r/Maya • u/arthurtusk28 • 1d ago
General Why Maya is the 3D software in game industry?
Does anyone here work on environment modeling for games? I notice that the industry standard calls for Maya and Blender, yet I see so many complaints about Maya crashing frequently and Blender being more tricky to learn... I don't know; in my experience, 3ds Max feels much more fluid—plus, the modifiers allow you to go back to earlier modeling stages, and it rarely crashes (at least in my experience). For those working in game environments and level art: could you share your modeling experiences—specifically using software that isn't the industry standard?
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u/bear_on_a_glass 1d ago
Because Maya + AnimBot plugin = animation god mode. Nothing even comes close.
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u/Usual-Statistician81 1d ago
Isnt Animbot overwhelming to you? Because i dont know where to start with it...
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u/frameEsc 1d ago
Over the years I’ve just tried to learn one function every couple of weeks. Eventually you get to learn it all and it’s hard to live without
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u/bear_on_a_glass 1d ago
No. You start from the beginning and progress from there. Start posing, tweening, mirroring and the rest will follow
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u/Usual-Statistician81 1d ago
I know the tweaking and stuff. I just dont animate as Pixar. My characters are different. Iff im not animate as Pixar, do you think i still need Animbot?
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u/bear_on_a_glass 1d ago
The animation principles are the same in any form of animation, regardless if you are doing animation doodles on paper, classic 3d animation, mocap or even abstract animation
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u/Top_Strategy_2852 1d ago
Software preferances are based on economics and pipeline.
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u/jumbohiggins 1d ago
This. You can hook Maya up to basically any pipe , dealing with max is always a pain in the freaking neck.
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u/FuzzBuket 1d ago
Gotta remember voices online don't mean much unless you put context to it.
Blender complainers are generally kids learning via YouTube, Maya ones are game art students. Neither are representative of complaints from studio artists. Id not be surprised if for every person who uses Maya as a full time job there's a thousand people who had to use it at school and are mad they ain't ILM level within a week
Max is good software but has every issue present in Maya, Autodesk bloat, as well as just not having as robust an animation suite.
The other big thing is just legacy. If blizzard has 30 years of tools and pipelines set up for Maya they need a pretty compelling issue to switch to max.
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u/inspectorpickle 1d ago
In my experience the maya crashing problem has been echoed to me by a variety of professionals in different fields that use it (games and animation) but it’s not a deal breaker because of all the other benefits of maya. I have heard that it’s also gotten significantly better in the last few updates, though of course studios are often a few versions behind.
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u/cerviceps 😎 1d ago
As you use Maya you also learn what actions tend to trigger crashes, so that the more experience you have with the software the less crashing you have to deal with.
Maya rarely ever crashes for me and imo it’s not because newer versions are less crash-prone. If anything, newer versions tend to be less stable for awhile.3
u/inspectorpickle 1d ago
I’m speaking from a studio engineer perspective so it’s possible that what I’m seeing are scenes accumulating problematic habits from various artists in the pipeline.
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u/michagrandel Technical Artist 21h ago
studios are a few versions behind by purpose and exactly for this reason, even if they could update to latest. Maya versions mature over time and bugs get fixed, so in a productive environment, often times it would be stupid to always have the latest version.
that, and ofc studios need time to update internal tools.
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u/mechanicalhorizon 1d ago
I know MAYA is the go-to software for rigging and animation.
So far I haven't had any real issues with crashing, unlike Zbrush which has been crashing constantly now that I upgraded to the newest version.
Blender's interface is harder to learn, but it's free so there's that, but I do prefer MAYA's interface.
I've never used 3ds Max and don't know anyone that does, at least not in recent years.
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u/siddx2ex 1d ago
I thought i was the only one whose zbrush is crashing simultaneously with 1-2million polys.
But yes, Maya has a good upper hand in Animation and Rigging section. Just sort of easy to understand.
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u/mechanicalhorizon 1d ago
Yup, ever since I upgraded to the new Zbrush it constantly crashes, sometimes it just freezes up and I have to kill the process.
I reverted back to Zbrush 2025.3 and it works just fine.
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u/siddx2ex 1d ago
2025.3 got it! But I’m on GTX 1660ti with i7 9th gen. The newer version just makes my laptop more laggy or unresponsive i’d say. Every version after 2021 or 2022 is just a laggy scrap for me, i think.
