Why CG industry is Dominated by Max, Maya and Houdini

Have you ever wondered why some 3D software like Maya and Houdini rule the CG world while others, like Lightwave 3D, fade away? Let's find it all out in today's video!
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[@jensenraylight8011]

Finally a video that was not circlejerking Blender. blender is good and okay, people in the real industry use all the tool they got, from maya, houdini, max, and still got the time doodling with blender in their spare time. they're tools agnostic, a real professional but, to villainize other 3d software to make blender look good is not cool, especially this channel had the tendency to do just that, to glorify blender as if it was a cure all diseases snake oil.

[@patakk8145]

It's funny. Even if there is no mention of Blender, there will be people like you spreading toxicity. And only because Blender is open source doesn't mean it's for "doodling". Get off your elitist ass.

[@phoenix2gaming346]

we love maya max houdini

[@se7en28]

The real reason is tech debt. Whatever your company chose ten years ago that they thought was the best. And back then it was Maya and Max, and now it’s nearly impossible to change. You’d have to relearn everything, change everyone’s pipeline while also delivering work. And then forget about interfacing with other studios who don’t use blender. The VFX world has so many vendors on any given project, interoperability and handoff is huge.

[@elconquistador3340]

not really, they are not dumb it just has to worth the price, houdini wasn't used that much at a given point for many reasons, but at some point it really got an edge and was useful and got quickly adopted in the pipeline.

[@metamesh1]

when it comes to vfx work, blender lacks behind a lot, I really enjoy playing with blender, is fun and cute and easy to install etc, but it can't compete with the level of data that is used in films, its scalability is shit and the moment you are using assets of film quality it chokes, and by assets I don't mean just 1 heavy object. I mean from heavy geometries to hundreds of UDIMS using 4k texture or higher, millions of hair per groom, muscle simulations, heavy fluids sims , all of it being able to be art directed and iterated many many versions as per client requests etc,. Even Maya and Houdini struggle under those circumstances and it becomes a slow process to deliver shots, but Blender won't even work under those setups, its scalability and expandability makes it a no no for big vfx houses, but for the 3d enthusiast and smaller projects it has a place for sure.

[@jensenraylight8011]

This!! yes exactly, i worked many times under those extreme abusive situation, where everything is maxed out, from geometry, texture, simulation, while other software tend to give up and throw a messy crash, often they can't handle even half of the workload established software like maya & zbrush, still try to handle it as best as they can, and often it worked

[@TemalCageman]

@@jensenraylight8011 Been working in the games industry for 17 years now (Pre-rendered and Ingame cinematics), and I still find uses for LightWave 3D where even tools like Maya will fail. It usually comes down to combining 30k reference meshes into a single mesh so things will be smooth sailing in a tool like MotionBuilder for mocap sessions.

[@btn237]

I would add that (somehow) studios have managed to work around this and deliver some fairly large projects, such as Maya and the Three or ‘Next Gen’ by Tangent. I’m interested to know how since I agree Blender can seem to struggle with a lot of data. Maybe they’re not on the same scale as some others? But I’ve also seen Maya struggle with simple scenes if not optimised though, so there is probably a degree to which you can make it work with the tools you have (I.e optimising) if you want to. Imagine the Matrix in 1999 using Pentium III CPUs to do their VFX 🥹 (not even kidding…). Thankfully as well Blender devs are addressing this slowly - apparently Blender never used to be able to open the Disney Moana island benchmark but now it can actually open it 😂

[@metamesh1]

@@btn237in 2006 I worked on this film called "Planet 51". It was fully done in 3dsmax8. That was before 3dsmax was 64 bits, meaning that all the machines we used had 2gb of RAM, which is ridiculous, even by that time standards. What I mean is that things do can be cheated and done, but not without a struggle and massive headaches. Things can be delivered even if using "the wrong tool" but that doesn't make it the smartest way of working and for sure that will cost you more time and money than using "the right tool" and in an industry with profits are normally so thin, time and money waste is a big no no. Can things be done in Blender or other not so ready software? Sure, but that willfor sure affect the outcome of it and the profit a company can make. But like you said, things are slowly getting better and even some tools in Blender are SO MUCH BETTER than tools in Maya ( Im looking at you , sculpting tools )

[@patakk8145]

Unlike ancient softwares like Max, Blender actually gets developed, constantly. Your comment will eventualy become obsolete.

