Maybe they are trying to become an 'exclusive' animation software for larger animation companies?
The problem is that those same features are becoming available with the free version of Blender which means that many people will jump ships and use Blender to learn new things. This will eventually lead with Blender having a bigger community making it grow and possibly kill Autodesk. I love Maya but it really seems unfair for them to make this move at the moment.
@@dannymorales787 Yeah, completely agree! It makes it exceptionally hard on recently graduated students as well. From what I understand bigger companies won't be as affected as they would presumably be paying for the licensed software but people who are trying to get work and have already graduated, this becomes increasingly difficult for them to even afford the software to learn it or stay relevent. That and Blender recently bringing out 2.8 makes this a strange time for them to do something like this.
Why? Freelancers and Studios are already paying for Maya, this won't change anything for them. This impacts only self-teaching users (like myself) and students in school.
@@TheDorianTube It's just that I recall a certain Amazon Prime series (The Man in the High Castle) using Blender for their VFX. Studios might be more inclined to adopt Blender for projects if more of their staff have their skills and experience based on it.
damn doing that during this time is straight up cold. guess i'll slowly transition, have you seen KeyMesh from Pablo Dobarro ? once that's out of experimental phase i can see a looooot of animators jumping ship
I switched to Blender a lot of months ago and i don't regret it, in fact it has some neat stuff for modeling that are just not present in Maya ( modifier stack just to name one ) and there are tons of plugins to speed up your workflow. If you are already at a good level in terms of 3d art, it'll take only 4-5 days to become proficient again with the new software. If you are just starting out even better because you don't need to re-learn the hotkeys and interface. Thankfully i paid only 1 year of Maya LT subscription ( before that i was using Maya student ) so the switch hasn't been so painful. I also don't like the whole "rent forever" thing that is going on with softwares in general.
Very centered and helpful advice. You don't have to only use blender, but is good to learn another tool to help you out in your work. You'll keep your Maya skills.
That's a relief to hear, I've been meaning to learn blender for awhile now. Just for the fact that both you and Sir said it's good to learn other tools. I was just worried I'd forget how to use maya
I really hope that Blender continues to improve at the rate it currently does. I've used 3DS Max and Maya for a few weeks and absolutely did hate 90% of the time using that software. When you know the ins and outs, fine. But getting started with those was an absolute nightmare for me - and still is.
It's not slowing down. If anything, it will accelerate, although there's a point at which throwing more developers at a problem doesn't speed up the work. As Blender is more successful, and more people are donating to the development fund, they can hire more developers who can work on more parts of Blender at the same time, but those individual parts will still probably develop at the same rates as they would otherwise. The real advantage to Blender's widespread adoption is more outside developers contributing small patches, making tiny improvements but a lot of them, which add up quick. From what I can tell, the number of these sorts of contributions is continuing to grow, and there are more and more first time contributors with each release. There's also more and more work being done by students as part of the Google Summer of Code grants.
So many people freaking out at having to pay for commercial software. If you are using Maya to learn and are serious about a career you are most likely at some institution. That will make you legible. If you are learning to do commercial work for yourself then you were aware Maya commercial license was required. All this does is refrain those that aren't in active study to get free access. It's the same as every other program. Adobe charge cheap for one year for student then full after that, regardless if you're a student. Autodesk never used to give anyone it for free. If you want free, and plan doing commercial work indie is there or you should start with blender anyway. This whole freakout is pointless.
I was taught how to rig in Maya so I'm familiar with that. But I also learned how to paint textures in Blender and that's awesome. I guess I should watching blender videos about rigging and animation workflows to start changing ship : /
I would recommend you watch the rigging tutorial series by dikko. Its free on youtube but its very long and comprehensive like a paid tutorial. Really great.
Awesome Sir wade I just started looking in to Blender and it's very different, but I like it. The rigging seemes so easy compared to Maya rigging. So I totally agree I think this will come back and bite Autodest on the ass. I also think it will mean the online schools will have to start teaching in Blender too. So if you do pick it up please make a series and we'll learn together. 😊
Look at "Drivers" in Blender they work pretty well so far for Rigs and Animation. And the Rigify Addon which is by default an disabled default addon Blender has but it is very useful. Oh and your wgeigh painting is always stored as a vertex group you can fiddle with and everything stays editable at any time.
I just switched to "Maya" from blender(3 years of using blender), but none of this "news" really bothers me, my plan was *and my plan still is* to get a one year educational license for Maya while I still was in a school, and learn how to use it, so I could at least say "I know how to use Maya." After that I'm probably going to just stay with blender, though buying some software isn't completely out of the question.
Hi! PLEASE Read These 3 Things:
1 - If you're upset or frustrated about these changes, please make sure to finish the *whole* video - it ends on some uplifting stuff that you really need to hear, especially if you've never gotten a job in the animation industry before, or are just starting out.
2 - If you currently have an educational license to Maya for 1-3 years, or whatever you've been using - it's still going to work until it expires! No need to panic. These changes are "effective May 14th 2020" so this applies only to newly created licenses, and you'll deal with it after your current license expires. When that time comes, you can still use Maya on the Indie license or use one of the alternative options.
3 - Cracked or pirated software is ILLEGAL and is NOT a viable alternative solution. As I stated in the video, the entire reason for this change is to reduce the misuse of people abusing Autodesk's licensing system. Obtaining and using the software without the proper licensing is literally the reason we're having this whole change happen, so if you're thinking of going down that path, you are only pushing companies to raise software prices and limit public access - so don't do it. Either validate your student status, pay for a license, or use a free alternative. We will thank you, and so will the developers who want to create affordable alternatives.
Thanks for watching :)
Just to let you know a good person to learn blender for someone starting out would Grant Abbitt ua-cam.com/users/mediagabbitt brilliant teacher. Taught me media many years ago. There is a nice Blender Beginner Series that can get you up and running
@A.C G autodesk really does not need more money cuz there got all that Disney Money coming in. They should of made it free. Maya is a fantastic Animation Program but hopefully we can get people more into Blender for them to include the Maya features into Blender like better animation tools.
You'll be very welcome in the Blender world. There's a lot of places to find help in your switch!
Just came across your channel. I like your videos. Frankly, software companies are not the only problem. I know you love AM but let's be honest here, education is overpriced, unfairly overpriced. Expecting people to pay over 2k for an online class is ridiculous. I made even bigger mistake. I went for a college degree, computer and traditional animation. I haven't done it in almost a decade. Life has taken me elsewhere. At some point I couldn't even afford a copy of Windows. Eventually I switched to Linux just so I can get basic online work done. Now I can afford Windows, I bought a copy last year. And I am yet to install it. I just have no use for it. Makes me sad but it's what it is.
Hey, a great resource for learning blender is a youtube called Royal skies LLC, he makes like 5 minutes or less tutorials for blender on everything that's easy to follow for new and experienced users. also, I'm sure you know flipped normals but if you don't they have a great series to point new users and a great video for experienced users of other programs looking to switch. check them out, it's the fastest track to learn blender.
I still refuse to buy into the "software as a service" scam, even at a reduced price. No perpetual license, no sale.
Yeah exactly what are you getting with a subscription nothing might as well let us buy the software . speedtree is subscription only so I am looking for alternatives and found some that I will check out.
Software on a subscription is a great option for some people. But the option to just buy a full licence should still be there.
@@NihongoWakannai I agree, a subscription is a better option if:
1. You can't afford the full amount up front
2. You're a freelancer, and only need a specific program for a short contract
3. Your school or employer pays for your license
But in the long term, a perpetual license is always a better investment, and usually pays for itself after 2.5 years, even for the most expensive programs. That's why so many people are ditching Adobe for programs like Affinity Photo or DaVinci Resolve. In fact, some professionals are still hanging onto their old CS6 licenses, because that was the last version before Adobe switched to subscription only.
subscription does not make sense when you download program that stays on your computer. I guess I would for instance understand why backblaze or google only using subscription model for their cloud storage because harddrives need to be swapped to maintain data. What is there to maintain once I have downloaded an app and started using it nothing the program just sits on my computer like any other program I guess I like options provide subscriptions for people who wanna receive the latest updates and a perpetual licence for people who are content with the software for what it is right now. I personally would buy 3ds max and speed tree if there were selling a perepetual license however right now I guess I am either looking for alternatives or sailing the high seas.