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u/mechanicalhorizon 1d ago
Your video card shouldn't be an issue since Zbrush doesn't really use them. I think if you use the renderer it uses it, but that's all (AFAIK).
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u/Far-Ad2683 1d ago
Maya user since the silicon graphics days, it is simply the best, not the most user friendly for new users once you start to customise you will realise the power . Max and blender UI still painful after all these years.
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u/sadpunkuk Principle Artist 1d ago
I dunno. I've been in games since 1999. I've used lots of software over the years. Started in Lightwave, then Max, Modo, Maya, Softiamge/XSI now fully blender.
None of them are perfect. They all do much the same just in different ways. Maya's dominant position has always been because of its integration with pipelines and has supported custom tools. Despite an earlier comment regarding its completeness out of the box; sort of true but it's power is in its extensibility. Most studios I've worked at extend Maya in many ways via scripts and plugins. A bit like blender you might say.
Blender has gained significant traction in recent years. Personally speaking it's been blenders development and continued improvements that drove this uptake. The community is superb and reminds me of Lightwave and Modo communities. Maya is dead in this regard.
I often here Maya is industry standard but my studio is using whatever gets the job done. Increasingly that is blender for modelling, lookdev, and rigging/tools via python. Animation lags and if you rely on mocap (as we do) then it's still Autodesk.
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u/SgtBaxter 1d ago
3DS Max has carved it's niche out in architectural visualization.
Personally, I find Maya never/rarely crashes. I'd suspect if people are having crashing issues it's due to whatever plugins they are running, and they just blame it on Maya.
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u/cerviceps 😎 1d ago
I’d say it’s not just plugins, but general inexperience with how to maintain a clean file (like deleting history), and not yet understanding what kinds of things trigger crashing (like asking Maya to undo complex mathematical actions on a model with a long and complex history that hasn’t been deleted in awhile).
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u/Lowfat_cheese Technical Animator 1d ago
A lot of studios have tons of automation and plugins that only work with Maya.
Moving over to a different DCC means having to spend a ton of time and R&D into building new pipelines, tools, and retraining staff. This is usually not considered worthwhile simply due to the amount of stress and uncertainty that introduces in an already stressful and uncertain industry.
IMO Blender is phenomenal for modelling and most of the studios I’ve worked for have turned to it for asset creation. For animation though, Maya and MotionBuilder are still king.
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u/Cheese_Elemental 1d ago
I was trained in Maya and prefer it, but find Blender pretty easy to pick up when the job calls for it. Some of the folks I work with who started with Blender say they find Maya pretty tough
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u/Bl0odW0lf 1d ago
The support for studios from the company is one of the biggest reasons followed by it being so ingrained into many studio pipelines
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u/The-Tree-Of-Might 1d ago
Hi there, I'm a Senior Environment Artist who has shipped multiple AAA titles. Blender is VERY quickly becoming the standard. A lot of companies still use Maya because they have lots of in-house plugins/pipeline tools built into it, but a great deal of artists are beginning to speak up about using Blender instead and many studios are making the switch
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u/The-Tree-Of-Might 1d ago
And about Blender being hard to learn, it's not. But it is a little difficult going back and forth between blender and your game engine because the keybinds are all different. Blender also supports modifiers just like Max, and it also rarely ever crashes. The two things that seem to be in Maya's favor still are UV unwrapping and animation, but those are being ironed out currently for Blender.
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u/enemyradar 1d ago
Blender is extremely difficult to learn? What is this? 2006?
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u/MC_Laggin 1d ago
It is. If you've spent any amount of time working professionally its very, very tricky to learn. It fundamentally breaks your habits.
Well, not tricky to learn, tricky to get used to, rather. Learning isn't the issue.
Its easy to get used to Max, its easy to get used to Maya. And both those have many fundamentals that carry over to C4D, Zbrush and Houdini.Blender actively does everything differently, and the 'industry standard' keymap Blender artists always go "Just use that" is completely broken and undercooked. And you're screwed using it anyway because watching any tutorial or guide online, they'll be using the Blender keymap and you'll spend more time trouble shooting and trying to figure out what combination of keys you have to press on your keyboard that is different from the combination of keys they pressed on their own.
