A rant.
Frustration, Anger and Rage.
- Tabs listed horizontally when there is far more vertical space,
- nodes open ontop of each other in the shader graph when clicked to inspect.
- Maya File browser,
- tool settings resetting and forgetting placement.
- Jungle of menus.
- lack of up-to-date and helpfully concise online recourses.
- created 2 faces in between 4 points while set as a quad
- Maya fluid sim won’t work with GPU and so I now cant render the light with RT cores.
- Maya fire rendering in Arnold
- water shader being projected way off from its mesh
I found working with Maya incredibly frustrating infinitely so when compared to my time learning Unity. This was a large part due to the friction between running into unknown problems and the availability of recourse to get through those issues. If I had run into an issue in Unity I would be able to find a blog or video going over that specific issue and would take me 5 min to go over. sometimes I would have to go over a dozen recourses to find a solution that works for me but it felt like progress into the learning process. With Maya, you would be lucky if the resources weren’t using an out of date UI poor dictation and audio clarity, low resolution and with no crop. These online resources would go over basics for 10 min before getting to specifics then I would watch for another 30 min to find out that I need to keep digging because this did not solve or address my current issue.
I got so frustrated at one point I decided to watch a couple videos going over why Maya is “king” and used over programs like blender “in the industry”. Knowing that I was probably just being a baby and finding it hard starting from step 1 all over again. I listen to an ex Dreamworks employee talk about how great Maya is for lighting and animation but how he had never used it for modelled in Maya and used something called ZBrush instead.
This being said, I find it even more vital for me to power through and learn Maya, knowing that if an employer required me to use Maya at some point, I would struggle and I don’t want that kind of thing to limit me.
I don’t think this project is going to turn out in a way I’m happy with. In the future, I should plan production should start along with planning to help me to figure out my issues early and give myself time to learn from these follies. I didn’t balance out my time well while working parallel with the Introduction to Virtual Reality Unit and should have been putting in more work towards the project in the 2 weeks leading into that Units deadline. considering the headless I faced with a constantly Blue Screening computer leading to lost work and candled renders, living in a very remote part of Scotland over Christmas break and the huge hurdle we are all facing right now that come with the current pandemic.