[@newbiadk]

once again a great video

[@JetCooper3D]

As long as you can output a format that can be shared between departments. May surprise some that I used Lightwave 3D on Star Wars, Marvel films, Skyfall Bond 007, Disney etc and all they required was the universal OBJ or FBX files. I don't mind what is used as long is the output is usable. I find that university's and training facilities are telling student what is required these days without consulting the studios anymore. (Zbrush as well).

[@aki_gong6271]

Lightwave3D is back ^^

[@vivoslibertos]

Some software light years ahead and some light years behind. I was in game and the dev use Max since it got biped, multisub material and the texture bake with skydome is OMG one click you're a GOD. While I am using Maya the transfer map bake is crap took forever to render though later on turtle sort of work not awesome but better than nothing. Thank God there's Xnormal.

[@jensenraylight8011]

i'm a long time Max user, but Maya had the real meat, even though i wish i could use some Max tools in maya, because it was just slightly superior. Maya got Xgen, Mash, Bitfrost. maya rigging tools and animations also the de facto standards. their vanilla tools were already great out of the box. also how it handle viewport make it a killing machine for doing Level design. nowadays, even though i'm always finding a reason to use max, i always use Maya despite the tradeoff in some tools and areas

[@3dtrip870]

Pretty spot on, only thing I would challenge is Modo as a rendering tool: Modo's rendering was quite good, fast, and they had an interesting material system...the rest I agree, Modo should have stuck to modeling; they should have put in parametric modeling (better curve tools) and improved the sculpting, they might still be popular. I loved using Modo, but after Foundry bought it, I was turned off, because, while Foundry makes some good products, their pricing model is ridiculous.

[@EightNineOne]

Modo does have parametric modelling now, they've missed the ball with marketing the last few years. There's a new product manager in charge now so hopefully it'll be in a better spot in coming years. Still the GOAT for modelling.

[@3dtrip870]

@@EightNineOne that is awesome, I own Modo, but haven’t used it in a long time

[@gherat]

same can be said for zBrush and Maxon. Maxon are greedy little fuckers

[@ShrikeGFX]

how many of the same video are you making

[@aiuhejvwvud8c99rjej]

lol

[@cgfroggg]

A good way to stir up controversy between Blender users and the rest (even though it originally wasn't about Blender) :D

[@junechevalier]

Other DCC softwares users are usually cool in the comment section, but Blender users are like cult members 😂 they will come at you and your mom and your wife and your kids and your neighbors

[@gherat]

@@junechevalierYes that’s what I always say, they behave like cult members! Really annoying.

[@bruterasta]

Free student licenses is a big thing, it's also the reason why blender is somewhere in the discussion. Maya and 3ds have that plus support for business plus years worth of manhours from smart, paid engineers.

[@smurfia_ava]

❤❤❤❤❤❤

[@KrunoslavStifter]

Honest question for curious? Blender and stylized animations and models, great. But when it comes to photo-realism, for whatever reason almost everything, with few exceptions I see coming out of blender community looks quite, well not realistic. And I can't seem to figure out if its because users are not as good or Blender rendering and everything it offers is not quite there yet. Forget Maya, Hudini or 3DStudiomax even Cinema4D stuff looks amazing compared to blender, in photo realism department. And I am honestly not sure what is going on. Is it the problem of render engine, users of blender or what? Why is it so unimpressive in the department of photo-realistic animations and rendering? Why does almost everything look KZbin ready but not prime time ready? Anyone?

[@smashedlegends]

Try this experiment: Create a simple metallic ball in Cycles and create the same metal ball but in Arnold. Do the comparison. The Maya with arnold will look photorealistic while the cycles render will look something is off. It will look cool, but not photo real.