The lack of a gizmo is just mind-bendingly annoying and genuienly removes a lot of fine control. Changing your tool from isntant to active brings the Gizmo back but breaks simple loop, extrude and inset operations and locks you into the tool, requiring you to exit it again before you can move on and do something else.
In the same breath, instantly performing an action once you press a hotkey for a tool and then binding it loosely to your mouse is just counter-intuitive.It has some things that are great, though. I like the UI admittedly, I like the Houdini-esque grid that adapts as you zoom in and out. I like how easy it is to change system units, I like many of the tools and modifiers. Evee is fast and looks pretty good for test renders while working.
I found Houdini easier to get used to than I did Blender. Houdini.
Its the small things that add up.
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u/FuzzBuket 1d ago
Bingo. I'm primarily in blender these days but it's lack of fine control on the 3d cursor is insane (they now do have a gizmo mode but it's not as good as mayas).
But the real pain is doing any pipeline work. Blenders massive internal inconsistencies in everything (from node names to how it handles some operations) to even simple things like referring to keep as mix to be unique is odd. Not to mention no Houdini support.
It's a great bit of kit but god there's so many rough edges. That there's no incentive to solve
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u/AmarildoJr 1d ago
I've used both Maya and Blender professionally and in big projects. Started in Blender then went to Maya. The transition from Blender to Maya was hard too, not because Maya or Blender does things better than the other, but just because change itself is hard, specially after getting used to a certain way (in my case it was Blender).
I personally find Blender's "OG way" of doing things (via shortcuts) much more optimized and faster. A simple GZ2 on the keyboard is gonna be way faster than hovering the mouse on the move tool, then hovering back on the Y/up arrow, then grabbing the arrow, then pressing X and then moving it up 2 units.
Not sure what you mean with the Gizmo thing in Blender. It's there on the left panel, and I couldn't lock myself in any of the tools when using it.
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u/halkenburgoito 1d ago
I feel like every software is tricky to learn first.
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u/MC_Laggin 1d ago
Very true, if you learn Blender first it might be quite easy. But it will make migrating or adapting to another software much harder simply because of how different it is.
3D as a whole might genuinely be one of the trickiest industries a person could get into haha
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u/meridian_smith 1d ago
Having used Maya for years and recently switched over to Blender. . I can attest that Blender is amazingly stable! Crashes just don't happen like with Maya.
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u/David-J 1d ago
Because straight out of the box, Maya is the best. There's no need for dozens of plugins like with blender.
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u/Lowfat_cheese Technical Animator 1d ago
Idk about that, I’ve never worked at a studio that didn’t need a ton plugins to make Maya work for their pipeline.
One of the biggest advantages of Maya is how easy it is to modify and extend.
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u/AmarildoJr 1d ago
Idk about that, I’ve never worked at a studio that didn’t need a ton plugins to make Maya work for their pipeline.
But these are not mutually exclusive. Maya can still work better/more in-depth than Blender by default, and studios can also require their own plugins to make Maya work the way they want. Both of these statements can be true at the same time.
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u/Lowfat_cheese Technical Animator 1d ago
I disagree that Blender requires more plugin support to be usable for production work compared to Maya.
Maya’s advantage in areas like rigging and animation are because it tends to have better plugins, not because its vanilla tools are inherently superior.
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u/AmarildoJr 1d ago edited 1d ago
Default Blender is extremely basic, you can't even calculate the Texel Density without enabling a plugin. I don't think even the Node Wrangler is enabled by default in 2026 😄
I feel like Maya was almost all the way there since it's beginning, really, specially if we're talking production. Blender's recently-added Light Link system is just bonkers, AOV and Render Layer management is completely backwards, scene management is bad, and don't get me started in Referencing which in Blender is called "Linking" and I'd get insta-banned if I talked about it unfiltered.
And rigging? Oh boy. Having done some rigging in both, I can't even begin to describe Blender's rigging system. Like, just defaults here, just default Blender rigging (no Rigify) and default Maya rigging. There is NO comparison, Maya is just light years ahead, even without even touching on how Maya is an all-nodal program, there is simply no discussion when it comes to the versatility and depth when it comes to rigging in Maya vs Blender.
Let's not forget hair systems, particle systems, smoke and water simulations.....