If the company is still developing the software it makes sense that they would want some sort of compensation for continuing development. It is not a scam, it's a less risky way of monetising software that you are still providing support and regular updates. It's not a scam. SaaS does not mean there isn't a perpetual license. You might just be restricted to using the last version that you downloaded. That means you don't have access to support and future updates which seems reasonable.
So basically Autodesk pushing people to use blender. good job.
@Adam Gibb yea exactly if you don't have free software to learn, people are not gonna use it. and I don't think Autodesk is hurting badly without this revenue. in a sense, it shot in foot.
Basmati Ryze true but for the self learners. This isn’t true for institutions really because institutions will pretty much always have the software on their computers for at a special discount for students. So looking at it at an institution level people who go will learn the software still & they’ll go off into the workforce knowing it
I still rather pay for Maya subscribtion than use blender, luckily i don't need to do either.
Houdini & UE4 ftw
Blender 2.82:
VFX - Partial support/capability
Fluid simulations - Partial support/capability
Particle System - Super basic, heavily limited even with plugins ( mediocre )
Modeling - Great, one of the best softwares.
Rendering/Lookdev/Shading - Great
Animation/Rigging - Not my speciality but i'd say OK.
Motion Graphics - Mediocre
Architecture - Mediocre
Maya:
VFX - Great
Fluid simulations - Great
Particle System - Great
Modeling - OK
Rendering/Lookdev/Shading - Epic
Animation/Rigging - Epic
Motion Graphics - OK
Architecture - Great ( script support )
Or if you want to go full clickbait, "AUTODESK SHOVE LOYAL CUSTOMERS INTO BLENDER"
@@ExacoMvm Blender script support is rather epic. It's Python. In fact Blender's insane Python support is one of the thing it's loyalists hold up as the reason they use it.
Maya -1
Blender +1
Blender doesn't come close to Maya & you'll see that once you try it like i did :)
Tony AnMckay no animation layers, no time editor and stuff like that. in general the animation workflow is not as sophisticated as in maya yet. but it’s evolving fast. there are no limitations in blender that would completely prevent you from achieving the animation you want.
@@tonymc293 That would require me to write a long long list but i give you few examples.
* everyone know about performance, Blender doesn't perform well on highend rigs, put more than two in one scene & you'll see.
* rigging in Blender is very limited and can't handle highres meshes, i am talking feature/VFX quality especially in the face, some complex setups causes Blender to hit dependency cycles quickly, found this on RCS by someone else and this is just a simple FK-IK switch blender.community/c/rightclickselect/c7fbbc/
* Maya has many tools for rigging especially with Nodes, what you can do with tens of drivers & constraints in Blender can be repalced in Maya with just couple of them........they both offer python API but Blender limits you to only using what it ships with you can't make your own modifiers, deformers, RBF Solvers, Floating windows/ editors...etc you can only make addons that use the UI code like buttons,panels, menus but not low level stuff.
* I also made a feature request for the 3d Manipulators, most animators prefer to use them instead of the G.R.S (x.y.z) which are spread out and require too much clicks for simple transformation, Maya also has some very nice smart features for Manipulators and they added tons of animation features in the 2020 version.
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/67fbbc/
* Blender modifers & constraints are slow since they're in a modifer stack that run on CPU and there is no GPU accelerated Skinning or Deformers, Facial rigging in Blender is not high level but saw few people trying to improve that like this guy which he bumped into many issues and someboy else is trying to help him with patches twitter.com/Muream.
* the Animation workflow of autokeying/keying-set in Blender is cumbersom, Blender keys everything and it has no concept of non-keyable/locked attributes which makes it messy in the graph editor and forces you to clean it up in each setp, the graph lacks quality of life functionalities like auto-framing,stacked curves...etc the timeline doesn't display waveform with proper sound, tried the VSE but the audio comes out janky.
* in Maya you can make custom shelf with your own tools,hotkeys..etc whether from someone else script or yours while Blender you have to write an addon for that which fills up the sidebar and makes it even bad.
* Blender rigs always look busy & unprofessionally made and they have issue of too much controls in the viewport with bad color scheme, someone else complained about it too on RCS :)
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/95fbbc/
There are tons of request on RCS for rigging & animations tools from Maya which shows how much more advanced & intutive in comparison.
Adam Smith i agree with most of what you say here but i want to point out that
yes you can lock channels in the graph editor, when you make a keyframe, it asks uf you want the location, rotation, or scale channels keyframed (or any combination of these) and only keyframes those when autokeying too
there are 3d manipulators most people just don’t use them. for me the g. r. s. commands make a much faster workflow, since they’re hotkeys instead of clicking and dragging manipulators. also you can type numbers after them which allows a fast and precise workflow. the snapping rotation in maya just never does that i want it to do, it starts rotating the other way and everything
there is a quick favorites menu. when you hit q, it appears (i never used it so i don’t know if you can add custom commands too...)
other than that, yes, blender is not there yet but i’m excited to see how it continues progressing
@Philipp Rapp Whos got 10 years of waiting huh i don't like autorigs they're not as intutive as custom rigs for specific needs.
"Autodesk remains committed to education"
This is a joke, if autodesk ever gave educational licenses, it was only to achieve its objective of monopolizing the industry.
I have to agree with this.
I think it's also why they bought Softimage and Maya/Power Animator and Mudbox. I gave up on Maya after it constantly crashed and would corrupt my file. And all of the hours and money spent on tutorials for Mental Ray and it's gone.
@Artisan
"Money doesn't interest me" - Creator of Blender talks about its future
watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg
yeah, he dont care about money.
and even if he wanted to monopolize something, he chose the wrong licence for doing so, anyone can fork an gpl code and create an competing product.
what people like you dont understand, is that money is just the means to get something, whats your dream of consumption?
if you want to buy an car, they you need money for that, but if you want to draw a painting, the ink and canvas arent your "dream of consumption", the final painting itself is your dream, your goal, and the ink and canvas are just the means for your goal.
you need money to purchase ink and a canvas so of course you will want some money, but that dont means geting dirt rich at the cost of everyone quality of life, including your own while using the tool that you build.
@Artisan blender barely has any profit lol. Its development is mainly supported by donations and volunteers (open source extensions that get adopted into the main codebase).
@@soundninja99 It can't have profit it's registered as a none profit so he is fully committed to just the software.
Well, that's one way to push everyone to blender, I guess.
But the thing is you were only suppose to use the educational version if you went to an accredited school. If you are attending an accredited school then I don’t really see a problem with this.
The only real people who are upset are the ones who do not attend an accredited school or graduated. Yeah, $1,620 (USD) per yr is a bit but compared to other things & software it’s not that bad. However, Maya has the indie version for Indie Devs for like $250 (USD) per year. So there is also that!
@@PhantomGanhdi The thing is, I'm not about to spend $250 every damn year just to keep improving my demo reel, y'know? I'm sorry Autodesk couldn't figure out a compromise that handcuffs illegal freelancers without harming non-students who are legitimately using it for non-commercial purposes, but oh well. My reaction to that ain't gonna be to buy it. *shrug*
Also...speaking personally re: education and colleges, after having gone through all that shit, my assessment is that it's all bullshit, and "accredited schools" are nothing but artificial gatekeeping to hold back people who can't afford it/forces those who can into unnecessary debt. But that's a much bigger topic than just Autodesk.
@@z-beeblebrox Yeah, I understand that but I can also see why auto desk did it because just like what I am assuming your case is you're creating demo reels to get a job? Which I can see them saying as still being under commercial because even though you are not directly doing work for a client, you are creating a portfolio so you can get a job and paid for it in the future.
But I do wish auto desk had an educational version that anyone who wanted to learn the software could use even if it was a bit of a watered down version just so more people could get their hands on it. As well as a version that was around $12-20 per month for hobbyist if they wanted to use it while also make money from it.
@@PhantomGanhdi The problem is everything you make is Autodesk property by their license and you must be at accredited school. Just download Blender and your problem is gone.....