[@KrunoslavStifter]

@@smashedlegendsExactly. I tried something like that. I used a cube and a ball with various metallic materials applied and rendered it in Arnold from Cinema4D and did the same in Blender. Exactly as you say. Its not always easy to tell what it is, but something just feels off. Arnold renders feels way more realistic.

[@doctorkj5640]

@@smashedlegends Both Arnold and Cycles are unbiased path tracers and can produce equally good or equally bad results. It’s much more on the artist’s skill than on the render engine. Same goes for vray….it’s biased and you have to push it hard and know it well to produce film level photorealism. Mantra is / was very good but slow AF, Arnold still has issues in GPU department. Cycles has unusual EXR layers naming scheme so comping in Nuke requires shuffle node to get the image…. So once again it more about you than software. And remember that rendering alone is never the final image. The compositing plays a huge role in the final result.

[@smashedlegends]

@@doctorkj5640 I understand what you are saying. But no. Arnold produce better results if what you chase is photorealism. The sphere metallic test/gold test is good because there are no artist skills involved. Only the core system of each render and the way they deal with specularity and so on.

[@KrunoslavStifter]

@@doctorkj5640 Probably true. Because I've seen lately VFX Grace team, can be found on KZbin, using Blender for rendering and Fusion for compositing to get some very convincing models of animals.

[@zuowa]

Me: Come up with the most clickbait title for a video on KZbin so that a real war can start in the comments! ChatGPT: Why CG industry is Dominated by Max, Maya and Houdini.

[@junechevalier]

Why would there be a war tho? It’s the truth

[@ebelesaurus2]

I think more people in the industry use zbrush than Houdini

[@TheHighFlys]

totally different usecases, that's like saying people use ZBrush more than Maya which both are false

[@doctorkj5640]

And judging by this stupid comment I think you don’t know the difference between the two.

[@arjun220]

lots of zbrush cowboys!

[@smashedlegends]

Zbrush is for sculpting. Houdini usually is used for fx.

[@vivoslibertos]

People use anything on CGpersia dayum

[@nosirve9458]

why people talk about this, is based on some time of research or what?

[@MaheerKibria]

Ok you can always tell outsiders from insiders by the stupid stuff they say. There is one thing and only one thing that prevents Blender from being adopted as a pipeline backbone. It's legal. The rest is copium. So blender is widely used in industry now. I can look at a lot of the biggest studios and they will have opening where blender is totally fine to use even though Maya is still the backbone. We have industry standard file formats for a reason. So support from cannonical vs blender foundation doesn't matter and a lot of smaller software companies outsource their support even allegorithmic did it back in the day. And big studios have their own on site support personel to solve problems internally before going to Autodesk. They hire engineers to write their own tools. Trust me support is not a problem. Blender in the educational environment isn't unusual and i've seen programs that teach blender in addition to maya or max. But the GPL licence of blender means that certain legalese makes it hard to make plugins with proprietary coding. Which makes those for profit companies really trepidatious about making integration plugins which makes it difficult to use blender as a backbone. Houdini engine does not have a blender plugin for this very reason.

[@EightNineOne]

Partly true. GPL infection is a thing. But it’s not the only reason why Blender is not being adopted. There’s a multitude of issues with Blender. None insurmountable, but there’s just not enough reason and the Blender foundation themselves are simply not intending to target high end anyway. Besides being free (which doesn’t matter that much in the grand scheme of studio work) there’s normally a tool that is either better suited, better supported (something a lot of hobbyists don’t think about) and more production tested.

[@filipeberquo]

Hello I have been seeing your videos for almost a year and to be honest, I feel that your videos feel very repetitive, because I think that you have come to a point where you make the same video everytime you post( most of the time) I am being the most constructive I can with this. Why dont you try to make videos about cgi and vfx history since the begining, when the technology was different from what it was as of now. I think it would be a great oportunity to educate young audiences because in a way it is always good to learn where all of this came from. Instead of making videos that usually have the same information, try to make something different. I would be a little fresh air to us to be honest.