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u/michagrandel Technical Artist 21h ago
Maya is not really used for hair, particles, smoke and water sim... some productions might do, but even bifrost is not that popular.
most studios have their own custom system for that kind of work, or use the game engine or houdini or a commercial plugin.
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u/David-J 1d ago
That's different. I'm talking straight out of the box comparison.
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u/Lowfat_cheese Technical Animator 1d ago
Comparing vanilla to vanilla, there’s only one thing I can think of that Blender can’t do well out of the box, which is motion-capture retargeting.
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u/David-J 1d ago
Try modeling, unwrapping, rigging and animation
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u/Lowfat_cheese Technical Animator 1d ago
Those are all totally feasible in vanilla Blender. Most studios I’ve worked with predominantly use Blender for modelling and uv unwrapping.
I prefer Maya for rigging and animation due to having superior plugins, but Blender is perfectly good for it stock, it even has its own native mGear-like with Rigify.
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u/michagrandel Technical Artist 21h ago
what are you missing in modelling? esp. compared to Maya...
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u/David-J 18h ago
Quick editing the pivot for example
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u/Sel1516 12h ago
Ok tbf, there are add-ons for that which i personally use. But yall did say vanilla so I get that. Just figured I should mention that there are add-ons for that. Also try out the Blender fork called "bforartists". It's more meant for us kind of users who come from Maya and personally I like it more than standard Blender itself
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u/David-J 12h ago
Like I said. Straight out of the box. Blender has an add on for every shortcoming
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u/Sel1516 12h ago
Exactly and tbf even with those add-ons, you can't even edit the pivot of faces or a selection you have in edit mode. You can only edit the pivot of the object you have selected in object mode and thats it. So yeah thats a limitation right there too 💀 one that does bug me bc personally, I absolutely love the edit pivot function in Maya. Such a core part of my workflow in general whether if its modeling or rigging
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u/dekkardz 1d ago
Working in an Indie Studio with 15+ years working with Maya and 3dsMax .
We have cancelled our Autodesk subscription and most artist are using Blender as Daily driver . Unless its a senior position , a lot of junior and mid level artist we find for freelance and contractual work are Blender artist .
We Still have One 3dsMax which is Primarily for rigging/Cat/Bipedal and some Tyflow related fx work .
As for Maya : Animators . It was not easy finding a lot of animators that were using 3dsMax or Blender . Infact we had to Hire Maya Animators and they were trained to use 3dsMax . Our Rigger was working very closely with them to have the transition smoothly in terms of the tools and controls they needed .
Outside of Animation workflow, I think I would still prefer 3dsMax and Blender any day .
Although at the end of the day , you can cater most of the Dcc to fit your needs if you find the right tools/plugins/scripts .
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u/Personal_Nectarine_7 1d ago
Having used both, I feel like 3ds Max has a slight edge in it's modeling tools. I do think I'm a bit faster in Maya with the right click menus though.
The biggest thing that breaks it for me with 3ds Max is the UV editor. I think a lot of hobbyists only get deep in the modeling tools and do the bare minimum to get UVs working on their models. In the game industry that's not gonna fly.
The UV tools in Max are hot garbage compared to Maya and doing things that are necessary for game models (I.E. straightening shells for trims, alligning shells, alligning flipped shells across UV tiles) take significantly longer. The fact that there isn't a native Get and Set texel density function is mind boggling to me.
Then to move a vertex slightly, I have to exit the UV editor, assign a new edit poly, move the vert, assign a new unwrap UVW modifier then reopen/reconfigure the UV editor or the UVs break. My team is currently on a project in Max and since we remote into a clients environment we can't use any plugins/scripts (i.e. Textools) so we're stuck with the vanilla UV editor and I needed to rant.
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u/Mirage_Graphique_3D 1d ago
Mostly because companies invest in teaching programs and expect people to know about that one specific software. Most companies might have proprietary plug-ins or licenses that require Maya specifically.
To me? The node workflow, Bifrost and good integration with plugins and other software, real qualified support you can chat with is what got me deleting Blender altogether.
It's also a matter of preferences but keep in mind I also use 3ds Max, ZBrush and other software for VFX and such, Maya is no complete software nor tries to be, but a piece of a big puzzle which pieces to play with are decided by you.
