Maya Complete 2008 or Lightwave?

Hi everyone. I have used 3ds Max for years but am now looking to change modeling software. Our company has decided to switch.

Does anyone have any good advice on what I should try? Both Lightwave and Maya look good. Maya Complete lacks some of the features of the upper version like cloth and fur though, so I don't know. I am budgeted to spend less than $2500, hopefully $2000 or less. We kind of want to stay away from Autodesk.

Do both export well to Gamestudio, or other indie engines like Torque or Dark Basic? Are there other modelers that I should be looking into?

I am primarily looking for modeling software to do game assets, so exporting to a variety of formats is a plus.

Anyone with some sage advice? I’d really appreciate the help.

softimage/avid xsi -> many exporters, popular among game developers and the modding community (half-life 2 etc)
newtek lightwave -> used for many films and tv series, 9.5 comes with decent exporters, takes some time to get used to, relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts
maxon cinema4d -> features the excellent bodypaint3d that makes texturing a pleasure, great GUI, easy to use

if you are looking for an excellent modelling software only, have a closer look at zBrush, modo and silo3d.

Thanks Broozar! I'll check those out.

Anyone else have some personal experience with modeling software?

Hi

I would go with modo, it rocks.

Maya is autodesk aswell so you better stay away from that aswell, and maya 2008 doens't lack Cloth/fur/hair.. Where do you base that information from :s?

Hi Enduriel,

According to their website Maya Unlimited comes with all the things you mentioned, but it is over my budget $5000. Maya Complete does not come with those and is $2000. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not totally against Maya, but I want some good reasons to get it.

Lightwave has fur / hair, physics and cloth-simulation included. Lightwave is a complete software for modeling, animation and rendering. It is very stable (especially compared to Autodesk products).

Maya is also a good software. The animation tool is told to be better than Lightwaves animation especially in terms of character animation. Both can do the same but Maya can be a bit faster in this area. In terms of modeling it is hard to say. Lightwave is very fast if you know how to use it. And the material editor of Lightwave is the best in the entire CG world.
The price of Lightwave is only a fraction of Maya.

Exporters are available for Lightwave. There are exporters for Gamestudio (from Greenbriar Studios), for Torque (David Wyand) and two exporters for Ogre. I have no idea about Dark Basic.
It can also export to FBX, Collada, obj and 3ds. There are plugins available for many other formats (e.g. X).
I don't know about the Maya exporters.

If you want to do pure modelling then Modo is indeed a very good option, more modern than Lightwave, 3DS and Maya.

maya because is a standard and really easy to use when you switch from 3ds max

I would suggest Silo + ZBrush (or 3D-Coat, a cheaper, but very good alternative)
Modo is very good as well, but a littel more expensive than Silo... personally i would recomment using a combination of various specific software packages over a huge all-incusive package. For example:
modelling >> Silo or Modo
topology painting >> Silo, Zbrush or 3D-Coat
uv-mapping and retopo >> 3D-Coat
exporting >> i would export to OBJ then use a cheap and proven method of reexporting through Unwrap3D, MilkShape3D or Fragmotion

The complete pipeline would cost considerably less tnah 2000$... and if you choose Silo over Modo the price drops even below 1000$

Animation is NOT included in this method (ofcourse you could animate with MilkShape or Fragmotion, but they're not the most complete solutions out there)

Lightwave + ZBrush + Bodypaint

Modo = modeling + UV (wow the UV rocks) + painting (rocks) + high detail sculpting (rocks) + Normal map (rocks) + export to fbx

Fragmotion = animation

well I would go with Maya 2008 then for making the base mesh of your models, then zbrush for addnig those extra details for the normal map projection.

Haven't UV'd much in Maya but 3dsmax has something called Pelt mapping which makes UVing stuff 10 times faster, I believe maya should have something like that aswell since both is autodesk now, just don't know the features name.

