Why I Use Maya Over OTHER 3D Software

just a heads up if i don't do much with this arm it's because i fractured it filming another youtube video so you'll see that one soon make sure you're subscribed since i started learning blender everyone keeps asking me if i'm ditching maya if i'm gonna switch to blender if i'm gonna go one way or the other no the answer is no all the 3d tools are fantastic and they're good for different things and they're useful in different ways don't let anyone tell you you have to choose a software and stick to that software most professionals use multiple tools in the workflow i don't know anybody who doesn't batman's got a whole bunch of gadgets in his utility belt so be like batman use them so what's the vigilante policy on 3d animation software unlimited but anyways there are a few reasons why i continue to use maya for so much of my 3d work and why i have no real plans of stopping using it for 3d animation some of you know that i used to be a trainer at dreamworks i worked there for two years and i was pretty much the maya guy i was in charge of almost all the maya classes at the studio i taught over 50 classes at dreamworks a whole bunch of software maya was one of them i was in charge of the entire curriculum as well as everything adobe and a bunch of other stuff so i've had a lot of practice with it but i want to break down very quickly why i started using maya why i continued using maya and why i'll keep using it today i feel like that'll cover everything and explain my side of it of why it's my primary animation tool so rewinding to 2012 i had just finished high school i was in college and the big summer blockbuster of 2012 the avengers no surprise there that it was very exciting for me and i really wanted to learn how the heck you make that kind of stuff because obviously iron man the hulk they're not really there someone had to make them how'd they do it and what software did they use that was the big question i had and i really had no knowledge of the animation industry or what it took to get into that world none of it lucky for me industrial light magic ilm was putting videos on youtube behind the magic they were showing behind the scenes breakdowns of how they made the movies it was this one transformers i think one of the transformers movies and battleship i think they put those three out there and i watched them religiously i just kept reloading the video and just looking for all the little details and zooming in and trying to figure out how the heck they put this together the two things that excited me most were the layer compositing i know that's not necessarily the 3d animation bit but i found it fascinating just the compositing just taking all the different elements layering them together and making these crazy compositions and then every time they would take a piece of 3d geometry and pull it apart and show you all the little pieces or where they had one big set and they you know place everything down somewhere in one of those videos that explains that if you want to destroy something if you want to break something you've got to make it first and so everything in there is cg it's got to be created modeled textured and then so on right that to me was mind-blowing i searched like imdb pages i looked in the credits of the movie until i finally found like used maya's i don't know where i saw but i found out they were using autodesk maya didn't know anything about it but i just started looking for classes and i found that a community college not far from where i was going to school had one class on like intro to 3d using autodesk maya 2011 or something look at that logo it's hideous i love it so i signed up i took the class it was a general overview of how you would do stuff in 3d it taught a little bit about modeling texturing just kind of the whole thing it gave a general sense of how things in 3d come to be it was nowhere close to what i was really i guess hoping it would maybe teach me but that's because i expected to start blowing up battleships and making transformers in the first couple of weeks obviously that's not how it works and if you've been around long enough to watch this video this very old video and very cringy video where i break down some of my very earliest animations from that class it's really no surprise why one of the first projects was a minecraft avengers video minecraft because it was basic enough i could try to do it and avengers because that was kind of the inspiration for getting into 3d in the first place so why did i start using maya because i saw it was an industry tool it's what other movies that i enjoyed watching were created in and so i gravitated towards that software had i found out it was a different software used to make these would i pick something different i don't know because the access to information that i had was also pretty limited there was no animation youtube channel about this kind of stuff there were no online resources there were online schools but i didn't know about them yet i wasn't really aware of any of the stuff but there weren't any mainstream learning resources available to me so even if i had wanted to learn a different tool it's not like i really would have had a lot of places to go and if you know some of my background my history from some of my earlier videos you know that i left the regular university i was going to and sort of dropped out of it and went to a community college in northern california which i picked because it had a good computer science program which was my main major but also because it had a great media and animation program and that's what i was secretly interested in trying to learn more about and guess what software they taught their animation program in maya that's pretty common maya is almost always the main program used to teach animation in all schools and that's not to say that other tools aren't being widely used or widely adopted as primary industry standard tools maya has always been a big part of the animation industry for all kinds of different fields within the industry well blender's being picked up a lot too like that's i'm not trying to say like ah well maya was the only thing and it continues to be the only thing and that's why i use it like that's not where i'm going with it stay with me but what made it so easy to stay with maya is that what little resources were available for me to use to learn they were almost always in maya if it was that rare tutorial i could find at the time that was actually useful they had one for maya when i kind of dropped out of school entirely and switched to an animation school i went to animation mentors an online animation school if you haven't heard of it or if you've been