@@alexas8787 True, blender is pretty great but the rigging and sculpting I just do not like it yet lol.
I can't believe this! I have officially gone to blender
Welcome!
Yeah, Blender is nice but so many companies still use Autodesk Software and specifically ask for Skills in Maya etc. And thats the real problem.
I can't believe this! I have officially gone to piracy... :(
I've got 30+ years in the CG industry. I can say that the future for Blender has never looked brighter.
@@SteveWarner that is also true
Now I can understand what Softimage users felt like when Autodesk discontinued the software back in 2015...
“But it’ll never happen to us,” they thought ...
And Softimage is still more advanced and stable than Maya. ICE is a hundred times better than their new bifrost. Even so I am learning Houdini as it is a way better than both. I imagine a new Houdini / Blender Industry standard workflow at some point down the future. The ONLY thing keeping maya viable is animation. Softimage is much better at character animation though.
@@talent103 Yup. Pretty much that's where it is going Blender/Houdini.
@@MeshVoid this is pretty much the conclusion I've come up with as well. I'm a long time Maya user, and I'm amazed about how easier it is to do a LOT of things in Blender as opposed to Maya, and with the wealth of educational resources available for Houdini, it does not seem as scary any more. The moment Blender integrates good CHARACTER animation stuff, Maya will take a HUGE hit. Even Cinema 4D is taking a hit from HOudini specially with the 3rd party plugin for MOPS operators. Now if after effects could have some decent competition...
Softimage was in a dead end anyway stop blaming autodesk for others problems, it's the main Devs of Softimage who sold it right & left before truely abandoning it, Autodesk took the chance & made it's code part of it's library which is a smart move from a company that wants to dominate & make money......it's just buisness in the end :)
It's basically Autode$k saying please download and learn Blender.
@27 confirmed kills in Al-Qaeda if anything they will make more
@27 confirmed kills in Al-Qaeda Its a big loss in their community...
all of the previous artist will use blender...
they will make great job using Blender which will attract more companies..
the community is the true treasure
Not YOUR MONEY....
And donate to the Blender organization so they can keep on making more tools and other improvements.
@five seven they are future customers. If you make them pay, instead of paying they'll turn to other software. If you let them have a free trial, they will have a much greater chance of making a purchase.
Where is the blender squad?
We are here just enjoying the show
Hopefully Blender takes advantage of this fresh news, and announce more features specifically for animation!! Les Go
Here here. i'm on my 4th year of using the amazinng software. I started back in the 2.76 days. :D
@Solid Snake as someone who works as a character animator in Blender, I 100% agree with you.
Ton retweeted this and now im here.
There is an option to set your keyboard shortcuts to "Like Maya" in Blender.
Which are not that great if you are not typing on an qwerty keybords ... I prefer sticking to logical "capital-of-the-option" shortcuts style Blender has.
Autodesk aren't clowns, they're the entire circus.
hahaha
easy there tiger.
Nah autodesk is nowhere near the clown levels that is adobe. I have a lot more respect for autodesk for making the software free for so long, this was expected at some point.
Daniela Morera
they picked the wrong time to do it.
@@ProjectAtlasmodling when would of been the right time?
Switched to Blender and i adapted my workflow with the clients, saved tons of money on software licensing
That's great in all still many developers like me who are low-funded do still rely on Autodesk Maya and 3DS Max that included other industries net worth around $100M+ annually. We are not simply just going to make a switch to Blender just because the community is huge on the other side. If I'm looking for 3D artists and the pay is $75k to $150k annually I demand higher quality of work from a higher quality of tools and software I can provide to my paying clients as a service.
@@johnenerio6453 i understand, my line of work is more flexible with my client, they don't care about the software i use as long the end result is reached. its unfortunate that some of the creative industries still tied to a software these days
$250/month equates to about 1 cent/month per bug. Blender: "Look at me, I load FAST, and don't crash 100 times a month!" Maya: "WTF!?"
It's $280 per *year*
@@CVerse In my case it's $150/yr for Maya license it's different for some people.
For me I used 3D Max from the 2000s to Maya from the 2010s and now learning Blender for the 2020s 🙂
@Trantor The Troll Already have one but thanks for the luck though :)
y'all forget the best one. Houdini.
Houdini was a nightmare to learn but if it works for you go for it
@@FlashVedder i like your Attituded Gives me a chuckle..
Doesn't matter what software you use.. just be the best artist you can be 🙂
Sir Wade, you said you're considering to learn Blender now. I just downloaded it and I thought it would be really helpful if you as a Maya Animator would do a tutorial at some point, like "From Maya to Blender for Animators", in which you would explain where things are in the new environment and how the software differs in that regard. I think that would be really helpful for many people!
Flippednormals has a video like that. "Switching to Blender for Advanced 3D Artists".
Yeah, quite a few other artists have already made the switch over the years, and there are any number of videos on UA-cam comparing the two. You are not breaking new ground here.
lol the guy didn't even open Blender for one hour and you expect him to do "tutorials" right away & he still has Maya student version & it'll probably never expires since he's a former Animation Mentor alumni which gives them a lifetime access to everything in the school inclduing the software but i do hope that he digs deep inside Blender & show the community the real difference between maya & blender when it comes to animation it's the only way to convince stubborn heads if you know what mean ;).
@@xox8717 i dont actually expect him to do anything, I merely suggested that that would be something helpful AT SOME POINT.
Try the dikko UA-cam channel. He used Modo and Maya for years and he recently transferred to blender. He could help you out
I've been on Maya for the since 2010 and I lived by Maya. However, I am currently transitioning to Blender and I couldn't be more happy. Blender is really simple once you figure out the differences. Plus the Blender community is really huge and helpful.
Can Blender be as good as Maya when it comes to rigging and animation? I have heard Blender sucks when it comes to comparing rigging and animation with Maya.
@@asifjaved7672 No, blender still has to work on it's animation pipeline and it will arrive there one day, given that the blender foundation has started working on making blender more industry compatable. Meanwhile, it doesn't suck at rigging and animation per say, it's just missing some tools that you can acquire from installing some addons anyway. You can make it work. Just give it a try and see
@@asifjaved7672 My animation experience is pretty limited, but overall, I've found it to be easier and better organized than Maya's workflow. I'm currently learning a rigging course in Blender, and overall, it's much more straightforward in terms of bone hierarchy, constraints, drivers, weight painting, shape keys, pose libraries, actions, etc. As for animation, one major criticism Blender receives is the lack of animation layers. However, I've heard it's possible to get similar results via the Action Editor.
@@atoaster2070 Blender can't handle thousands of Blendershapes, constraints,Drivers..etc without having huge performance impact & what you can do in Blender with those can easily be done in Maya with couple nodes & of course many features are lacking like Pose Space Deformer, GPU accelerated skinning, No GPU opensubdiv yet, attributes spreadsheet, deformers,Set Driven Keys...etc it seems that the dependency graph is more limited , i have hit so many cycles that it's not easy to over come them like in Maya.
Here is just one example where a simple IK/FK visbilty switcher is hard to do in blender, you end up with tens of drivers for just basic ik/fk chains & there is no way around it besides what Blender riggers do which put dozen of custom properties for them & clutter the sidebar, that's why most Blender rigs are unintuitive and very messy........i got more complicated stuff for facial rigging which i am still exploring myself.... So to me Maya still wins in this area big time
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/c7fbbc/
i went to the Maya community in reddit, the community there is dead,
+ i got attack by people and called me spoiled and more, wtf, Autodesk Maya is overprice.
now i am learning blender. and the community is a million times better,
They timed it perfectly too, Blender's 2.8 seams have been ironed out mostly and its features are piling up.
They really shot themselves in the foot. Needing to prove eligibility for the free version will even deter people who are eligible. Those people will go look for an alternative, and Blender's limitations can be worked around.
Gotta say those prices are utter extortion. You could BUY similar software in the past for those prices, and now they want to milk companies annually for this price.
Imagine needing to lease the new version of your car all of a sudden for the same price as you bought it for years prior.
"Maya", means, literally, "illusion", and, like all illusions, is subject to sudden disappearance. Or, they got ya hooked, so they're turning the screws...
