I do have a Bad feeling about it.... But...
AutoDesk Can Do a Good Job...
that might not make any sense for PPL who used Max and Maya, But for those who used "AutoCAD" might get my point.
I mean autodesk do have some software with no "kiddy looking easy to use interface and random crashes"

Besides...
THEY CAN'T stop developing Maya...
Can't imagine that they payed 182 million for any other reason than to add to their cutomer list major names like Dream works, ILM, Weta Degital...
they cant loose such clients.

some say time to start usin' XSI
I don't think that will do for me...
I'd say it's just about time that Pixar releases Marionette
for public use, or else ......or else?????

Kiddy Interface? What the hell are you talking about? Maya is the software with the out of whack, diaorganized and extremely annoying interface. If anything, Max's interface is reasonably organized and across the application, almost all of the interface is logical so you can generally expect to find things where you get accustomed to looking for them. Max has a much more refined and simplified interface, but don't let that fool you. Discreet didn't bother wasting valuable real estate with a separate 4" wide line (data field) for each Move X, Move Y, Move Z, Rotate X, Rotate Y, Rotate Z, Scale X, Scale Y, Scale Z. There is no interface for those because it's not needed. A single data field handles all x values, another, y values and the last z values. Those are the transform type-in. These take up less tha 1 4" line in the interface (on the Status Bar at the bottom.)

If anything, you Maya guys would be blessed if you got a portion of the Max interface. It is much more organized and much reduced / refined, to be efficient, rather than looking like a grandiose version of a simple tool.

In Maya, you cannot adjust the way tools open. They are all rollouts that are the entire width of the panels. In Max, similar is true, but the Command Panel can be 1 or more fields wide and tools adjust to fill that new real estate, so instead of scrolling for days, you just stetch it as needed, or better, use 2 monitors and place the widened command panel on the 2nd monitor.

In Maya, you have tools in like 7 locations. We have in Max, the right click Quad Menu that is Contrxt Sensitive; the Command Panel, Tab Panels or Toolbars if needed, and the keyboard shortcuts. I don't understand why your wouldn't want many of your tools for creating elements on teh right hand panel, as they are in Max. Having Tabs for simple tools is fine, but it's also silly since you need to go to the panel anyway, so why not start there? I use Tabs primarily for scripts and the Layer Bar.

Take a good look at the Max interface. It's not kiddy, it's just efficient. In many ways, it's not that different from the Maya interface, except Max's is more minimal and flexibility is built in. Many tools in both applications are accessible from various places, so you can use Pull down Menu's, Quads, Toolbars / Tabs, keyboard shortcuts. And these are all customizable.

Maneswar

As Lou Reed said "And me? I just don't care at all"

I'm an XSI user ... nyahh nyahh nyahnyaa.

But seriously folks. It doesn't matter in the long run. These clunky tools we use for 3D are bound to disappear eventually, replaced by something far more fluid and way less tedious.

*sigh* i think the this is just selling out, plain and simple. this is about the top guys getting rich, nobody is honestly thinking this is going to be good for alias or the industry. accel-kkr is caching in on a short stock. since when is a mega company a good thing for innovation? all the sanguine speak about best of both worlds is just denial. anybody looked at viacom's stock lately, or have a hard time getting your dsl working after the baby bells merged?? how about disney. i got a fax a long time ago at my desk sent to all the staff of paramount announcing a new c.e.o. with his manifesto attached. it was all about best of both worlds and leveraging all the distribution and software channels newly acquired..... he's now admitted it was a mistake. anyone tried getting customer support at blockbuster lately?

what changes culturally is basically this, the board will now have the final say with the direction of maya, studio tools etc, and the share price will be the driving factor. maybe not getting involved with the details of exactly what specific features stay and go, but they won't sit for long letting the various offerings cannibalize each other. in other words, all this talk about nothing changing for now is code for "please don't leave while we figure out how to leverage everything".

i don't think it matters if you like maya more or max more, everyone looses when there is less competition. alias employees don't really know what will happen, it's up to the shareholders now.

