64-bit for mac is long overdue. Talk all the crap you want about Mac, Maya is more stable on Mac than it is on windows. The problem for us is that without 64-bit we need to boot up windows so we can use all of our RAM when rendering. And I can live without a 5800 and buy a render node instead. If you set up scenes properly, you don’t need millions of polys to be displayed when you’re working.

Better hardware previews is long overdue. Gamers get better graphics then artists do. And mudbox can do it, Maya should do it.

I would also like to see features from XSI brought into maya now that autodesk owns it, such as viewport preview renders that you can save and scrub instead of the IPR crap that doesn’t update for half of maya’s settings. other XSI features such as remembering which components were selected in objects the last time you edited them, preview settings and final render settings.

Another thing that would be nice is presets/streamlining things from Mudbox - Maya and even ZBrush to Maya. There needs to be some nice standards established and a badass UV toolkit inside of maya so that you can get the most detail out of your sculpts and texture maps without so much trial and error. Some automation would be nice for (painlessly) setting up objects UVs, multi-quadrant style, so they are ready to have multiple maps generated for them in the sculpting apps.

I think everyone can agree that making sure mental ray’s SHADOW PASS works correctly is a must as well as all the other passes which are unusable. having to use 3rd party shaders or hidden MR shaders to try and get a shadow out is retarded and never looks perfect. Why are all those passes even in there if we can’t use them? Maybe we’re expected to pull them out with code like half of Maya’s stuff :)

Try and remember that actual artists use Maya too, artists meaning those of us who aren’t programmers. So much time could be better spent in Maya creating rather than trying to figure out workarounds or typing code. Not all of us can afford a team of programmers like a larger studio has, and it seems like when artists run into walls it’s at the point when the developers expect it to be coded to get that functionality, even things that aren’t very complex, like breaking objects away from an instancer or swapping a group of selected objects with another group of objects randomly, things I had to code in MEL.

Another thing, how about some plug-ins for all the top compositing apps that will take our render passes and set them up in default overlay modes so we don’t waste our lives connecting things. All large studios seem to build these things and It’s still beyond me why it’s not part of maya. I’d much rather that than a crappy render queue or toxic of all things. And if you really want to be sweethearts, make it so with a button click you can have maya save all passes neatly in an EXR or custom format (that isn’t broken). The plug-in would auto load the layers properly and let us choose which channels we wanted to use. Simple, yet super efficient and big on time saving. you can save to exr now but half the passes don’t work and ProEXR for AE doesn’t automate anything.

And when you get a chance, make the bevel plus put edge loops around the caps of objects, update the particle system and fluids which are getting stale, and rebuild the rigid body system. No one uses it for any type of production because it’s broken and has been since I started using maya in 2004. Unless you’re dropping one object on another, it’s riddled with interpenetration issues and most places that decide to do dynamics in Maya create, or use a 3rd party solver.

And lastly how about a few custom MR shaders just for Maya? revamp the sss shader with some procedural controls, or make one for multi-layered volumes, or an animated, procedural, displacement wizard. A better skinning system can also be tacked on to the list so that default weights are more accurate.

Add to that list a terrain generator, revamped paintFX system that connect stems to stumps when converted, realflow-ish liquids, more force fields, an interactive metaball system that can be seen before finalized, fracturing system, and have Nparticles use the instanced geometry’s shape for collisions instead of just a sphere.

Maybe we’ll see all this stuff in Maya 2050 if we’re lucky.

Autodesk must be illogical, the overwhelming majority of people seem to prefer to post their wishlists here. It is to cumbersome, and long winded to send each request through in a sterile box, with no feedback, and no idea whether anyone actually reads what took you time to think and write about. Why can’t Autodesk be logical and send someone here once a month (or even less) and make a list of what’s on peoples minds. That would probably take one person half a day. The sense of being part of a community, and actually hearing feedback about your ideas, is much more rewarding. So I foresee people will stop requesting features for Maya altogether.

Good luck with that. I’ve explained how the process work in he forums before. I also wrote up a proposal for dealing with the reality of how Autodesk’s feature development works while at the same time accommodating people’s desire to discuss the features they propose.

http://area.autodesk.com/for...ld-have-had-since-maya-10

I can’t quite figure out why nobody wants to do it that way. It would actually work, you know.

I’m open to other ideas though, and I would even be willing to spend some time summarizing feature requests and sending them to Autodesk. I happen to know exactly how to do that because it was part of what I did when I was at Autodesk. It’s just that we only paid attention to customers who were on subscription with gold support at the time.

Did we already mentioned the new and like always hidden “Built-in Image Based Lighting” feature in Maya 2010?

>IBL can be enabled by setting the string option “environment lighting mode” to the value “light” (further modes will possibly be made available in the future). The “environment lighting quality” <float> string option with a floating value in range from 0.0 to 1.0 can be used to control the quality of the image, with 1.0 been the highest quality.

further modes will possibly be made available in the future ??

so when does the future starts for Autodesk ? Maya 2050 ? can not be that Maya 2010 has no HDR lighting model like Vray were you can get super crisp shadows with an light dome. It is the year 2010 and not 1998.

when will we get that features in Maya?

what is the point of having a wishlist thread if no one is going to read it.  especially on the autodesk sponsor home website.  I guess it gives people a place to air their grievances even if no one will ever hear them.  seems like autodesk should just shut this web thread down so that no one thinks they are submitting any “real” suggestions to autodesk and instead be “forced” to submit through the suggest a feature menu.  It seems like it would make a lot of sense for autodesk to hire someone to patrol this forum a bit and try to get the best ideas implemented.  I cant really think of any reason not to? maybe i should suggest this in the suggest a feature menu… haha

I know its not a big deal but I’d have to say a new updated UI would be nice. Max has had the light and dark UI for ages, its about time we got something like that. Other stuff, built in Plugins? Max gets shag/fur and polyboost built in, we have to externally get shave and a haircut and NEX. Also the paint weights/component editor tools are still a little buggy, they could be improved.

I think the dynamics toolset inside maya is lagging painfully behind max and soft. At work we are all jumping over to other software for our dynamics. I wish maya had stronger, more stable, and most importantly more user friendly particle effects. The things I see people doing with ice, fume fx and krakatoa are very impressive, but I don’t think maya could support these kind of tools within it’s current dynamics environment. Also rigid body sims are just way too slow, unstable, and error prone to be of much use anymore. Ncloth is very impressive, but nparticles are not where they need to be. They are too slow and limited.

Other than this obvious weak point in maya, I usually get by fine with most of the current tools. Mental ray can always continue to improve, and become more streamlined. And hair rendering could use to be improved for sure, the shading engine for hair is just too unrealistic and hard to match to your scene lighting, especially within mental ray.

You guys realize that nobody at Autodesk is reading this thread, right?

THNKR 18 February 2010 01:59 PM

You guys realize that nobody at Autodesk is reading this thread, right?

Who cares? I find this topic useful because I can read different opinions from the userbase and that help me understand a little more about the workflow of Maya and the strenght and weakness of this beautiful software. As a community we cannot ask or demand to implement things based on our personal preferences, but sure we can make a wishlist of things we would like to see implemented to be discussed in the community.

Anyway, Autodesk created The Area to gather their userbase to discuss about their products, so if no one at Autodesk read The Area forums, what would be the point of this place?