Maya LT 2016

[nodeway]

Have a read here => https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthr ... lumination

They talk about many GI algorithms (including CyeEngine) and what we got/will have in UE4 in close future.

[MauricioPC]

How do you guys feel CryEngine compares to UE4 and Unity5? From a payment perspective, they are right in the middle. You rent from $200/year, but you have no royalties.

[nodeway]

CryEngine is a mess. Around two years ago, when I tested it, you could import geometry easily into it only with their custom importers (only for 3dsmax and Maya). They had no FBX support. It changed right now, but the documentation and approach to community and training is nowhere near those of Unity or Epic. They may have the best tech out there and I wouldn't care, because they just don't understand how to make is user friendly.

[MauricioPC]

Thanks. Now I know I should look into only UE and Unity.

[nodeway]

Thanks. Now I know I should look into only UE and Unity.

When installing Unity 5, make sure that you install also Example Project. There are couple really nice examples of steering behaviors in it. 2D Game, First Person, Third Person, Third Person with AI, Rolling Ball, Car, couple Planes, Particles.

[Rez007]

Does anyone know by chance when Maya 2016 is coming out or any announcement for it? When I do a search, it is always about Maya LT and I cannot find anything on the regular version of Maya.
Thank You.

[Maximus]

after this http://area.autodesk.com/nab2015 most likely. (April 13th-16th, 2015)

[Rez007]

Great! Thank you for letting me know.

[Mathaeus]

Just found a long thread about Maya LT on Modo forums.. According to comments, it seems that Maya modeling become a possible mission. Anyway it's funny to see how one guy is explaining how to hide polygons in Maya, while another guy says, that he uses Maya for decades, not knowing about the 'feature' .

p.s. to explain it more, it was impossible to hide polygons in Maya, for decades (at least without some weird workaround). How people were able to model a complex game levels, lot of different rooms and so, it's a mystery.

[Rez007]

I like the UI improvements a lot - nice and clean, it is good to see Softimage devs adding nice improvements to Maya. I am still unhappy about the whole EOL thing, but hopefully there will be more of a shining light with Maya than in the past.

A bit OT, but as anyone heard anything in regards to Autodesk Stingray? I thought that were supposed to do a presentation on it at GDC, but there isn't too much floating around. Maybe it was one of those NDA meetings...

[Bellsey]

The reason you won't find anything on Maya 2016 is because we haven't made announcements yet.
To date MayaLT 2016 is the only M&E product that we have announced and now released. (I've noticed some customers have been downloading the new version)

As for the hiding polys thing. It wasn't 'impossible' in Maya, just abit convoluted. Some users pieced the commands together and several scripts got out there. And there's been Bonus Tool for it that's been kicking around for years.

And Stingray, there's was a technology preview at GDC, but it was by invitation only and not public. There isn't much I can really elaborate on right now, other than what was in the press release we sent out. Stingray is based on the Bitsquid technology that we acquired last year.

[brudney]

there are screengrabs and videos floating around the net (cgtalk and others) showing people using both new max and maya.
funny/sad thing is AD tries hard to ignore that fact and clearly won't comment on the features shown/not shown in the videos because new version haven't been announced yet.

[Bellsey]

Well, I don't make the rules, I just have to abide by them.

The Maya and Max videos shown were not from Autodesk and from a user who has either breached his Beta NDA and/or obtained a build somehow. Either way his actions are illegal and I contacted him to politely remind on that. The videos have been taken down. Personally I don't think he was being particularly malicious, perhaps just made a simple naive mistake. Even some people on other forum threads have said that its a stupid thing to do.

[Mathaeus]

Ok downloaded the trial. There's number of familiar things here, like drag-drop keyboard mapping editor (oops, hot key editor). There's also Shrink Wrap, 'Soft modification' in Max style, some sort of cluster deformer, contour stretch UV, and more. When operator is applied, small thing with parameters jumps up. UI design is really nice imho, they got impossible , legendary Maya light-green wireframe of selected objects, to logically fits into the rest of colors. Interface design IS very very important for long time work, I'd be sure. For now everything works with great response, everything is stable.
Anyway it's still Maya, wearing new clothes. Just now, there's small 'clash of titans' here. I'm trying to re assemble behavior of SI clone, using node editor, Maya is resisting, so who is more stubborn . I think I'll be a winner...
Said this before, perhaps there are nicer things around, for modeling and key framing like Blender, Modo still has nicer design for my taste. But, even idea alone, about industry standard 3d app, becoming usable for tasks, so heavy relying on muscle memory, wins. That is, muscle memory takes much more to build, than learning the difference between this or that visual programming system, at least for me.

[Mathaeus]

Ok finally got a sort of SI clone in Maya LT. Need to say that Softimage clone thing is somewhat special case, as functionally, it is construction history 'end result' of one mesh, used as 'zero shape' of another. So, got something by plain connection, from 'out mesh' port of one object, to 'in mesh' port of another. Have no idea is it a 'proper' way, but doesn't matter in this, experimental case.
Now there's time to read some docs
Nice thing that node editor.....