[@AnkitKumar-xy5xl]

what about blender could please provide some detail about its

[@Zuranthus]

Autodesk killed off Softimage and i hate them for it

[@stevenlitvintchouk3131]

I really think that for professional SFX houses, the fact that Blender is free is a bug, not a feature. There's a certain credibility and status that comes with buying and owning something expensive: It costs so much, it's got to be good! This is why people buy more expensive cars than they need or can afford. If you want Blender to be more widely accepted, produce a commercial version that is fully supported by a new startup profit-making company, which should price it at maybe a third of the price of 3ds Max, but no lower than that. That way it still has the status of a high price. (Long ago, Mad Magazine referred to this concept as the economic law of supply and idiots.)

[@migovas1483]

That s why there are LTS releases, and companies supporting the product... just like Linux for servers and such, has the same structure... the "I pay big $$$ for this so should be good", is not a big plus, when what you are fighting for are budgets, but studios will care about support, and integration... and while you can write that off in BIG budget productions, most of the work is not done in these conditions. Story time, Almost 2 decades ago, there was a time when you would pay big $$$, for a 'seat' on ubberexpenssive Autodesk Inferno/Flame room , with special lighting and even a free bar... depends the place, to do your editing work.. why? because you had write on your budget let s say $500-$1000 an hour on an Inferno/Flame suit to do some, 'track and mask' and some lens flare effects.+ operator Fees... yep. Ah, because the 'Director' wanted to see 'Real Time play', and such and yada yada.. mostly BS.. It was the Goldmine of postproduction houses and bread and butter of Director assistant, agencies, etc... because they had these 'golden key' , studio would give them a cut, for bringing the project there. So it was a 'win-win'.. except the new generation of tech moved fast, PC started to get faster, suddenly, it was way cheaper to get 6 PC, with 6 VFX people using, Shake, or After Effects for doing the same Job.. The freaking 'License ' to have the Autodesk Flame machine was almost 200k.. you could get the full Adobe suit for a under 2k... I saw how many houses lost a lot of those Pretty rooms, when the people who brought the work, knew they were paying too much for the same stuff.. they did not care if you were doing your shots on AE or seating on a golden chair,.. they wanted to know if they could afford 100 shots or 10 shots... That's it. Same happened with Linux, full circle, it was just cheaper to keep good Programmers and IT professional on a GNU license kernel under your control, than paying big bucks for a license with uncertain Future, that keeps finding ways to bind you.

[@EightNineOne]

The first sentence is true, but not for the reasons you'd expect. Blender being free and open source is a negative because of stability, maturity and support. I'm gonna use an analogy - tractors (bear with me) You've just started farming, so you invest in a versatile tractor that has a wide array of spare parts, but comes from a smaller manufacturer. When something goes wrong with it, you have a manual, so you roll your sleeves up and fix it yourself, you can't necessarily afford a more specialised tractor or the prohibitive cost of getting it fixed for you. Which is fine, you have a small farm. There aren't many professional mechanics out there anyway. Now if you were a medium sized productive farm, you've invested in some more specialised equipment and can shoulder the cost of having it maintained professionally. It becomes more costly to keep the old tractor maintained than simply replace it with a tractor you know will work, and if it doesn't you can get it fixed and back in action every time. It just takes a bit of money. Now imagine you're a large, industrial farm - Money is not much of a barrier, but efficiency is. You wouldn't even consider that first tractor, even if you have your own garage and technicians, they've all worked on the bigger, more specialised tractors which suit your needs better anyway. You can make minor repairs in house, but you also have the support of the company that sold you it. All you care about is the tractor working. Blender isn't bad, it may even be better at certain things than X,Y,Z software, but there's more to the equation than "Eevee is cool, geometry nodes are cool" when it comes to usage in larger businesses. With companies like Autodesk, Foundry, Maxon, SideFX if you spend enough money, you get a hand in the development in the product, you get on site support, you get custom development, you have a sales rep that knows if your problem isn't fixed, you'll take your business and millions in revenue somewhere else. So it gets fixed. It's hard to do that with an open source project of the scale of Blender, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze.

[@i_am_a_real_cat1443]

modo is crap, and what about c4d?

[@gherat]

c4d is way to expensive, Maxon are a bunch of greedy fucks. At least Maya has the indie licence which only costs 256 dollars a year.

