Max vs Maya

A 3ds Max user for ten years, Chris Hobbs, application specialist at CADline, recently started using Maya. But which is the right product for in design visualisation users?

3ds Max is a product that has been under the Autodesk umbrella for many years, since the acquisition of the original development company, Kinetix. During the intervening years it has been traded under the company name of Discreet, which has itself been reabsorbed into Autodesk as the Design Media and Entertainment department.

Maya has been owned and developed by a company called Alias which was acquired by Autodesk earlier this year, making Autodesk the market leader in modelling and animation.

Positioning

I have searched high and low to find a definitive message on how these two products sit within the Autodesk portfolio and in this article I will attempt to simplify it, or at very least try and aim you in the right direction.
With any major software acquisition the same questions reverberate around the industry; ?Why has Autodesk acquired Alias??
Surely Max is in direct competition with Maya, don't they do the same thing??, and ultimately, Has Autodesk bought Alias to shelve Maya, or even replace Max??
In the main, they do perform many of the same tasks; they can model, render, animate and create a headache for most IT departments! They do have their subtle differences and as with most competitive products, they have their strengths and weaknesses.
The straight answer to the last question is neither. Those of you that keep an eye on such things will be well aware of the precedence set with the purchase by Autodesk of the Revit Corporation five years ago. For those of you that haven?t heard of Revit, it was a product that was in direct competition with Architectural Desktop in the architecture and construction market. Autodesk acquired the software and has been developing them in parallel, with no intention of shelving either product. They have taken ideas from each and shared them with the other, improving both products. The differentiation that has emerged has been one of mindset rather than feature list. This is something that I am sure we will see happen to Max and Maya.
After spending the best part of 10 years using Max in various industries I have now started to use Maya and have found a lot of similarities in the way the products work. In Max we use the transform gizmo to move, rotate and scale an object, a function that is mirrored by a similar tool in Maya. Right clicking an object in both products will produce intelligent sub-menus that are only relevant to the selected objects. I find using Maya very familiar, with some features in which I still prefer the Max approach, whilst in others I find the Maya approach a refreshing improvement. Both products are now using Mental Ray as the secondary rendering engine.

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