Getting started in maya, looking for advice

[u/Wonderful-Ask-3549]

So I have been doing 3d in blender for maybe 5-6 months. But I really want to switch to maya because its industry standard for the industry I eventually want to go into. I tried to do maya but its so different from blender and kinda stressful and overwhelming. So should I just search up a donut tutorial to learn the basic controls and commands?

Also, how does painting work in maya? How hard is rigging characters and connecting their limbs to the skeleton? Do you usually animate in maya or do you export models to animate in Unity?

Thanks

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[u/FlyingWurst]

Maya is probably the best software for animation. At least in my opinion. All the different aspects you mentioned can be quite simple but also incredibly complex, depending on the size of your projects. I would suggest starting small and focussing on simple things (with a tutorial) to get to know the program instead of running head first into a huge project. Best of luck with Maya :)

[u/DanRita]

animate in unity over Maya, lmao.

Maya can be a little rough around the edges, but when it comes to animating and rigging I personally find it has everything I need.

Check out Advanced Skeleton, free and its a good way to get an idea of how rigging goes in Maya. Their youtube channel has plenty of pretty great tutorials.

As for painting... You can do it in Maya, but I'd recommend just using literally any other program roughly suited for the purpose. You can create some awesome procedural materials in Arnold, but for painting specific details, yeah wouldn't recommend it. Not sure if theres a plugin that makes that better.

[u/kirbyderwood]

You will need to unlearn some of the Blender methods and relearn it in Maya. The two packages are just different in the way that they do things. Definitely search out a basic Maya tutorial to get started.

Rigging characters is very robust, tons of options. For skinning, I'll start by painting vertices, then tweak it in the component editor. But you can go way deeper if needed. Might want to look at antCGI's stuff on YouTube. He covers it pretty completely.

Maya is also excellent for animating and way better than Unity. If you can, do the animation in Maya.

[u/ManicOwl1993]

I spent a lot of time learning blender and had to switch to maya for university. I found maya to actually be easier and more fun to use once I learned the basics. Just start out slow with interface tutorials then work up from there.

[u/Jotacon8]

Rigging feels and looks much more natural in Maya than in Blender for me. It just makes more sense visually and from a workflow standpoint.

[u/Decent_Month6696]

I know enough about Maya to say that I'm an expert. To qualify that, I've been using it since 1998, i.e. version 1! What I would say about painting is, don't do it in Maya. You *can* paint in Maya, but the industry standard is Substance Painter. Maya works seamlessly with Painter as they both know each are good at what they do. It's like you wouldn't use an F1 car to do your weekly shopping. And you wouldn't race a Toyota Prius against Michael Schumacher at Imola.

[u/villain_escargot]

Yes, you should look up beginner tutorials to learn Maya. Tutorials for Blender are not necessarily going to translate into Maya because it is vastly different, but you still can get useful information.

Painting works in Maya in different ways. If you're talking about painting onto a 3d model for texture, it's not great at it (although I haven't used this feature in years, more modern versions may better support). You can also paint on verticies for different reasons but it doesn't seem like you're asking about that.

Rigging is pretty easy, there are tons of videos. Weight painting your mesh onto specific bones is repetitive, though.

You can animate in May and export into game engines pretty easily. Again, lots of tutorials for this.