wondering and you haven't seen my old videos and you're wondering where did i go for animation training i went to animation mentor if you sign up tell them i sent you it's grade school and they teach and taught in maya now a lot of people who watch my stuff are using other tools not just maya and they wonder hey if i sign up for the school do i have to use that software can i use the one i'm more comfortable with if you know blender and you want to know can you use blender and the reason that they would say probably don't animate in blender i won't speak for them but at the time at least that was the rule it's because the mentors the people guiding you through your shots who will help you troubleshoot they weren't using blender they were using maya for the most part of their jobs because if they worked at disney they actually animate in maya at disney that might be changing in the next actually might change i don't know if it's changed already but i think disney switching to pixar software which you can't get same as dreamworks and software they're proprietary that's why it doesn't matter what you pick you just have to get good in general learn animation learn the craft anyways i continued learning maya because that's always what was made available to me that's always how i was taught and what i was taught and what's interesting is i actually got this weird like elitism thing in my head when i was working at dreamworks so after animation mentor i started working at dreamworks and i was teaching mayan we didn't have blender at the studio there was one person who was playing with it and showing cool stuff back when it had kind of the game engine in there but it didn't catch on and a lot of us didn't really take it seriously because of the whole freeware thing just thinking like oh it's free how good could it really be obviously it's not really a good way to look at things but while i was there i did kind of develop this weird aversion to blender and i think it was for two reasons the main reason why i like wasn't interested was because i had this view of like oh well you know we're we're a major studio like this is what we use this is the right way to do it that's for free like that's you know not that great you know i've seen some of the stuff online like i'm not going to use that tool and that's not good that's wrong that's just not a good way to look at things i think the reason that that that predicament even happens is because blender was more accessible there were more people using it more people who weren't using it professionally making stuff and so you had a bigger pool of content that was i guess beginner level available to see which made it feel like the tool itself couldn't make that good of stuff because most of the stuff you saw was from people who didn't have a lot of experience as they learn that's how it should be but that's all you saw versus you look at something like maya or even 3ds max or houdini like the crazy stuff you see this work that's just amazing you don't see any of that beginner stuff because there's a higher learning curve there's less people using it for fun because you're using it usually in a school context or to get a job and so you don't usually just see recreational creations in these tools and so it kind of gave this sense that oh well these are the professional tools this is how you make the good stuff and this is the free stuff i mean it's 3d sure so that was part one of why i like didn't look at blender the second thing is i don't know why but while i was working at dreamworks something kind of weird happened to me just like mentally before i got there there was this feeling of like ah like diy customized like figure out how to get something done just kind of guerrilla filmmaking style creativity i used to do a whole bunch of projects i just kind of take whatever i had around and just mash it together and and make something because i wanted to make stuff but when i got to dreamworks i was really trying to learn like how how do the pros do it how do you do it in a studio like what's the right way to do it and i got so into figuring out like what's the proper way to go about this workflow blah blah blah that i kind of stopped doing the guerrilla filmmaking stuff and only would do things correctly it had to be perfect it had to be great because i i wanted to kind of hit that standard it's been about three years since i left dreamworks and i'm still kind of like recovering from that mentality i used to just make stuff because it was fun and i didn't really care if it was perfect or what now i have this weird like fixation on trying to do things right and do it the right way and it's very annoying because that's not creative that's just it's just something i picked up and it wasn't something that like dreamworks taught me it was just like this weird thing i think of getting into a big studio really early that kind of i don't know i don't know what that is but it's kind of like that thing where when you're in school and you put the studios on this pedestal and like you there's nothing greater than working at pixar and like wow that's the goal but then if you get there like that's not the end there's more to like there's more beyond that so you have like this weird pedestal ha like way of thinking and i think that happens with like the creative stuff too you get there and there's this like this way that you see the but no no but there was one good thing that happened as a result of all this while i wasn't learning blender cinema 4d stuff we weren't using at the studio i was laser focused on the stuff that we were using stuff like maya so i got really really good at it i understood how things work on the back end the the little quirks the bugs how to get around stuff i spent a lot of time really refining how i was going to work with the tool which makes it very easy to keep using it so not that it's like i was always using it and so i just kept using it it's a really good tool like people are going to be mad at me because like wow your blender is a good tool too yeah everything's a good tool it's fine we can all like different software right this isn't about saying why one tool is better than another it's that it works really well for me i really like using it i love maya i have a great time working in it just like i'm having a great time learning new tools and there's certain things that for animation now fast forwarding to now why is it my primary tool why do i keep using it why don't i have any plans of changing partially it's habit partially it's because i'm used to it but not in the way that's like well i'm used to it i'll just keep dealing with it i really like it there's a few things it does really really well