What's new in 2025 ?

[stephenkmann]

I'm not sure this was supposed to be published just yet.. 

youtube: Whats new in Autodesk 2025

https://youtu.be/MEIK9jprJDg

-=s

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http://smannimation.blogspot.com/
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[SEQUENZ | Gerstenmaier]

Thanks, Stephen. Good to see that the dinosaur Maya is till alive! Time to play with USD + MaterialX + V-Ray 6.2. 

Lars

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[joiec...@gmail.com]

In fact, I'm wondering if MaterialX is supposed to emerge as a new standard for shading in the industry?

I mean, it looks like it has lots of potencial, but hard to learn too, and maybe too technical also. It worths the effort?

[Steve Davy]

Seriously, is anyone still using Maya in production for anything except character animation at this point? Even in my last job – which was still using Maya – they had eyes firmly on transitioning away from it (probably to Unreal) as soon as possible.

Even the 3D jobs I now see advertised seem to prefer apps such as Blender and Houdini....

I wonder what the long-term viability of Maya as a product can possibly be.

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Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2024 11:58 AM
To: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] What's new in 2025 ?

 

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[sid]

I was a full time Maya generalist from 2006-2017. I picked up Houdini
in around 2011 to do some small bits and pieces, and eventually
started using it full time from 2017 onwards. Cameras, rigging,
animation and basic layout still tend to be done in Maya and exported,
but Houdini is becoming an enticing option for all of these as well,
particularly since KineFX and the new H20 animation tools.

I can't see Maya being around in 3-5 years, really!

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[Anthony Rosbottom]

I stopped using Maya full time in 2011. Have paid for maya indie a couple of times since. 

The problem I see is that Blender is just objectively better to model in than Maya. 

I’ve modelled in Maya from version 2.5 to 2018 and Blender is just better at modelling and with the cycles real-time viewport, is a more pleasant modelling and texturing experience than Maya. 

So IMO the start of the 3d process is better in blender and it seems from what I’m hearing, that the latter stages of the 3d process are better in Houdini.

So that only leaves the character animation ‘better’ in Maya. So if you’re not an animator or a company department doing animation, you’re going to look at better options. 

Cheers,

Anthony Rosbottom

www.anthonyrosbottom.com

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[matt estela]

Feels like Maya is still the default tool for previs, layout, rigging and animation. There's so much muscle memory in those roles, and so much reliance on legacy scripts/toolkits in animation and rigging, they'll be hard to shift.

Anecdotal evidence is that Blender's anim and rigging tools are still not quite up to the task for heavy production assets. The handful of riggers I know will occasionally compare mGear+Animbot to Blender, quickly scurry back to Maya. You see more and more Blender rigging tests pop up on linkedin, but I wager no-one is willing to bet a commercial or a show on Blender rigging right now. Maybe improvements in 4.1/4.2 will change that.

Doesn't feel like any other alternatives are ready either. Houdini and Apex are still a bit too early, I don't know of anyone who's adopted Cascadeur or Rhumba. XSI is properly dead dead (took ages!), I don't think there's any other serious options around.

You'd hope Autodesk are paying attention, but I fear what's happening is the unfortunate expected result of Alias -> Alias Wavefront -> Discreet Logic -> Autodesk company swallowing/rebranding. The Maya division is so small compared to the rest of the archivs/engineering sectors, any shouting for dev or leadership is getting ignored, Maya is unfortunately stagnating. 

I don't bear Maya any bad vibes, I *want* them to succeed and blow us all away with innovations. Competition is good! But all I've heard is complaints from users saying 2025 is a really underwhelming release, or making huge bitchy rants on linkedin about all the bugs that haven't been fixed since v2.

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[matt estela]

Yeesh, I just speed-watched that 'whats new in 2025' video. Man, that's the very definition of underwhelming.

[Anthony Rosbottom]

I was shocked and dismayed with how Autodesk are treating Mudbox. There is a Mudbox 2025 but it has no new features. Just bug fixes. 

With people like me who are very wary of jumping into ZBrush now that they are owned by Maxon who have made ZBrush an expensive subscription, you’d think the time is right to hoover up all those new customers that want a dedicated sculpting app instead of relying on Blender. 

I like sculpting in Blender but I like more, the layer system in Mudbox. 

Cheers,

Anthony Rosbottom

www.anthonyrosbottom.com

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[matt estela]

Nomad sculpt on desktop due pretty soon... :)

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[Anthony Rosbottom]

Ooh nice! I have Nomad Sculpt on my iPad but haven’t had a chance to get into it yet!

Cheers,

Anthony Rosbottom

www.anthonyrosbottom.com

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[matt estela]

I'm the worlds biggest superfan for nomad. The latest update has just gone to the appstore for approval, this one adds exoside quad remesher as an in app purchase, facegroups, uv's for all primitives, ton of other great features. 

The only thing missing is displacement map export (it already does diffuse/rough/metal/normal/opacity map export), once that lands, it'll remove the last thing I use zbrush for. Hell, even then I use marmoset whenever I can or blenders displacement baker.

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[joiec...@gmail.com]

I really don't know if all this is an Autodesk strategy to close itself, but if you see the "What's new in 3ds MAX 2025" kind of video, it doesn't feels like they don't put so much love on MAYA, but also on MAX too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31w9ffFPVw0

[SEQUENZ | Gerstenmaier]

After all those comments, I feel like a dinosaur as we still using mainly Maya besides Houdini and some breezes of Blender ;-) But I guess AI will change the way of 3D work so fundamentally, that it will be more essential which company / software will have the most advanced AI functions. 

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[Anthony Enos]

I held on to my perpetual license and mostly work in C4D these days, but I still jump back into Maya for jobs that require more modeling/rigging or that are more VFX heavy versus Motion Design. The 2022 version has been fine for that, and it's been great to have around. For Character Animation, I still think Maya has too much of a stronghold to give up to another traditional 3D software, but an AI enabled tool with a completely new way of animating could finally unseat it. I think we could be looking at the last generation of "traditional" 3D character animators/riggers at this point.

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[stephenkmann]

REZA has a little more info on the 2025 update.   https://youtu.be/c8Y0qJNX7qY

We should see a big speed update with the UI using pyside 6 

Which has allowed for a lot of other things. like the dopeSheet update (speed)

and adding the channel "cubes" in the time line (which I haven't found a real good use for yet) 

parentMatrix should be a nice speed improvement as well 

and while I don't do a lot of modeling , the bevel updates do look nice

we shall see ....

 -=s

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