Wait, Maya used to be free?
@@not_herobrine3752 - Yeah, All I remember is little self-important A-holes at Maya seminars smuggly saying that training was only £1,600 and that'll get you 20% off the gazillion quid the product cost, if you have a certified workstation with the right GPU (facepalm). So I used LightWave and SoftImage instead! :o) Now I use Blender and get things done way faster.
@@not_herobrine3752 yup thats how they have a user base at all tbh
I can't believe this happens to me as soon as I graduate this year. I wasn't intending to work at home on Maya and get a job in a studio. I was hoping to still learn maya at home. This is just so ridiculous. I bet free educational versions of software improve the amount of people using it. Blender's business model has worked so well and I'm surprised Autodesk has decided to make this stupid decision. They are shooting themselves in the foot and more people are going to be using Blender. Moronic decision making, ESPECIALLY during a global pandemic where people hope to teach themselves.
Exactly blender is about to blow up even more. I'm glad it's free
Hopefully more people donate to Blender's Development fund, purely out of spite for these greedy bastards.
I COULD be wrong, but if you have an account with Autodesk, and you sign up for your educational license, you can hang on to that and download it on to a computer whenever you have one (if you don't already). The expiration date, I believe, will be 3 years after your initial sign up, not the download date.
I could be all wrong. Worth checking out. I JUST got the 2020 version, and if you sign in to your account and look in the My Software tab, the version you're allowed to install will be listed there along with the expiration date.
Aw man...best of luck!
@@atoaster2070 i am going to donate to blender once i have learn to use the program.
Thanks for the update! Crazy times!!
Such a strange decision considering how many alternatives their prospective customers have to explore! Still, Maya seems to have the best tools for animators regardless for now :P
Sir Wade Neistadt They have to be careful to not alienate people though. You don’t want a split between students and professionals in terms of Software. It’s great that you don’t have to train people in Maya when they get hired.
@@jeandenishaas I've been thinking of going to the high school I went to and doing a presentation for the students but I'm really not sure if I can recommend using Maya because of this.
daaaamn... blender here I come! Been wanting to learn and make the switch anyway, and this is the push I needed. Wonder if my 3 year licence still counts🤞If I ever got a job in the industry I'd be using Maya day-to-day anyway, it's just annoying having to use/learn a different software for personal projects...
14:41 It's because they've done the maths and they see that they're on the way out, so they've calculated the maximum milking ratio and set their policy to pursue that.
Nuke capitalism from orbit now
AutoCAD Is the money maker. The couldn't care less about Maya or 3Ds Max
I kinda hope you are right. Ton talked about this too, Autodesk effectively makes nothing from their VFX monopoly, it's like 300K a year, all the money they make is with CAD ~4billion, maybe Blender got to the point where Autodesk realized they didn't care enough to compete, what a strange way for Blender to win in the end.
Exactly.
Maya: is no longer free
Obnoxious Blender users: **maniacal laughter**
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA
No, but seriously though, when I saw the title of this vid i ACTUALLY let out a maniacal laugh, no bs
At this point they're making it too easy, lol
Ton Roosendaal, Godspeed, you magnificent bastard !
Alternatively...
Blender users: _"It's free real estate."_
mwahahaha
@@mihailazar2487 i mean yes it's like being in a race and suddenly the best runner gets a gun and shots himself in the foot, what a stupid desition
Its funny because I just said soon as I get out of AnimSchool I was going to Blener for my Animations. I love maya but I cant dill anymore.
Blender is really awesome and a lot of software like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 (and soon UE5 when it releases) actually support Blender Models now.
Blender is miles behind Maya in animation tools. Wouldn't recommend opting for sub-par software if you have a choice.
@@__w__o__w__ Agreed. Blender can and is used by a lot of great animators, so it's definitely a valid option. But it simply doesn't compare to Maya (only talking about animation tools, nothing else)
Animschool represent!
@@hectorescobar9450 for heavy VFX & advance character rigs it's a lot behind but of course Blender doesn't have ILM,Weta,DNEG,Disney,Lucasfilms.etc supporting it , so lets see what will happen after this.
Polls on my channel surprised me, 80%+ of people voted to transition the channel to Blender.. Times are changing..
Few years back even suggesting something like that would get you killed.
@@myhandlehasbeenmishandled yeah try last year haha, I pulled the same poll 8months ago, and it was 80% asking me to keep the channel 100% Maya..
you'll see when you will be using blender the shortcuts are weird compared to maya but when you get used to them its nice👌
You can also customize the hotkeys or use other keymaps, like this one I made with Maya ALT camera & QWER transforms and otherwise mostly defaults: blender.community/c/rightclickselect/w0fbbc/
It also has a secondary shortcut layout called "Industry standard", which probably can be helpful. Though I personally find default Blender shortcuts to be a bliss lol
@@z_tiger311
Oh sure, because 100% of all 3D work ever is animation.
Dealing with Maya is much easier than dealing with Blender and it's lack of power & features.
I thought so at first, but after using it for a few minutes, it became second nature.
Me as a Blender user:...
I switched over to Blender since Autodesk killed Softimage.
I really love Maya for a lot of stuff, but the only option that the shitty Autodesk politics had left me is switching to Blender.
I just landed a job on an animated series produced with Blender, so I'm currently making the switch, and it made me realise how most of what I like about Maya is actually not the software itself but what's been built by the community around it. I mean, Blender obviously can't match the tools of Animbot, or the great diversity of awesome rigs developed for Maya, but other than that, so far I actually like Blender much better. I like the flow, the menus, the interface graphics, and the fact that it literally takes a minute to install and a second to launch. After Using Maya for years, it's just a joy for me to open Blender.
It's always a pain to change software and loose you automatism, and I'm sure I'll find more things that Blender doesn't do as well as Maya, but overall I'm really glad to make the change.
And as more and more people go to Blender in the coming years, we'll probably see much improvment both from Blender itself and the scripts and rigs developped by the community
AnimAide for Blender is a partial port of the animBot tool suite. It's on Github. Hope that helps! :)
@@quollism Oooooh, that's great ! Thank you :D
Animbot? 🤔 Actually i was shocked that it is a third party plugin when blender has more 70% of what the plug in offer already included
Blender have most of the tools included in animbot as default, Maya is not as good as blender.
I've always been on the fence about switching, but if you recorded yourself for a couple hours just using blender for the first time I'd love to follow along!
Everyone: has no student card
Me, an intellectual: *P H O T O S H O P*
Pretty sure that's illegal and can get you in plenty of trouble
Yea this is just a huge bummer I'm just worried about what will I do after AM since I'm in Class 6 now I should still have 2019 till the next two years or so since I haven't even got it for a year yet. but still I do hope in that Time Blender revamps their animation pipeline because I saw some tutorials and boy do we have it good on Maya not a big fan of what blender has in terms of animation but we can deal with it. I'm going to try to learn Blender as well it is going to be a learning curve but who knows Blender might get even better with all these creators switching and giving blender feedback. The only thing that causes a problem with switching over from Maya to blender for animators is that there really isn't a lot of rigs out there for us to animate to and with barely any rigs or even if there are good quality ones it's really going to be hard for animators.
I agree, years ago CGCOOKIE released a flex rig similar to the Bishop rig, where there are a lot of customizations to the character's looks... But right now it's really outdated and things like hair and the eyes don't render properly on the latest versions of blender. I do hope someone comes out with more free rigs.
But there is also the blender cloud, where you do paid subscriptions and you get access to all of the blender institutes project files. So like rigs and assets from blender's official short films.
I've been using Maya since 2012 and I can tell you, Blender is a much BETTER option with it's tools and recent animation set up than Maya. Plus, it's free, so complaining about the tools is like complaining about getting free water
Toybanaza oh for sure I’m sure blender has a bunch of amazing things and I’m all for it but as an animator point of view we can’t animate if there are no good quality rigs out there to use. There is the shorts rigs that blender created but that’s locked under a subscription which I understand why they did that but most other rigs are either Anime fan inspired or just not as appealing and good as the library of maya rigs out there. Now I could Model and rig my own rig but that is not my field I don’t want to have to model and rig just to animate a face test nor will I even get the quality I need. I’m sure more rigs will come in due time and animators can really make the switch it has nothing to do with the tools or anything just the lack of a rig library and resources. I can’t make animation without a rig. If you know a place where I can get really good rigs from blender please let me know would love to test them out
Well, I found one for ya here is the link. Hopefully, it helps
ua-cam.com/video/2vKoNzz-8no/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/yCNUP2NAt-A/v-deo.html
This was made entirely in blender.