One thing I like about maya also is the paint skin weights tool, where you paint on the model and tell what bones to control which of the painted area, and that way you can have really smooth animations, takes no time to do, don't know if other softwares has this feature, but i'm still in high school last year and we are using maya. But yeah I cba to list all the cool features but maya and 3dsmax is ofc the leading 3D softwares atm, it's like comparing Nvidia vs ATI.

Animating in maya is also really easy once you got your rig ready with IK handles and different constrains + custom attributes for example on the fingers of a characters to rotate them.

Other than that I beleive (think) all the 3d softwares are pretty much has the same features, it's just getting used to the UI, cause if you know how to model, then i'm 100% sure u can use any software after a few days of getting used to it.

Personally I like both max and maya.

Enduriel: You are right, the tools are all somewhat similar. Lightwave also can paint weight maps and use it for shading or bones / animations. Pelt-mapping is very common. The professional modelers told that Modo has the best uv-tools currently.

Many schools teach the most expensive tools (Max and Maya, just like in your case). But this is quite old-school. As you could see in this forum thread: a mixture of Modo and Zbrush will easily beat Max / Maya in terms of modeling. But if you want to do modeling, animation and rendering for a cheap price, then Lightwave is the right way. You can even buy Lightwave, ZBrush, Modo and Bodypaint3d and you are still way below the price of Max and Maya.

There is much more than what they teach at schools.

Thanks for all the good info everyone!

Here's what I found.

Lightwave looks good. It is feature rich, and has some robust poly modeling tools, but I'm a little worried about it's UV mapping features. It seems a little harder than it has to be. Seems like the learning curve might be high, and the solutions for smoothing problems seem to be workarounds. On the other hand, it is full featured and an amazing price.

Cinema 4D looks pretty good, and includes Bodypaint which would help out tremendously. Also seems to export to common formats. I couldn't find enough information to know if their poly modeling or UV tools are any good. I'm so familiar with pelt mapping for organic shapes that I don't know if I can go back.

Modo looks very good as a pure modeler, but again I'm worried about the poly modeling toolset. It would be nice to switch between modeling and sculpting, and the UV tools seem amazing. Also, I couldn't find any information on how it exports. Does it just save to a proprietary format? Has anyone used Modo and gotton a model into Gamestudio?

I'm still looking, and I haven't begun to look into grouping less expensive separate programs. I do like working in as few programs as possible.

In the end I might just convince the company to stick with Max. Maybe add Zbrush or Modo, I don't know. I do have Max down.

The old uv-mapping tools are not perfect but I saw the new ones and they provided everything I missed so far (pelt-mapping, relaxing and so on). They will be in one of the next editions. Beta testers can use it even right now.

Smoothing is actually no problem. You can control it via materials, with additional polygons, with breaking edges or creating layers of polygons. If you use something like Max's smoothing groups then it also have to be prepared for DirectX like Lightwave it does: material parameters and groups of meshes. Your graphic card does not know a smoothing group, only polygons and shading.
It is no workaround, you just model, look at smoothing and break it here and there or change the material, it works smooth and perfect.

Thanks for the info Machinery_Frank!

I just watched a tutorial for Lightwave where the guy did a extrude to smooth out a plane after performing a boolean with a sphere on the plane? This seemed kind of odd to me, as its just correcting the shading by adding an extra face around the edges -there were already similar faces there. Im sure the shading problems were created because of odd shaped polys created by the boolean, but I would have fixed it different -I wouldn't want to add an extra extrude where I hadn't planned. So probably not really a problem with Lightwave.

Some engines can recognize Max's smoothing groups, but I get your point. Smoothing groups are very useful for renders with lowery-poly geometry.

I do agree that Lightwave seems like an incredible deal, very feature rich. I'll give the trial a go and see if I can get used to the workflow.

