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OK, finally had to upgrade to this POS at work. We finally upgraded our Linux OS to Debian Squeeze to work with this latest version of Maya. I’m just an artist. I don’t care about the OS or the hardware. I just want things to work. I think we upgraded our graphics cards to work with Houdini (more about this later). So maybe they aren’t optimal for Maya?
I’ve been using Maya since it’s Alpha cut way back in the mid-90s while I was at Sony. One thing that amazes me about SW companies is the amount of man hours they are willing to spend to make a customer think something is new and improved. Instead of actually, fixing things that don’t work. Or adding actual features that take advantage of advances in hardware such as GPUs.
Specifically for Maya2012, I just noticed the save notification that your file has been changed and do you want to save it. Why was there a need to reverse the order of the buttons?! People who’ve been loyally using this product already know by heart where the buttons are. They can hit them in their sleep. Now for no apparent reason, someone at Autodesk deemed it necessary to have a programmer spend man hours to change this. WTF?!
Has anyone noticed that if you do a playblast after opening the options window, that in the resulting playblast, you get a wonderful animation of your option window scaling down? Does anyone at Autodesk perform QC any more? WTF?!
I have a scene with a lot of referenced files. I had to assign a new shader to some of the meshes. Each time I open this scene file, that shader assignment is lost. WTF?!
The Space Bar function is useless when I have the above mentioned scene open and shaded with a fluid container. Even with only polygons displayed and shaded, there is a noticeable lag in switching from 1 panel to 4 or vice versa. Again, anyone at Autodesk heard of QC?
I don’t know about other office/studio environments. But at least in ours, Maya 2010 and Maya 2012 cannot coexist. When I have Maya 2010 open, I can’t open Maya 2012. It “Segmentation Faults” every time. I stopped using Maya 2011 when, in our studio environment at least, there was no “x” button to close certain windows. We are all Linux so maybe in Windows, this is fine. I don’t know.
Back to the issue of changing positions of buttons, or changing an icon as opposed to actually making improvements to the product. The reason we have optimized our graphics to support Houdini is because it is so much faster than Maya. I’m sitting next to a Houdini artist and while I can get the same final results, there’s no way I can do it as fast in Maya. And now, he’s playing around with the Beta of Houdini 12. OMG!!! It’s night and day compared to the previous Houdini which was already so much faster than Maya.
Here’s my proposal to Autodesk. Instead of “advancing” the product based on your current development schedule, why not open it up to the community at large? Take a poll of what’s important to your end users. I doubt that moving buttons would even appear on the list. Or changing an icon. We who are in the trenches know exactly what would make our lives easier and more competitive. Let us outline the next version of Maya for you. Then maybe I won’t have to start learning Houdini.
OH, almost forgot. Since I’ve been using Maya from the very beginning, I had written a large number of scripts over the years. I know it’s sloppy but I use the “$tmp” variable in all of my scripts. Why the hell did Autodesk start using that variable?!!! I’m not a programmer. But from what I understand, that’s pretty sloppy. I had to go back through all of my scripts and change that variable. What a pain in the ass!!!
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