This really hits hard, but what can we animators do about it. Had no idea about the indie version but transitioning from paying $250 to the full $1600 automatically is a shady move. Sounds like Blender will eventually become a bigger competitor with Maya. I do hope Maya makes a better move in the end.
I work as a freelancer using Blender. I have never used Maya but I know a friend that does.
It seems from what I know is that Maya has better animating tools than Blender, but Blender has the better modeling tools.
Better doesn't mean "crushing", you can do most of what you can do with both softwares, it is just some things will be a little easier in one of them.
Also the undo system of Blender is currently broken for large files but hopefully with the frequent Blender updates it will be fixed soon.
Although I am not that experienced, my opinion is for people to use Blender to learn or even start making money with it until you feel confident enough that buying Maya will improve your work and is worth the money. Learning a new software and adapting to it doesn't take more than a couple of weeks. Modeling and animating principles are the same no matter what tools you use so these will always be with you.
Blender is improving faster than a profit driven company like Autodesk ever can, and I think in most areas it will overtake Maya soon. For everything else, it's already past the "good enough" point. As you say, the differences aren't crushing. It becomes simple math at that point. Do you want to pay four figures every year for the rest of your life doing what you know, or spend a few weeks of downtime learning something else that will be free forever? I'd say there's actually significant opportunity cost from not switching to Blender ASAP. If you can still make rent if you spend those weeks learning Blender, why not just do it now? If you can afford Autodesk's yearly tax, think about what you could do if you invested that money in better hardware instead while using Blender. Faster renders mean more time can be spent making artistic decisions, which get you better results and help you learn quicker too so your skills improve faster. Or invest that money into some classes or one-on-one mentoring.
Wow, this news just ruined my day!! I'm a 3rd-year animation student and this sucks big time. One thing I wanted to ask though, what happens to the existing Student License users? I love Maya, especially the UI and the fact that it's so userfriendly but since Autodesk has made these changes I think I'll probably switch to Blender for good, cause it's just as good as Maya and in some cases ever far superior.
Thankyou for the update btw.
The basics are the same just a different UI. Plus the community kicks ass, so it's easy to reach out and figure how to do complex stuff. My school used Maya only, and with that knowledge learning the UI of Blender was easy.
You can actually switch to industry keybinds or shortcuts so that it will be very similar to how maya does it
@@NightShinerStudio My advice is learn the shortcuts in blender. While I know they are different there are a lot you would lose changing the key map.
I just got a job to work on a Feature film in Blender and now this happens... well I am happy that gonna be trained to Blender.... Still am gonna miss Maya... But I hate what they have become. Part of me wants Blender to be as big as Maya so they could start treating their customers with respect!
give blender 5 more years,
and in 5 more years maya might be gone for good.
No More Maya, Blender Rules !
@Trantor The Troll Autodesk fanboy
My Mom is trying to do a carreer change, completely self taught, using youtube and Autodesk's software... This blows.
This has been a requirement in Canada for a while. When I started relearning 3D animation about 15 years ago, I had access to the student version, but within a very short time, they made this same change for Canadians and I was forced to use Blender... which I've always had trouble with, not just because it's cryptic, but because I have a mental block against having the z-axis as up.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I've been using student versions since 2012 and have never needed to send ID, and I'm a Vancouverite.
So many thoughts and emotions are running through my head right now. I'm studying to be a background modeler and special effects artist for animations and video games, and for the past 3 years of college, I've spent my time learning maya and zbrush for modeling and houdini for special effects. But I mainly focused on maya because I was constantly told that maya was the industry standard and that's what I needed to learn. And I was told I didn't have to worry about paying for it after I graduate because it was still free, plus my license was going to last 3 years anyway and hopefully by then I would maybe have a job in the industry. But now everything is slowly changing to blender. I know of a couple of small game studios that are switching to blender because it saves them a ton of money and it does basically the same thing as far as they are concerned. And my brain gets all emotional and upset that blender is even free, how can they afford to just give away software that is close to the level of quality as maya, for free and still keep there business going? It just doesn't make since to me. Plus it sets this idea in peoples heads that these high powered softwares should just be given away to people for free? But someone had to put in the effort to make it? And maya still has a lot of things that blender doesn't, if your a student or even just a normal person you can get the pixar renderman plug in for maya and it changes the game in terms of rendering animation and texture work. I'm scared that i'm going to graduate and all that time I spent learning maya is going to go to waste because everyone has switched to blender. And i'd like to actually get into the entertainment industry. I just don't know where the entertainment industry is going in terms of software and it kind of scares me? Sorry for the rant. This just really scares me right. And I know in the long run we will all get through this.
Blender is graciously given free to us but the community does give money and support the development, so while its free it doesnt mean that people arent paying for its development, it sucks about maya tho
Also know that your knowledge will stay with you and most likely will translate to anything you do, so keep up the hard work girl! You got this!!
@@samueltavarez2819 Thank you so much! The reason maya took me 3 years to really get the hang of, is because I had never really 3D modeled before, so im hoping that those skills translate im just not looking forward to learning all the blender short cuts. And I do worry that blender being free gives people idea that all programs should be free. But if all software is free there is no money to put into development? I actually don't mind paying $1,600 for a program, I mind paying $1,600 for a program every year. Other programs like zbrush, you can just straight up buy the license to the program for like $1,400ish and then you own it forever, now if you want the most up to date version you gotta buy it again. Idk I understand that programs cost money because there are so many things that maya has that blender doesn't have. I just worry that because blender is free that a lot of game design and animation studios will transfer over to that, and while blender is on the right path to being industry level quality, it's not quite there. Thank you for the encouragement! I hope you have a wonderful day!
@@beacreates4370 Blender has been free for years, but it's only getting better because people are paying for it to be better. Software like Maya have been used because it's always been really good, that's why it's expensive. Blender on the other hand wasn't always good, but the community has been donating for it to be better, and the devs working on it aren't working for free btw. So I would say its fair.
I doubt companies like Pixar would make the switch, cause compared to the budget they use for their movies, it isn't much to pay for Maya.
@@BergsArt well, Pixar and Dreamworks have their own proprietary softwares, but Disney does use Maya and it's unlikely they'll just switch. Smaller studios, however, are probably far more interested in blender
I will say that any animators reading this that are trying to get into videogame development... If you have to switch to blender to be able to animate at home, that's fine, but be aware the majority of the big studios use Maya or in some cases Motionbuilder, so just be aware that you'll have to be flexible and change/learn for that job. Guaranteed people will pass on you if you insist you only know blender. As the video says, you have to be adaptable.
When you open Blender for the first time, you can specify your control preferences. They have added 'industry standard' (same as Maya or Substance Painter) controls
The Industry Compatible keymap is really good, though it makes tutorials confusing since they tend to use defaults. If you want something that's somewhere between that and the default hotkeys, try this one : blender.community/c/rightclickselect/w0fbbc/
I actually just noticed 2 days ago, that my student version Maya required me to now provide a license, which was weird. I'm currently working on a paid for license by the company I work for, so I didn't notice that right away. What a bummer... I'm really tempted to go the shady route to still be able to access Maya for my private/learning stuff, and I think a lot of people will too...
I think Autodesk needs our shady roads. In the end, when you earn money you will not want to have legal problems and you will continue using it but paying what they ask for.
EDIT: Hey everyone! I don't think you need to panic about your current licenses right now :) Like I say at the end, I'm fairly certain your current Maya license will be allowed to finish out its 'timer' before you need to choose between options 1-3. And if you're currently a student about to graduate, grab a document that's as late-dated as possible so you can get a new 1-year license at the end of your school year, and you'll be good for awhile after leaving school.