[@smashedlegends]

This is the old discussion Maya vs Blender. Theres a whole new generation of people that started in Blender. That´s all they know. And in their minds it´s impossible to be better that Blender. Someone with real experience in both programs will tell you, that Blender it´s not ready for a big production. Working on Maya and Blender is night and day. A world of difference. Maya it´s way ahead. In fact in the vast majority of things, Maya it´s not even on the same league. From customization, from the modeling tools, shortcuts, history nodes, Bifrost, XGen, Mash, NCloth, Rigging, UV, Bullet, Muscles, integration with Substance, shelfs and Arnold.. everything it´s far far better than what Blender has to offer. The problem with Blender is the UI. It´s good for someone that only knows that but it´s not pratical for someone used to Maya with the shelfs, where everything is highly customizable. In Maya everything just works. And it´s WAY more stable. People that talk about crashes in Maya, need to understand how history nodes work. They need to know how to delete the history because in Maya everything is node base and they don´t even know it. As for example, the dynamics ... in Blender you create a liquid and you have maybe 20 customizable atributes. In Maya you have literally 200. It´s another world. Blender it´s amazing for a home environment or a small studio, where you use the same program for everything. And you get the work done. Maya it´s a program to be used in a pipeline. It´s a professional program. You do the modeling in maya and pass the job to another department (for visual effects in Houdini for example), and then you receive the product again in Maya where you do the rigging and animation. What people must understand, it´s that while Maya is usually integrated in a pipeline environment, if you want, you can do ALL the stuff you do in Blender but in Maya everything is more serious. Everything its better and much much much much more complete. Think about plugins. Maya is a program where each part is like a separate plugin like XGen or Mash for example. The diference is that each plugin it´s the best you will ever see in a generalist. Each plugin is like a premium super complete package already integrated in Maya. Even if your thing it´s just modeling, there is no comparison. But again, someone that only used Blender not know that. And the price of Maya is not helping. That´s the business side of things they choose. The change in the industry it´s not a matter of "Maya appeared first so it´s what professionals use". Maya it´s the first choice because it´s just in another league. It´s the Houdini brother.

[@jensenraylight8011]

Maya is like a very seasoned Mercenary, that you can deploy them into the harshest inhumane condition possible, and they will still get the job done, eliminating the target. heck, they're so badass that they can even conquer a small country by themself if they're assigned to do just that Maya is Incredibly great for Team because everything is in single page, there are no unnecessary features deprecation, rename, or just nuked for no reason. even if you're separated 5 years apart, you can still work together i agree that maya is stable, it's not only stable, it's predictable, even the features feels more solid, optimized and mature, everything is well thought out, not just haphazardly thrown together it support wide range of formats which is indispenseable for data exchange. don't get me wrong, blender is good, its get the job done, and i like blender for a light and quick modelling and rendering session, i like that blender load super fast. but blender is far from "cure all diseases" tools

[@smashedlegends]

@@ameknite good joke beginner.

[@trihardo3555]

@@ameknite lmao, the true take is Blender cant compete with ZBrush, Mari, Substance, Marvelous Designer, Cascadeur but it definitely is leaving Maya in the trashbin. Hell Houdini left Maya in the trashbin not Blender, nowdays Houdini is hard requirement and its not impressive knowing Maya as it was in past.

[@hound_of_justice]

​@@smashedlegendsagree and same with 3ds Max vs Blender. Its funny how some of those hobbyists mock Max as as crippled sibling of Maya and then proceed to claim that Blender beats both in all aspects. I use 3ds Max as generalist tool but will soon split the tasks and share with Maya and use for both their respective plugins. Using either of those two is a different world from Blender, let alone using both Max and Maya as a combo package.

[@junechevalier]

I used Maya for my personal projects, but since I’ve learned Houdini, I don’t think I’m going back (except for work stuff). Houdini is great

[@joselovelife8636]

capitalism, there you go. solved your question.

[@Maxdesign3d]

Nice video till you start talking about blender. blender sucks.

[@robertmarquez6084]

i love maya but after 2.8 blender is the king