Many years ago, I used MAX in professional pipeline before Maya came to rescue me. I studied Maya from the first classes at Gnomon. And I never looked back at Max.

Max never earned the respect it wanted from the Film industry, and now, AutoDesk took the first chance and bought their ticket to the front line. Or so they think.

But Autodesk is known to screw up products because it's a corporate monster with a business mind.

There is nothing that MAX can learn from Maya. Max is all canned plugins. Maya is a fluid tool, that yes, it takes a while to learn well, but once you got it. You can really fly. If something has to go, it's Max, as it is. Now.

I've said it before and I say it again:

"MAX IS THE BEST TOY...MAYA IS, THE REAL THING"

I wonder what is ILM thinking, now that they just redesigned their pipeline to Maya. And the idea of George Lucas buying Alias...sounds excellent to me. Because what drives him is creativity, not dividends.

Like Clafortes.... Never see this comming... but like must of U this give me a bad feeling ... I like both packages but I use more Maya since it was alway one step in front of Max, the bad feeling that I have its probably the fact that COMPETITION ITS GOOD AND HEALTY FOR THE CONSUMER!! Im worry about the future price of this two packeges and the future of maya and his interface that I love. I hope they keep the two product in diferent road but help each other in realesing a better product... still there is that weird feling in my guts.

I coundn't agree more with ACE about George getting his hand in Alias instead of Autodesk; for the same reason about creativity over money.

[quote]Mane said:
Irrelevant words about something completely subjective.
[/quote]

Ok cool.

Who said autocad? I mean the product is as good as dead. Has been for a while, CAE progs are slowly but certainly phasing out all cads.

I dont mean to say autocad is bad. i jsut say theres been nothing significant in autocad for years.

And maya particluary invented context sensitive menus! And they are everywhere in maya. Anybody who says maya lacks organization is not realy up to speed on whatkind of software maya is.

It blows my ind that I keep hearing all about how "now" Maya will be so corporate and be held to "shareholders" (who must all be evil I guess). First, Alias ALREADY has shareholders! Second, since when has Alias NOT been about making money? Do you think do it all for free and just begrudgingly accept donations? Come on- they are a business.

What about the hardware you use- whether it's Intel, AMD, NVidia, ATI, or Mac with an IBM chip---we are talking about some of the biggest, most far-reaching corporations out there. All have many stockholders and all want to make lots of money. So does Pixar and George Lucas (it's laughable to think he does it all for creativity since he's all about marketing and licensing the crap out of every property he's ever owned).

So my point is- get off your "starving artist" high horses, and see that money and creativity are in no way mutually exclusive. I know a lot of fantastic animation, graphic design and architectural firms (to mention a few) who would beg to differ with the idea that the only way to be a great artist, etc. is to be poor and struggling.

Can I say for sure Autodesk with be the perfect nurturing parent- no, not at all. They may screw things up a dozen ways. But I seem to remember SGI did that too, and to my mind it's a miracle Alias has survived such bad management.

[quote]dbowker said:
It blows my ind that I keep hearing all about how "now" Maya will be so corporate and be held to "shareholders" (who must all be evil I guess). First, Alias ALREADY has shareholders! Second, since when has Alias NOT been about making money? Do you think do it all for free and just begrudgingly accept donations? Come on- they are a business.[/quote]

haha, that's a good one. so you think the suggestion was that shareholders are evil and private companies work for love of art? well then i guess i'm calling myself evil because i am a shareholder of autodesk and i've made money on this deal. no, hate to break it to you but i'm all for making a buck. but that doesn't change my opinion that this is bad for competition. it's like this: kkr et al didn't have a major 3d program and industrial design program in place when the bought alias, neither did sgi. autodesk does. something's gotta go.

sunyate said:

"haha, that's a good one. so you think the suggestion was that shareholders are evil and private companies work for love of art? well then i guess i'm calling myself evil because i am a shareholder of autodesk and i've made money on this deal. no, hate to break it to you but i'm all for making a buck."