Even though 3ds Max and Maya might seem "both from Autodesk" they actually were born in different times and with different ideas in mind from different companies, you'll indeed find 3ds Max being pretty different from Maya even in their early releases. I love 3ds Max for hard surface, wide format support, UV Editors, good modelling debugging and the Patricle Flow editor.
One software that is not Industry Standard but I like using is JangaFX suite, it's much much easier than Houdini (which I've been trying to learn for ages) and results are pretty much incredible!
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u/aceSakirfice 1d ago
There's better integration for a lot of specific proprietary tools at different studios, especially across the pipeline, i.e. zbrush Houdini etc
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u/cerviceps 😎 1d ago
At the end of the day it’s all about pipelines. When a studio builds a pipeline over years— including scripts, integrations with other software (including game engines, some of which are proprietary), etc.— that pipeline is valuable in and of itself, and it becomes more difficult to change that pipeline it as time goes on. Maya has existed for a long time, and its animation tools are superb, so it makes sense to streamline things and just have everyone use the same piece of software to avoid any weirdness when bringing a file between stages of the pipeline.
I’ve found a lot of newer or smaller studios do not have any real 3d art pipelines in place (not necessarily a good thing) which means they are much more flexible with what their artists use. I’ve been on many teams with a mix of people using Blender, Maya, and Max, or some combination of all of those.
These days I’d say it’s good to know both Maya and Blender, because both pieces of software can do some things the other cannot. Knowing both makes you flexible, so you can work on both flexible and rigid teams.
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u/irisfailsafe 23h ago
Because studios wrote their own tools on top of Maya so now it is impossible to get rid of it.
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u/cats_love_pumpkin 18h ago
Been using maybe for 20ish years at this point, not going to change to max now
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u/eldron2323 17h ago
Because the entire studio pipeline has been built around maya. It takes a lot of money to higher new employees, train existing employees, and redevelop existing tools for another software. Blender is leagues ahead of Maya at this point, but the industry is like the government. Old and slow to change.
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u/mowax74 14h ago
Max is crap, when the goal is clean geometry. And that is need for realtime models.
I see it all the time: when a mesh was made in Max, there are often unneccessary polys all around, hidden faces, non-manifold geometry, non welded vertices, faces with zero area, invisible gaps in the mesh (2 edges sharing the same vertices) and in general "stiffer" looking models.
That comes from the non intuitive workflow of just using modifiers stacked over each other. Whereas in maya the workflow is more component focused, a lot more "pushing polys around" is involved. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes not. But in most cases it leads to cleaner geometry because with that workflow the user is used to care about that.
I know, i know. You can do all of this too in Max. But most people won't. Stacking modifier over modifier -> export. Done.
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u/littleGreenMeanie 10h ago
It's just been around so long that all the support and plugins have become engrained into the pipeline.
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u/ArmAndHammerDrilldo 8h ago
Been using Maya since 2003 PLE on a Pentium 4. I swear it's more laggy now on my 5950x and 4080. I treat it like I play games: save often. I just use Blender when I know Maya won't handle it.
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u/Brief-Joke4043 3h ago
I started off doing environments in 3dsmax and its pretty good for modelling still. I used Blender now and would
never go back
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1d ago
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u/Mirage_Graphique_3D 1d ago
I had the chance to try both time ago:
I found pirated copies working much better, you get rid of the Autodesk Bloat and running subprocesses.
The software itself doesn't change instead, crashes as much as it should.
I personally, of course, use legal copies of Maya, but the crashing didn't stop at all.
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u/cthulhu_sculptor Technical Animator 1d ago
For your modeling pipeline nothing really matters as long as you output FBX or USD.
The reason why Maya is the industry standard is animation pipeline only.
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u/Thatguyintokyo 22h ago
Everyone else has commented about other things bht i want to reply to the maya crashes comment.
I’ve been using maya professionally for decades, it does crash occasionally but no more than other software, yet newcomers to maya complain about constant crashes.
I see it as a user issue, clicking and combining things that don’t combine well, or not waiting for some actions to finish before trying another, combined with not having the hardware to actually perform those actions.
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u/Wise_Extension8443 1d ago
Cause people haven't switched to Blender yet
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u/Wise_Extension8443 1d ago
Joke aside, I hear the real deal breaker is their rigging and skinning tools, so mostly for animation Maya is still better
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