ALSO I do NOT condone any illegally obtained software, Maya or otherwise. So no talk of cracked licenses or anything like that, please. Illegally obtaining or using software is what causes the prices to drive so high for so many products, and hurts smaller developers who could otherwise create new tools for us to use.
Man i like your UA-cam videos because u make things easy and understanding
I have three years in my maya student liscence for 2020. Will it stop working or continue until 2023?
Sir if people go to the Lt version the AMD Pro Render is a freaking fantastic free PBR render engine. I've been testing it and I'm shocked with the quality
I have been watching Animation videos each an every day ...I wanna be a program a so I can earn money to start a cartoon studio or is it a studio
You'll be fine! :) Your current license should keep going until it expires, and if you're in school now, you should upload your documents and get an extra year starting when you validate your student status.
5 years of Blender use has taught me that basically any and every feature of other 3d software already exists in form of add ons and scripts, you just have to do some research and some extra work to get the exact tools you need. Yes, that process is extremely time consuming but the software is still open source and full potential in regards to other Softwares.
I changed from 3ds max to Blender and am really loving it. There are things that I really miss in 3Ds Max such as Arrays, Garment Maker, Particle Flow, etc. However I am enjoying the shift especially for dynamics such as Rigid Bodies, Soft Body, Sculpting and knowing this is all free blows my mind especially as I am more of an indie animator.
You mention digging in into Blender;
There is that question as to whether Blender stack up in terms of saving a lot of time and money on animation production.
I'll be creating a video series about getting mixamo animation into a library directly inside of Blender that you can edit via the rigify addon. It's something I've done professionally in a corporate setting, so It's been industry tested. I'll even demonstrate how to make plenty of layers of animation editing via the NLA editor, so we can blend together different actions to make new ones.
I'm interested in gauging interest on this, and feedback is welcome. I'm about halfway through my first episode. Kudos Sir wade, It's not easy to design a good tutorial!
Take ANY class at a Community College ($46 per unit, $140 per class) With the proof of enrollment, get the FREE one-year Maya license. Repeat after one year. You get a cheap copy of Maya AND you can learn great stuff at Community Colleges. I went to Gnomon, Animation Mentor and iAnimate. After 20 years in the Animation Industry, I now teach at a Community College in California, where your first two years’ tuition is FREE!: edsource.org/2018/getting-free-college-tuition-in-california-a-quick-guide/599039
Wow, can't believe it! I actually use Blender to do high quality animations and Blender does work well once you get used to it. You get used to the graph editor changes you mentioned. TBH the biggest complaint I have is honestly the undo tool is very slow in comparison to Maya. Give Blender a shot though! My whole studio uses Blender!
Do you work at Tangent?
Try 2.90 alpha, the new undo is way faster than ever before.
jesus they are so god damn stupid it hurts. The one way to get people committed to your software is them actually using it as much as possible. The more proficient they get at it, the less likely they will change, because you know, they don't want to waste the time invested learning your software already switching to something else. Even if someone was to use Maya student version unauthorized for a few years, it would absolutely gear them towards becoming an Autodesk customer eventually. Whether that is through buying a license of their own or them being hired at a company that then needs to buy a licensed version for them.
Putting this huge hurdle right at the start of someone's animation career is literally the stupidest thing they can do, especially with such complicated software that may take literally years to become proficient at.
What do they think they can possible gain from this? A few thousand freelancer licenses suddenly buying it? Not a chance, if they were using their license illegitimately to begin with nothing will stop them from continuing doing that. And thats not even where the big money is to be made anyway, that has always been the big studios with dozens if not hundreds of licenses; companies who could actually be sued effectively f they don't license correctly, so they make damn sure they do.
Like seriously how difficult would it have been to make a limited version freely available, that beginners can at least use to get themselves started with all of the basics (and trust me that takes enough time) but that professionals couldn't abuse due to certain limitations? Autodesk is digging heir own grave by driving away a complete new generation of potential Maya users. It just boggles my mind how they can be so inept... It really is time for me to move away from this dinosaur of a program...
I was already considering jumping ship, I'll keep maya around this summer to help teach a few classmates how to model in it. I hope the indie version of Maya will be available when I needed it to brush up on, once I get a job.
That's the thing. I'd love to jump ship and get on blender but the fact is that when I'm being interviewed for a job my interviewer will tell me they use Maya. So either I won't be employed or they will employ me but I will have to get use to Maya again
@@southpaw9041 I mean I'm fine with using maya, it's something that was mentioned in the video. You can't tell your employer sorry the company is garbage so I don't use this software.
I've also heard some (most) companies give you about 2 weeks at least to get familiar with any new software. All companies also have you use that 2 weeks of time, to adjust to there workflow
I expect that a lot of online schools will start to reword their website to say "...such as Maya, MODO, Blender, or other appropriate 3D package".
..
It's Autodesk. Anyone who 'trusts' AD to seriously take into consideration their customers who don't pay them a $100k or more per year is fooling themselves. Personally I use MODO. Tried Lightwave, and while I do like a lot about it, it's age shows every 2nd or 3rd thing you try to do. I still use LW, but MODO is an amazing piece of software.
..
(PS: I learned Maya back when it was "Maya". That's it. As in the first one. In fact, it was a Beta, iirc (I was in an actual 3d school in Vancouver, BC...'CDIS', which got bought out by Art Institute a couple years after I finished). I liked it well enough, but was infinitely more happy with Softimage|3D...which I actually bought. The AD bought Softimage and said, "Don't worry...we aren't killing Softimage in favour of Maya or Max. We just added it to our portfolio so we could offer our customers more". ..er....oookkaaaa.... Then big features of XSI showed up in Maya. That was the point all us Softimage users had no doubt; "They're just gonna canibalize it and toss the mangled carcass of XSI into the ditch". A lot of us XSI folk jumped ship then. A few years latter and..."Sorry. We're discontinuing sale and support of Softimage|XSI. Thanks for your money. Now give us more, every year, for Maya or Max...or eff off".)
..
(PPS: Yes, I am STILL P'O'ed at Autodesk for killing Softimage! 🤬 ).
I'm jumping from Cinema 4D to Blender, I love C4D, but it's been getting too focussed on motion graphics for many years now, which it's amazing at, but which isn't my area of interest, and a lot of its other tools are being severely neglected and becoming outdated as a consequence, plus I don't support their new Software as a Service model. Like you I hadn't looked at Blender for years and when I last tried it it did things so differently it was a pain, but having taken another look at it after the 2.8 update, it's truly amazing.
i have been following your channel with maya tutorials although i am a blender user bcoz there is no animation community in blender and now we have got a tutor for blender
Scared me for second there, I'm a heavy Blender right now and the college I'm going to be teaching Maya & ZBrush. For a hot second I thought I was going to pay for that on top of everything else.
As a Blender diehard, this is fantastic news!
Seeing this, Blender should focus more and modelling/animating instead of trying to do everything. If they can focus on those 2 things, ppl would be more pleased to go for it. Especially animators since I see a lot of them wanting to do so but the tools aren't as efficicent compared to maya.
completely disagree. I love that blender can be a onestop shop and I think that the way they organize the tools into different workspaces provides sufficient "focus".
The Blender Foundation might want to spend more time on those things in the short term if they're getting useful feedback from artists about areas that need improvement, but Blender is open source and there are always going to be contributions coming in from everybody for every aspect of Blender. This isn't a zero sum game. All aspects of Blender may be improved each version that gets released. I always see a ton of new features in the release notes on parts of Blender I have never touched or didn't even know existed. I'm still getting lots of new stuff in the areas I use every day.
It's also worth noting that Blender isn't a profit-driven enterprise that is trying to take market share from Maya at major studios. That doesn't really do anything for them. Their objective is to bring the best tools to all artists everywhere for free. It's completely irrelevant if the studios don't use Blender. It's completely irrelevant if all the studios use Blender exclusively. Making the best tools for artists naturally will lead to greater industry adoption, and features that make Blender more easily integrated into pipelines, but that's more a side effect than a specific objective. There's artists that want those features, and coders willing to do the work, and if enough artists are clamoring for those things more than other things, the Foundation will pay somebody to work on it specifically.
Wow, they also hiked up their month-to-month subscription. In my country it's almost double what it was in January and it's not all due to the exchange rate.