i've done some comparison videos that aren't really good comparisons but some just kind of first impressions videos of maya versus blender for animation workflow where i've showed kind of some of the stuff about maya that i really like about the animation workflow there's a lot of small behavioral stuff that to me works really well and then i you know it'd be hard for me to break away from those workflows but more than that i think it comes down to kind of the priorities of what you want in the things that you make for example a lot of people who work in blender like to model stuff because blender's a really great modeling tool i don't like to model it's not something i enjoy and so i haven't even bothered to finish the blender donut tutorial i kind of just got bored of it because i didn't want a model and while i know i should learn how to do it and it's necessary i just don't want to there's a lot of stuff you could do with the modeling tools or the sculpting stuff and the brushes and i mean there's a lot of things that you can add to your animation with the tools that blender has to make that really great in the same way that for me in maya the stuff i'm more interested in is like effects and simulation type stuff i don't need to actually simulate most of the time but i want stuff that looks like i simulated to make it look like i put a lot of work in but really i spent 15 minutes doing it my video on mash is a huge part of that i really like using things that look really complex and get really intricate and just look really cool a way that i can somehow put a piece of that whole behind-the-scenes ilm magic into my work without having to spend all the time and all the energy trying to do it the right way there are some really cool things that i can do in maya that i have not been able to do in blender but where my priorities lie and what i want to make for me it's just easier to do it in maya i like the way it looks i like the way it acts i know the way it works in the software and the way it's organized and to me it's just it's a better workflow for me but there are things that i kind of hit my limit i'm like okay well now to do more it's going to take more work than i really want to put in that part you know there are pieces that kind of dip into other software like how this would be much easier if i knew how to do it in blender or this would be way cooler if i could just kind of outsource this part to houdini which is why i'm learning the other tools so that ultimately i can do different things in different software and combine them you know by taking the strengths of each software and my personal strengths and interests and where kind of my brain works best in these tools and combining them into one final product and when it comes to animation right now maya i think has kind of the most streamlined workflow there are enough things maybe it's just because i'm used to it but there's enough things that enough of us have been doing for long enough that there's a lot of resources on it there's a lot of help there's a lot of support when things go wrong but also there's a lot of assets there are more appealing high quality rigs from maya than for any other application because probably there's the more people using maya at work and then making stuff at home obviously we have a lot of cool stuff coming out like the rain rig for blender and i mean there's more stuff coming out all the time for the different applications but maya's kind of always been an animator's tool set and based on the assets that are available it shows so with everything we have now let's say i have to go back i just finished high school i'm going into college or i'm at college and i have to choose i want to make something in 3d what software do i learn what do i do do i make the same decision do i change it honestly kind of jealous of anyone at that stage because uh i'd probably just learn more than one for animation specifically i'd probably still go with maya because of how many rigs there are how many videos there are how much help there is your capability to learn character animation by using maya i think is is stronger i think you have a better chance of of getting better with all the stuff that's there currently because of how many other people have been using maya to develop all that stuff does that mean that if you choose blender that's a bad thing no of course not there's more and more stuff all the time being created for blender and i'm like i'm trying to learn it too i chose maya because it was the easiest for me to get started and i continue using maya because i'm good at it and it's easy for me to keep getting better at it versus the learning curve of starting something new but that doesn't stop me from learning something new i just do both i have limited time so if i want to finish a project it's better for me to just use maya because i know what i'm doing and the time taken to get a finished product is going to be a shorter time versus you know having to learn and practice and blah blah blah which i'm still doing but that's why there's both that's why there's multiple and the feature sets are different between different tools animbot exists for maya it doesn't exist yet for blender hopefully soon that'd be great but the point of today isn't to draw those comparisons it's to say this is the tool i've been using for forever and i'm going to keep using it because i really like it and i'm going to keep learning new things because i want to keep learning but that's the deal with being an artist you have to keep evolving keep growing if you want to keep developing your skills anyways i'm going to go ice my arm because it's starting to hurt remember to subscribe if you want to find out how i fractured my arm making youtube video and i'm out of here i'm gonna go celebrate my anniversary it's my three year anniversary so a little staycation i'll be away from my desk so yeah anyway have a good one thanks for watching links to everything down below patreon twitch if you want to support the channel all that good stuff subscribe if you haven't thanks for watching i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 85,371

Keywords: blender vs maya, maya vs blender, maya blender animation, blender animation, character animation, character animation tools, animation software, animation comparison, animation workflow, animation workflow blender, blender animation 2.9, blender animation 2.83, blender 2.9, maya animation, how to animate in 3d, which animation software is best, maya or blender, blender maya tutorial, should i use maya, c4d, houdini, best animation software, animation software 2021, maya, 2021

Id: qFQFds14i5Y

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020