"extrude to smooth out a plane"
microbevels and yes, it's a common technique. the only true alternative is breaking up your mesh in several parts. but sometimes, that's not possible.
all built-in tricks like smoothing groups, applying different surfaces/materials only really help inside the 3d package you are workin with, as soon as you export it to your favourite real time engine, it will all be gone, save for the microbevels or upbroken meshes.
if max' smoothing groups are supported by some prgrammes, it's most likely an exporter thing, it probably interprets the smoothing groups as single geometry unit and exports a number of small, grouped, but not connected, meshes. wings3d does that, too, its "auto smoothing" slices the mesh open, and giving a nice flatshaded-like experience without shading errors.

Why are you thinking of moving away from Max?

Yes I use modo all the time with 3DGS - it works great, you can export using FBX and Med/Wed import work great with modo.

You can also export out of modo into lwo, x3d, dxf, fbx, obj

modo is new and does not have the baggage, all its missing is full animation but I'm sure that will come soon.

Our company has expanded, and it's mostly a cost issue, a little customer service issue. We're leaning toward a combination of Max and Modo now though, even though the extra cost.

Thanks MaxF, it's good to hear that it works fine!

You should test drive modo

You can get a 30 day http://www.luxology.com/trymodo/

a small warning: Modo does - according to their homepage - not work on Windows Vista (see hardware). Just in case you you Vista.

from their forum it runs OK with Vista but yes you should ask questions and try at own risk.

JakeL,
I have been a maya user for several years and I would actually recommend against maya unless you were interested in maya unlimited which has fur,cloth,live and tons of other features.

I also have modo and I really dont like it, the interface is clunky for me and the learning curve is sharp.

I like simplicity and power. Sort of a zen combination(if your into zen). For my money and ease of use I would highly recommend silo then animate in blender if your work is in gaming. I would also recommend zbrush for normal maps.

TriNitroToluene,

Now that's the kind of info I need! I'll take a look at Silo.

It's going to take me some time to sort this out -doing trials and everything, but everyone here has helped out.

Thanks again.

I don't think supporting two applications is going to help your customer service a great deal.

As for the cost, it is rarely measured in the cost of the software but the skill level of the staff and the training of staff. If the staff are experienced then they will work efficiently but introduce new software to the equation then costs (at least initially) will rise dramatically whilst efficiency normally takes a hit.

I wasn't referring to our customer service, I was referring to Autodesk's, and I will keep the specifics between us and them.

As I had explained, our team has grown and quite dramatically. Members of the team have different modeling programs that they are experienced with. Coordinating our asset production pipeline would be both difficult and costly unless we streamline the process by selecting one or two software packages to produce the bulk of our products.

Cost of software, or any other for that matter, directly affects the bottom line and is always a huge factor. This is why I posted. I asked for recommendations for affordable and efficient software. Businesses would always like to have the best of the best, but it is not always economically feasible. I do understand your points, and we have already accounted for the loss of productivity during training.

Thanks for the input.

Does anyone else have any experience with the software packages mentioned thus far in the post? All the info has been a great help!

I think modo work flow is the best of all 3D apps, Maya has the biggest learning curve, modo is easy. But its what you are used to.

Ahh I think I know where you are coming from here. It can be likened to 'extracting teeth' upon occasion

I would explore C4d and download the latest trial as it seems (I am currently checking it out) a very good package with Collada support.

Thanks, I'll check it out!

Once I make a decision, I'll let everyone know what info I've come up with.

JakeL,
so, what did you decide on ?

BTW, one thing that I just thought of ... if your company does large scale renders (animations / movies etc.) then take into account the costs of adding render nodes. I've been using LightWave (primarily, ZBrush / 3D Coat / trueSpace on occasion) and one thing that I've found very positive is that it allows you to install a huge number of rendernodes without additional cost.

I only use it as a hobby, but even I have set up my multiple PCs at home to work as a renderfarm (my quad-core PC even has multiple render tasks running). All in all, I have 7 active rendernodes (which cuts down on rendering time quite a bit ;)).

Just my 2cents worth ...

Cheers,
Andreas

Yes, Andreas is right. You can add as much computers as you want in a LAN to one single Lightwave license to render images for a video. This saves a lot of money if you often render animations.

