Hacker News Reader

Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

Maya was an amazing piece of software once. It is falling behind only because Autodesk seems to be content to just let it slowly rot.

The funny thing is that there are litanies of complaints about many core Autodesk products that echo the same chorus: the software is poorly maintained, bugfixes are promised "for the next released" (paid upgrade, of course) and yet, they never appear. Customer feature requests are completely ignored and each release feels like it's just a version number bump with a few token changes here and there so that sales can act as if they created a meaningful new release.

View on HN

Some of us admins in the field like to joke that Autodesk isn't a software vendor, they are a licensing company. And to be honest some of their changes with regards to Named User Licensing is going to be a PITA for many studios.

I've gotten the chance to have a few conversations with some on the Maya team before, and they are great people. But they are fairly hamstrung by a company focused on sales and growth than development, one where M&E is less than 10% of their company revenue[0] (those numbers, which are an increase in revenue, can likely be attributed to the forcing of subscriptions), and having to cover a lot of ground re-architecting an application with a ton of technical and legacy debt. The historical idea of Maya being a Fraken-app exists for a reason.

[0] https://investors.autodesk.com/static-files/749abc95-16be-4c...

Media & Entertainment being a tiny part of their revenue fits with the general wisdom that the market for general purpose 3D software is virtually non-existent. The software is costly to build and maintain and combined with a small customer base and thus high licencing prices, this is a killer.

For some reason, enough resources is infused into Blender for it to be competitive, even though it does not bring any sales or licensing revenue.

I wonder if the market is that small.

The resources that get poured into Blender are coming out of pure desperation. The companies that pay for it have to have some tool that is suitable for their work and supporting Blender is simply cheaper than doing it from scratch.

Autodesk does an equally poor job maintaining their Architecture and Engineering softwares, despite them being a larger market. GP’s comments about the state of Maya hold true for AutoCAD and Revit as well.

Autodesk is the Oracle of the professional media world.

Adobe is their Microsoft.

I was surprised not so long back to find out just how much of the proprietary 3D market that Autodesk held. It seems like they own pretty much all of the big, studio-oriented 3D packages I had heard of from 10-15 years ago.

> Autodesk is the Oracle of the professional media world.

Autodesk’s reach in the niche of M&E 3D packages seems far more horizontal than Oracle’s in even databases. It is as though they set out to own all of the competition and largely succeeded – and this isn’t even the area that brings in most of their revenue.

For a complete opposite of Maya, see Side FX Houdini. An incredible masterpiece of software development, keeps getting better every year, the company is extremely competent, beloved by the community, they keep innovating even though they're so far ahead of any other alternative.

I don't know if I have a point to make, I just wanted to gush about my favorite 3D software, and also I'm sad to see what autodesk is doing to Maya, what an absolute disaster. I loved Maya so much when I was a teenager. It was built by a brilliant company (Alias|Wavefront), it could've been so good if it wasn't sold to autodesk.

Every year, I keep praying that Side FX doesn't sell to Autodesk - so far it seems to be working.

SideFX is the single most pleasant and hope-restoring company to deal with in this entire field. Other vendors have amazing teams, but top to bottom SideFX outclasses them all in terms of support, feedback reception, release cycles, feature/stability improvements, and licensing.

Autodesk and Adobe have become a problem, the lack of competition and incumbency mean they are basically milking the same cow ad nauseam.

To be a little bit fair - those systems are in fact very complex, and it is quite a big deal to do anything in them. But literally as I speak Photoshop will not go 'fullscreen' on my Mac, and Adobe blames this utterly ridiculous bug on Apple. Which may very well be the case but whoever is 'at fault' - things are retrograding a little bit.

I sense there is opportunity for a new angle on things.

> things are retrograding a little bit

Sure thing, but it seems even you are acknowledging that this specific issue seems to belong to Apple rather than Autodesk, so you're saying things are retrograding in the Apple ecosystem here, not Autodesk.

Disclaimer: I'm biased against Autodesk and love Blender, but even I see the fault in your argument here.

I said it may belong to Apple, not that it does, and frankly, I don't see this bug with any other software so really it seems iffy, moreover, Apple is still part of the 'old guard monopoly retrograde cash-cow' which is my point.

I mean, ultimately Autodesk doesn't give a damn about any of their other products as long as the AutoCAD money firehose continues.

Maya continues to be the industry leader because VFX studios have spent 20 years integrating it with their pipelines. Blender could beat Maya feature for feature, and places like ILM and Weta still won't adopt it because of the effort required to fit it into their pipelines.

Well the cash cow keeps making them money and the Studios are happy to keep giving them money so why bother

It's the same with Sports games, "corporate software" etc etc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com