YOURE RIGHT! That was )supposed to be) a good one- I guess I was a little too subtle in my sarcasm? Of course I don't think shareholders are evil, nor do I think it's wrong to invest in a company and expect to make money from it. If you read the rest of my post I think I made that clear (or maybe I didn't? :) )

I was responding to another post that said that now that Autodesk owns Alias, they (Alias) would be the pawns of it's new shareholders. It seemed the poster was under the false ussumption Alias did not already have shareholders...

[/quote]

i think what they may have meant is that in a publicly owned company, the shareholders can vote with their mouse buttons, and if there is a market fluctuation, or investor confidence falls, or worse, their rating changes with some brokerage house, then the company can loose liquidity and millions overnight. this is totally different than a private company, it usually means that a public company has less autonomy. i think you need a real maverick to run a public company that size, still take risks, and not be voted out by the board, panicked by their share price... jobs, carly fiorina and eisner are some examples. when sgi bought alias, it wasn't as much of an industry powergrab because there wasn't as much of an industry.

Sigi was screwed so what, atleat alias fitted the sgi image very well so it was kindof one of their flaghips they didnt want to kill for any reasons (thats why the sold it off). Inside Autodesk this is not true.

Also autodesk has a different idea of how the corporation should be run. The fact that a company is public does not maen all public companies have same kind of goals. Many public companies are not so terribly concerned of the share proice, most are tough. Thing is that autodesk is one of those companies that allways was a shareprice first company.

And we all know shareproce does not reflect the product directly, it can but often it does not. One can have a killer product at hand and still die because the upper management was only interested in share price (because they get shares as bonus for example). Se you can temporarily do wonders to share pices by doing stupid investments for your company. Infact you can even kill of all your products and still get good shareholder prices. But in the long run tht wont work, unless yoru a big company that makes living out of slowly killing your assets, then aquire new ones to kill.

I mean autodesk is one of thsose companies i could buy shares of even tough i didnt believe in its products! Becaus in the end its money for me, who cares about the prduct. NAyway i do conciously try to avoid dealing with companies taht work thisway fror other reasons.

I think that the overall problem with Maya vs Max is that the two sides are filled with people who tried out the other application many years ago, went with the other because it suited the work they were doing and haven't bothered to hop over the fence to see what the other side is up to (I will gladly admit I am one of those guys). Max and Maya both have a lot of strengths and a lot of weaknesses and irregardless of what playground pissing match/trantrum that some of you might want to throw here I think we all need to sit back and realize that this will probably be a great thing that will benefit everyone.

Can Autodesk screw this up? Sure there's always that possibility, but look at it this way, Alias wasn't doing so great on its own either. As a company it was a sinking ship that hemmoraged money when it was a part of SGI (SGI reported what 80 million in losses a year associated to Alias?) and continued to do so when it was ripped out and sold off to Accel KKR. Most of the updates that came out were pretty lackluster and its low price didn't seem to help it nearly as much as expected. So irregardless of how great the products that the company offered may or may not be (depending on who you talk to) I think we need to keep in mind too that how things were going were not so great at Alias, in fact they were pretty darned awful.

Can Autodesk do something great with this? Well there is that possibility to, they did announce over 300 million in new R&D funding and they have been pretty good in the past few years at giving Max some great R&D to make some pretty cool tools and really bring it up a number of notches. Plus you have a lot of great technologies that can be integrated from both applications (and you have to be a real idiot not to see that) and can provide a real stepping stone to some real innovation.

In the end though I think the most important thing to remember is that if we get a better application out of it, be it Max, Maya or a new tool and that application lets us be more productive while allows us to have our creativity shine then that's all that counts and that's really the only discussion we should be having here.