At least they are creating jobs for people to do the accreditation, I think.
Edit: nice shirt!!
It's Blender time. I would love to see you use it more often tbh. Seriously though, this is a disgusting amount of money that they charge
Not really even cinema 4D is expensive so 3D was never cheap until Blender came so paying 150 a month for a license where most 3D projects are 1000+ it id a fair price
Ah this makes me so sad, only have been animating for less than a year and maya just decides to do this 😭
Same 😭
@@Som3D Sorry bout that
I haven't even started it yet :(
@@hopevity OMG Eliza I feel even bad 😂😭😭😭😭
@@mayanachiappan7625 thank you hopefully they don't continue with this hope they can do something for students to still use it because seriously they will lose so many users to blender
blender users:we finally stole biggest maya animation content creator,now he is our propety
Though I like that your gonna give blender a try, cause the Blender community has an abundance of free tutorials about everything else, but severly lacking in tutorials about character animations specifically (talking about tutorials thats free, cause there are a lot of paid Blender courses for professional character animation)
15:33 "animation is a craft" important message!!! 13:48 / 14:04 versatility is important too, so... learn about all around you!
I will do it 💪🏼
I had an account with maya eduard license that i created in 2019 and i just check and maya is gone. I think i will go back to my origin, blender here we come XD
Edit: I still have my license but idk for how long, but i think i have the 3 year license from 2020 to i think 2023
What do you mean by Maya is gone?? Can you upload a screenshot somewhere?
Could you elaborate please? :0
In my opinion this change is a big problem. If you are a self-taught animator you have no way of accessing Maya to learn their platform. Nuke, Houdini, and a whole other host of software provide non-commercial versions completely for free for anyone who wants to learn. Maya takes years to learn and it is unreasonable to expect someone to pay for a license to learn the software if they aren't able to turn it into a career yet. Basically this move is restricting learning Maya to people who can afford to license it and people who currently attend university. I am 23 and 2 years out of college. I am still learning 3D. I was using Maya student license for a while, but now I use blender because I cannot afford the expense of a Maya license purely for the purpose of learning the software.
I think in the long run this will force more people to move to blender and Maya will eventually lose market share.
Makes you wonder if art schools are giving Maya a kickback. Anyway, the only winner in all this is Blender, and the studios that want to hire Blender artists.
@@fakecubed I highly doubt Autodesk did this to get extra money from schools. It is more than likely just a crackdown on freelancers who didn't want to pay. I just think Autodesk's calcuation on this one is completely wrong and Maya isn't good enough to justify it's price.
It takes years to learn 3D and not all people have the luxury of getting a college education for art. Blender is beating them on almost every front, but there are still a handful of tools that makes Maya better for big studios. I think it will still take years for the majority of industry jobs to switch to blender.
There are a lot of design houses that have already switched to Blender. Especially after 2.8 came out.
It's going to be a landslide of houses switching now that 3.0 is out.
I'm actually quite surprised that it's all new in the US. I clearly remember having to send official school documentation for my student licence 5 years ago (in Belgium). I had to wait like 4 days before receiving a mail confirming my licence activation
I see a time in the future when I won't even be able to load my old Maya projects. I really can't justify investing any more time in Maya. Hopefully by the time I learn Blender, they've upgraded their undos and their rigging. Anyway, at least it's got a guaranteed future.
MultiCappie export to obj
@@ProjectAtlasmodling Hahahah, yeah, nice idea.
Like some artist say "Blender has already caught up with Max and Maya in the eye of the industry at a very high level. There is no point in discussing if or when, it has happened."
"Personally I would have waited until after a global pandemic to confirm that you're part of this big Jumanji game, but, you know, do your thing AutoDesk"
I live in Scotland, we had to sign up with Autodesk with our student email and that was confirmation that we were eligible for the software. So, technically, this was already in place for my university.
I switched to Blender 2 days ago. If you were comfortable with Maya, the transition takes about 8 hours, is not as painful as people make it out to be and is not even frustrating because of how pretty Blender's UI is compared to Maya's. Never thought I'd say this, but I'm 100% team Blender now.
I've never known anyone who switched the other way, but lots like you who switched to Blender and never looked back.
Lightwave to Modo to Blender. Couldn't be happier. Know what the best thing about Blender is? It can't be bought up by another company who shoves a subscription down your throat, then refuses to bother to make any more progress because they don't have to entice you to upgrade.
blender has been winning for years, The industry are just hesitant to change because of the cost to changing pipeline.
Blender is on Steam even... so If you don't know which version or what to download just go to steam and there will be up to date one.
Blender is making giant steps to become the new standard in the near future, I would say that with the new support from Epic, AMD and Nvidia, and the incredible dev plan, they have smooth sail for the next years.
Unfortunately, AMD has not shown much with Blender yet. If you are working with Blender as of right now, the choice is using an AMD CPU and NVidia GPU.
@@KevinSmith-qi5yn completely true, yes what I meant is AMD is donating actively to ensure blender development on the future, which is really important
bye maya hi blender
I've started 3d on blender a few years back (before 2.8) and switched to maya for almost a year and I loved it, the only downside was the price, although I was using the educational liscence I've made the choice to go back to blender 1-2 months ago and seriously for someone that is learning (3d in general) for fun like me I'd suggest blender a 100% especialy since version 2.8 👌
Sir Wide, I attended VFS where I studied Character animation in Maya 3d 10 years ago. graduated and never got a job...It was the biggest regret of my life. because of the cost. Hi hopes never paid off. And they boasted of getting people work right out the door. its now the year 2020 and we are smack dab in Covid lockdown. So I timidly decided to go back on my old workstation. And you know I'm rediscovering that I actually love animating. I want to pick it back up again, just for myself this time. I'm older wiser and not under the pressure of 'landing' the big job anymore I just want to learn at my own pace and get good on my own. Not sure if A.M is the way I will go. but your videos have encouraged me greatly. thanks Sir Wide. keep it up. ps.Bottom line wish I had studied with AM instead. now I my might have to look at blender.
I don't see the problem. Just use Blender. It is as good as any other modeling program. Its not the tool, its the artist. Bad artists will blame their tools and delude themselves that expensive software will make them go pro. I am happy to see that Maya is making room for Blender.
@yellow bees well, this is something they plan to fix until the end of this year. I saw some improvements in the undo recently. It is going really great
Well depends, Blender rigging/animations tools are still lacking behind Maya so Animators won't come unless
Riggers & TDs also make the jump..there is the term "intutive rigs" & unfortunately Blender rigs don't fit well with it, tools play big role in your workflow and speed up your productivity.
can you imagine not having IK or FK and have to counter animate in each step! just take a look at any Blender rig and you'll see that it suffers alot of problems because of how old & dated the design is while Maya kept updating and doing big changes in each step of course they have much bigger community/studios in animation helping them so they progressed faster
If Blender really wants to take advantage of this situation then it needs developers like Pablo, who took on sculpting and he's making it much better , ask any Blender Sculpter if he wishes to go back to 2.79 & the answer is simply NO, sure the tools there worked but lacked tons of stuff even some were broken like the multires but now it's a whole new world that wasn't exposed to Blender users, same should happen for rigging & animation , better tools = better rigs = happy Artists :)
That's a shit argument. It takes time to learn a new tool and even than there are things that Maya has that Blender doesn't. It's unfair to throw blame at new users if Blender lacks features that Maya animators are used to. There are plenty of shitty tools that even the best can't make work.
Well being a high school art design & animation teacher perhaps it’s time for me to test out Blender, learn and apply a bouncing ball exercises as well as modelling a simple chess piece to give me a baseline for a comparison with Maya- this news is very disappointing many of my colleagues throughout the Province have always worked in Blender warning me that this day will come- even though my school will end up being on their list this new direction opens up doors to Blender as one all inclusive application, from 2D Sculpting Modelling Animating possibly having a game engine within the app...the biggest ease that I also online is the ability of rigging characters in minimal time which baffles my mind...I need to go and explore my options...take care everyone!
An Autodesk person in the Maya forums confirmed that Maya Indie will be an ongoing product, so hopefully they make it a permanent option soon. I like both Blender and Maya.