Besides that I found a website with benchmarks of 3d app rendering times. And Lightwave renders indeed a bit faster than Max, Maya or other tools mentioned and is much faster than Mental Ray.
Also interesting is: Lightwave gets faster with every core / cpu, and if you have 2 cores instead of 1 then it indeed doubles the speed (half of the render time). A quad core cpu or several cpus bring a lot for rendering images in LW.

Why spend a dime when you can use wings3d(free) to build the models quickly and export to fbx and then animate in your favourite animation tool some say fragmotion(cheap) some say blender(free) then export to mdl through blender.

Depending on your animation needs the cost could rise beyond your wallet!

Having said that why not try Carrara 7 with all the bells and whistles and support for exporting to collada .dae maybe hexagon for modeling is your style also similar to Modo! Or Maybe houdini is more to your liking?

The best for UV Mapping why not try these bad boys out:

Ultimate Unwrap I think you already have this link
Unfold3d http://www.polygonal-design.fr/e_unfold/index.php
UvLayout http://www.uvlayout.com/

i just love UvLayout Unfold3d looks pretty good too Wings3d's uv mapper is good too

or maybe you might like cyslice http://www.headus.com/au/cyslice/

enjoy !!!!!!

I can tell you why. Yesterday a new minor update appeared for Lightwave 3D. Just have a look here:
http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/benefits.php

The update manual showing only the new features is more than 100 pages thick. And please look at the amount of work they have done in the link above. This is only a minor update. It is LW9.6. This means they already made 6 FREE updates for their customers. They are listening to bug reports, to complains and they are getting crash reports and remove bugs.

This is the way you get a stable robust software with the tools you just need to work. And it shows a very good alternative to the yearly and expensive upgrades from Autodesk. A Lightwave user only has to pay for the next major upgrade (LW 10). And this takes a few years.

Look what they have done, they have soft IK to prevent IK popping. This is the first animation software in the world providing this feature. They have great in- and output now. FBX, OBJ and Collada are tested with ZBrush, Maya and other tools. I also did some tests with 3d-engines and it runs perfectly.

I compared the lighting system of LW lately with Blender and there is a huge difference. Sometimes it is worth to spend money for a good software, support and future development.

Thats fine and dandy if you have the money to buy these products in the first place if not the benefits are useless!

If someone dont have the money for such a commercial tool then indeed Blender is the best all-in-one solution. And Wings3d is a good modeler and unwrapper. It is more than enough to create game models.

Not sure why you would see the price tag for LW as a problem, if you then turn around and suggest tools (e.g. cyslice $4000 / Unfold3D $299 / UV Layout $300) that are quite pricey, considering their limited functionality.

But I agree with Frank ... Blender is a very good, low-cost option ... as is trueSpace.

Cheers,
Andreas

well any software over 500 US gives me many reasons to raise my eyebrow. It would have to be exactly what i want otherwise no point and besides even if it was what i wanted the cheaper the better. If only software companies understood its easier to sell cheaply rather expensively. That way more buyers would come your way!!!

Look at blender being free a huge following!!!!! And Truespace being free should also help them a little too.

The reason why i sugguested those products to Frank is because he may have money to burn. Why do you feel their limited?

Moggy

Thanks Moggy, but I dont need this extra software. I own excellent tools. One of them, Modo, has fantastic uv-mapping tools, great modeling, sculpting and 3d-painting. So not extra tool is needed. And I have Lightwave as a good all-in-one solution including professional animation, physics, hair/fur, particles, the fastest renderer and robust modeling tools. Both tools together are much cheaper than 3ds Max, Maya or XSI but deliver more power.

Welcome Frank, no problem i just thought i would throw them in there. Yes Modo seems quite modern and has a bright future. I just hope the development of Wings3d moved a bit faster. As this Modeler has the fastest modeling i have ever seen. The learning curving is very short. Better than Lightwave or the bigger plays of the modeling world like 3ds Max. If its community and programmers were more energetic maybe things would be different. But i cant complain at least there is still development.

