I’ve been looking over the new feature list for Maya 2012 and have a few concerns. To be fair, I haven’t had a chance to see 2012 in operation yet, so I hope some of these don’t apply. I like many of the new tools that have been added, but as usual, the high end stuff has grabbed all the glory, while basic tools remain at the same dismal state they’ve been at for at least the past ten years. For example, Maya’s duplicate tools remain shockingly primitive, with no easy way to create complex arrays, and with an unnecessarily complicated workflow. I don’t think they’ve changed at all since version 2. Many other software packages (After Effects and Lightwave are two) have introduced a consolidate feature that grabs scattered assets from multiple locations and puts them all into a new project. Maya still doesn’t have one. Cut Copy and Paste remain useless, adding an empty node above each pasted object for no apparent reason. You can create names for things in the channel box and Maya will obligingly add underscores in place of spaces, yet this is oddly absent when you create layers.

I could go on and on but you get the idea. Most of these problems have been well known for over a decade, and yet the developers of Maya to this day continue to neglect them, and create flashy new features at the expense of basic functionality. They might do well to remember that being on top today doesn’t mean being on top tomorrow in this business.

Did you intend to put a question in there or just sharing your thoughts?

n8skow [FA]