This was from a reddit post reply by a user named Autodesk_Amanda:
"Autodesk is committed to providing lower-cost solutions such as Maya LT and Indie - to this end, we introduced Indie as a pilot last SIGGRAPH. The reason we launched Indie as a pilot was because we could not immediately make it a permanent offering for various technical reasons. We are working through these.
The pilot uses normal Maya and 3ds Max licensing which is why it auto-renews at normal pricing. We are therefore turning off auto-renew (this should not be turned back on). Instead, customers will need to buy a new Indie license on expiry. This is because the pilot is being tested as a promo price on normal Maya/3ds Max licenses.
Our goal is to get Indie licensing in place, but we don’t have an exact date for this yet and until we do, there is always some risk of changes in the offering. However, we are working towards full implementation as soon as we can."
Hi can you post the link to the reddit thread here?
@@DeepuVS from the original post: www.reddit.com/r/Maya/comments/extlc0/is_maya_indie_renewable_at_250
As a UA-cam channel, you would probably reach a wider audience by catering to Blender users (being more accessible than Maya since long before now). It's not like the concepts of animation design are really that much different either - I wouldn't touch Maya but I still follow your channel and learn useful things for hobby game-dev animation.
I've actually only discovered your channel a few days ago. If you do decide to pick-up Blender, your timing couldn't be any more perfect for me. :P
yeah, blender community is waiting for Animation tutorials.
I switched to Blender from Maya a while ago, and I love it. Blender is even better than Maya in some ways, except it takes a lot of time to get used to it.
These days switching software isn't that hard. Blender has a UI setting specifically for users from different software, who wanna use these specific shortcuts and interface. I assume Maya has a couple plugins you can customize to fit users from blender and other software.
So please have a positive attitude when it comes to switching software, cause that is what the industry expects especially now that it's changing a lot these days.
Not the same, Rigs in Blender & Maya are day & night also the performance, quality of life features, workflow...etc it will be hard to just switch , Maya has much more robust and powerful rigging tools that makes it the rigs intuitve, just pick any free rig from both Software & you'll see the difference that's why Maya is much loved by the Animators and there was no other software to come close to it except for Softimage.
@@xox8717 I didn't say Blender and Maya are on the same level . What I'm saying is that a lot of powerful software has UI presets for specific users so that switching won't be as hard. Which is a good thing for us Artists to make the switch as smooth as possible. And of course there will be differences, you still gotta make the effort to switch. Mostly for people who can't afford to pay for Maya.
I’ve tried dabbling in Maya in the past. I’ve always been a hobbyist. I have yet in years to see a profit from any of it. I wanted to learn CG from a personal perspective, just like someone who enjoys painting from home. I’ve made it a point to use Blender. Unfortunately I am not taking classes to afford any student version of anything. I’m absolutely certain you don’t need a formal art education to learn, and that you can learn from home.
Instantly clicked on this once that little bell rang! I am so surprised they would do this. I have used Blender in the past but prefer to use Maya as that is what I used at College... and you know, Industry Standard but I am VERY shocked to hear Autodesk would do this! Maybe they are trying to become an 'exclusive' animation software for larger animation companies?
The problem is that those same features are becoming available with the free version of Blender which means that many people will jump ships and use Blender to learn new things. This will eventually lead with Blender having a bigger community making it grow and possibly kill Autodesk. I love Maya but it really seems unfair for them to make this move at the moment.
@@dannymorales787 Yeah, completely agree! It makes it exceptionally hard on recently graduated students as well. From what I understand bigger companies won't be as affected as they would presumably be paying for the licensed software but people who are trying to get work and have already graduated, this becomes increasingly difficult for them to even afford the software to learn it or stay relevent. That and Blender recently bringing out 2.8 makes this a strange time for them to do something like this.
This might be the start of a new era for many creatives, both freelance and studio, switching from Maya to Blender at a large scale.
Why? Freelancers and Studios are already paying for Maya, this won't change anything for them. This impacts only self-teaching users (like myself) and students in school.
@@TheDorianTube It's just that I recall a certain Amazon Prime series (The Man in the High Castle) using Blender for their VFX. Studios might be more inclined to adopt Blender for projects if more of their staff have their skills and experience based on it.
damn doing that during this time is straight up cold. guess i'll slowly transition, have you seen KeyMesh from Pablo Dobarro ? once that's out of experimental phase i can see a looooot of animators jumping ship
I switched to Blender a lot of months ago and i don't regret it, in fact it has some neat stuff for modeling that are just not present in Maya ( modifier stack just to name one ) and there are tons of plugins to speed up your workflow.
If you are already at a good level in terms of 3d art, it'll take only 4-5 days to become proficient again with the new software. If you are just starting out even better because you don't need to re-learn the hotkeys and interface.
Thankfully i paid only 1 year of Maya LT subscription ( before that i was using Maya student ) so the switch hasn't been so painful.
I also don't like the whole "rent forever" thing that is going on with softwares in general.
Very centered and helpful advice. You don't have to only use blender, but is good to learn another tool to help you out in your work. You'll keep your Maya skills.
That's a relief to hear, I've been meaning to learn blender for awhile now. Just for the fact that both you and Sir said it's good to learn other tools. I was just worried I'd forget how to use maya
@@Jasperkitty12809 😁 you got me!
Hope everything goes well with blender and whatever new you pick up! 💪
I really hope that Blender continues to improve at the rate it currently does. I've used 3DS Max and Maya for a few weeks and absolutely did hate 90% of the time using that software. When you know the ins and outs, fine. But getting started with those was an absolute nightmare for me - and still is.
It's not slowing down. If anything, it will accelerate, although there's a point at which throwing more developers at a problem doesn't speed up the work. As Blender is more successful, and more people are donating to the development fund, they can hire more developers who can work on more parts of Blender at the same time, but those individual parts will still probably develop at the same rates as they would otherwise. The real advantage to Blender's widespread adoption is more outside developers contributing small patches, making tiny improvements but a lot of them, which add up quick. From what I can tell, the number of these sorts of contributions is continuing to grow, and there are more and more first time contributors with each release. There's also more and more work being done by students as part of the Google Summer of Code grants.
TO BLENDER!!!!!!
So many people freaking out at having to pay for commercial software. If you are using Maya to learn and are serious about a career you are most likely at some institution. That will make you legible.
If you are learning to do commercial work for yourself then you were aware Maya commercial license was required. All this does is refrain those that aren't in active study to get free access. It's the same as every other program.
Adobe charge cheap for one year for student then full after that, regardless if you're a student. Autodesk never used to give anyone it for free.
If you want free, and plan doing commercial work indie is there or you should start with blender anyway.
This whole freakout is pointless.
I was taught how to rig in Maya so I'm familiar with that. But I also learned how to paint textures in Blender and that's awesome. I guess I should watching blender videos about rigging and animation workflows to start changing ship : /
I would recommend you watch the rigging tutorial series by dikko. Its free on youtube but its very long and comprehensive like a paid tutorial. Really great.
Awesome Sir wade I just started looking in to Blender and it's very different, but I like it.
The rigging seemes so easy compared to Maya rigging. So I totally agree I think this will come back and bite Autodest on the ass. I also think it will mean the online schools will have to start teaching in Blender too.
So if you do pick it up please make a series and we'll learn together. 😊
Look at "Drivers" in Blender they work pretty well so far for Rigs and Animation. And the Rigify Addon which is by default an disabled default addon Blender has but it is very useful. Oh and your wgeigh painting is always stored as a vertex group you can fiddle with and everything stays editable at any time.
Blender could cost more than Maya and i would still buy it.. Autodesk is RIP
I just switched to "Maya" from blender(3 years of using blender), but none of this "news" really bothers me, my plan was *and my plan still is* to get a one year educational license for Maya while I still was in a school, and learn how to use it, so I could at least say "I know how to use Maya." After that I'm probably going to just stay with blender, though buying some software isn't completely out of the question.
Autodesk could make a non commercial free version for them to get more customers
That is literally what they're getting rid of.
They have an indie version that's much cheaper. The expensive one is targeting big companies/studios. They want to get a piece of their pie.