As for 3d sculpting i think 3d-coat is very good much like zbrush but cheaper

As for a cheap or free development stream i would use TRUESPACE, GAMESPACE, CHARACTERFX, DAZ 3D STUDIO, BLENDER, WINGS3D, WINDOWS PAINT.NET(for making textures) and fragmotion if exporting animation was a problem and finally 3d Coat for painting on textures to models. If you really wanted UV MAPPING then i would use Ultimate Unwrap cheap and plenty of import and export ability. This is just a rant for the beginners to let them know that you dont need to spend a lot of money to create games.

Considering that Truespace and Blender do animation, fragmotion and characterfx are virtually not needed unless for export reasons.

But if i did have the money then buying Modo and Lightwave would be a good option. But make sure you pay attention to input and export ability as this is the key to having a good development pipeline to make games.

I just wish the interfaces to blender and lightwave didnt have such high learning curves. If only they had the simplicity as Wings3d life would be so much easier.

I wonder if there will ever be a new Mirai?

Cheers Moggy

This is a good list of options you mentioned there. But to be honest: I would not use them all. This would create a lot of confusions. It is much better to master one of them perfectly. Since I have bad experiences with Truespace I would rather learn Blender. This alone can take a few years but will be worth it. Another unwrapping and animation tool is not needed. But maybe Milkshape and Fragmotion can be used for export.

Regarding the UI: I worked with MED, Gamespace, Lightwave, ZBrush, Blender, Modo, an older Max version, Cinema4D, Reflection, Monzoom, Milkshape and UU3D. It always takes time to learn the UI. Truespace has a very unique UI and takes some learning. Lightwave took me some time but was absolutely worth it. Blender and ZBrush takes time. The most different UI is the one from ZBrush but still it is the most used sculpting tool among artists. So this was not a big barrier for the ambitious people out there.

I have to say something about modeler since I used many of them at my work. I started with blender when I was In hi school 7 years ago ( it was the beginning of blender I guess) and then I switch to lightwave which is crealy morre powerfull and handy, after lightwave I was a bit stuck with the texturing. I Started game modeling and it wasn't this easy to texture my character. After two year I started working with 3dsMax at university. I learned it just to do my project and get my grades. I finished by learning maya for my job and I find it really handy and the ui more controlable than lightwave and 3dmax. Of course without the need for my job I wouldn't afford such a price.

But What I've learn is more important than the UI is the modeling process, the texture workflow and the animation can be learn in any of this package. Then It will depend on how good you are to use the tool in a proper way.

I have to say if you just start you won't find any diference between lightwave and blender or blender and maya. Even if the diference is huge( I mean it)

It's better to learn from something free first because by the time you'll learn how to model an organic model maybe the product will be in another version already.

I use modo and as frank says it a great tool.

@frank --- I would learn Blender for sure and because its free to use. I here that the Interface will change starting version 2.50. So hopefully the learning curve wont be so high. Either way the pipeline from blender to Gamestudio is very good.

There is also a program that you can buy that doesnt need uv mapping , you just paint straight onto the model and save it and then export to gamestudio. Something to do with auto uv mapping.

http://www.blacksmith3d.com/ check it out!

Yes the interface is the most time spent on when it comes to any software package.

Finally here are a few more tools you could try : strata3d, rhino3d, realsoft3d the list can go on and on

@sueds

no matter what happens all i know is the easier the interface the quicker we can achieve the goal of being a good modeler. I started with Wings3d because it was the easiest to understand interface wise, and being able to do something quickly in the program without being bogged down by the interface to learn first. Afterall its game models we want to create for our games in the first place. In the end my dream of making games is becoming reality, a bit more practice and bringing the skills together will have the game i have been waiting to make for a long time reality.



One last note: Anyone seen this creation tool? I am sure some have ,even this can bring game ideas to life quickly. All one needs to do is create the models and the level design and your done within a week or maybe more depending on how slick you want your game to look www.fpscreator.com

cheers

Moggy