First Impressions Blender vs Maya - Animation Workflows!

Do you agree with my feature requests? What differences did I miss that matter to YOU? :)

But now in 2023 blender has been improved well actually you can do anythin in it😊

i'm sure blender watch this video because almost all of the point you've talked about are now present in blender.

Personally, I commissioned a model ages ago, that was used in maya, so i used that for a good bit of my animations, but later on i commissioned a model which was used in blender, now recently ive been using blender alot more, and have found it to be more user friendly for me and i feel like im learning more about how to do things in blender then i ever could in maya, maybe its because im just spending more time on learning blender, but either way im having alot more fun with blender!

Good to know: a few months ago the Blender devs did a big Animation workshop asking the community what could be improved in Animation and rigging systems, feedback, papercuts, .... All this to establish a list of features and things todo for the "Animation 2025" project.
This video was quoted a few times by different people to illustrate points and have already lead to slight changes in the software

It was 2005 when I first tried Maya 4.5 as a 3ds Max animator. Maya's Graph Editor came across so much easier and more intuitive compared to the one avaialble in 3DsMax. This is important stuff, As the animation process has to feel fluid and easy with as few clicks as possible. Insightful video, Thanks!

Blender Animation needs a lot more work.

Crazy watching this back as Blender has a lot of these features implemented now!

blender is tooo keyboard dependent for a fast and efficient workflow.

Shift+Left Arrow brings you to the first frame.
If you want to move a keyframe vertically, you can click the middle mouse button...

I feel like using gizmos are the absolute most waste of time you can have when animating. The hotkeys that you can use in Blender gives SO much freedom to make the movement you want to make.

For example, if I want to relocate a foot without getting it from touching the ground, I can simply use G + Shift Z= that will make the controller to just move on the X and Y, instead of having to move throughout the X and then the Y. I feel like this is something Maya animators need to desconstruct in their minds. Because when 2 people are animating in Blender, and one uses only the hotkeys, and the other uses only the gizmos, the one using the hotkeys will deliver the same time of animation as precise as the other animator, but using less time.

Hey Sir Wade, I'm trying to find where this was, I thought you had a video about Cascadeur. You ever used it? As a professional Maya animator, I was wondering about your thoughts on that, and workflows such what some people are doing right in game engines like Unreal. Maya is maya, but you have to admit some of the pricing models like Blender and Cascadeur are pretty attractive, especially for indies. Anyway, just curious if you had some thoughts on them. Thx.

Thanks to this video, I've been able to solve most of these issues, and Blender 3.0 allows you to select the curve

Blender is awesome nothing comes close

How did I download Maya for free?...does anyone have link for me

All I wanted to know is how to play the soft through my headphones with a cord not Bluetooth. I take it tNice tutorials is not an option since I have

Thanks for tNice tutorials content. It was the first soft soft video I've seen that didn't assu I knew my way around all of the functions.

I guarantee tNice tutorials - I am going to pursue soft one way or another. It is my dream to make art that inspires people and shows them so

doesn't have sufficient space. Thanks!

The hotkey compromise beats the annual salary paid that maya asks for

Here's what I can't figure out how to do in Blender. In Maya, the graph editor defaults to Auto Frame. Selecting a curve and hitting F will frame selected, while hitting A will frame all. I see that in Blender, you hit the tilde key and then have to move the mouse either left to frame all, or right to frame selected. I can't seem to find a single hotkey for this. When hitting tilde, the F is underlined, or, there's also the number 4, which I thought indicates you can just click on either of those keys while in the graph editor and it would execute the command. However, it appears you need to hold down the tilde key alongside the additional key. Just trying to figure out how to enable Auto Frame and a single keystroke for Frame All and Frame Selected. Incidentally, assigning the F key to frame selected in the 3d viewport is the one custom key I just had to add. I, too, fought the Blender keys for a long time, and then tried using the Industry Standard mapping, only to find they ended up breaking all the other shortcuts. So now i'm back to default Blender keys.

I even disabled the manipulators in Blender by default because I ONLY use the hotkeys G, R, S and X, Y, Z to animate and the manipulator just distracts me. This feature in blender is probably the main reason why I like Blender more than Maya. When I used Maya, it always bothered me that I had to aim with my curser exactly at the axis I want to manipulate. Most of the time I clicked slightly next to it and therefore had to undo the step which completely threw me out of my workflow every time. Doing this with keys on the keyboard is so much faster and more reliable for me.

Hand macros - i believe you can actually set up handles/control bones to just do that. As in, the system used to set up handles/control bones just naturally supports you creating complex setups/behaviors like what you mention here.

I only don't like about maya because it's not free it's only free for 30 days

Hi Sir this is a very important QUESTION! Since you are learning Blender now after using all the time MAYA do you use BLENDER with its native KEY SHORTCUTS or do you use the feature that makes BLENDER work keys like it was MAYA?

Great animation Channel ! Keep posting! Thanks!

Thank you very much, exactly what I wanted to hear is the thoughts of a person with an animation background. Advices on animation from people who only generate or model doesn't help very much.

I have put my frame selected button onto my mouse button, it's really handy

I am just getting into animation and it seems to be the main technical aspects are, keyframes, graph editor and rigging setups. It seems that both Maya and Blender have all this so really you could get the same results for anything in either software right? Just personal preferences of workflows separate the two only?

Blender looks and feels like a program made by a bunch of different coders who have never created anything but they tried to stuff it with anything they could.

"For blender I have to look and go across the keyboard"

Sounds like someone never learned homerow or their 10-key

nice video,when that big robbit short film released i installed blender , it was good but not enough , i had to delet that , and today ... wow ... as a free software it has all u necessary tool as professional 3d artist , i like it :)

The macro stuff, there is a concept called Drivers in blender.

Beautiful

Man, heating that Maya uses a lot of the same hotkeys as Unreal Engine makes me want to use it. I hate having to retain my brain every single time I open Blender. I like the Blender hotkeys being intuitive in the sense that g is grab, r is rotate, etc, but I HATE that literally every other program uses controls that Blender doesn't share.

The sensitivity can be lessened by holding shift in blender

I use Blender regularly and I cant stand having to familiarize with so many different shortcuts.

I wanna go to college for animation but they all teach Maya and I’m so used to Blender. Is it easy to adapt to Maya?

Blender has a frame selected tool you can add to the quick menu (Q)

I never actually used the dope sheet or saw the use of it after years in the industry.

Asking if blender or Maya is better for 3D is like asking if Markers or Water color paint is better for coloring

moving the keys in graph editor.... you can press g to move it without having to click directly on it. also you would have to deselect the handles of the curve separately. So pressing G is like your middle mouse thing

"Both software's have their strengths and weaknesses." Yeah, cause' Maya costs 1500 a year.

Edit: I'll admit, he does seem to be talking mainly about the good things about Maya tho.

FYI -

Proxies are in the process of being replaced with "Library Overrides" which are just...way better.

I'm not sure why your lines are so hard to see. In my blender, they are a lot more visible.

You're spot on with Blender's hotkeys! They are a disaster and the industry standard mode is terrible. You activate industry standard and all of the sudden you have no idea how to add something to your scene anymore. I wouldn't say Maya is 'good' with its hotkeys I would say blender is 'terrible'.

I don't use auto-keying. It results in really messy curves imho.

Gizmos are extremely usable in blender 2.8+. In my custom keymaps I have Q,W,E,R set to select, move gizmo, rotate gizmo, and resize. The issue with blender isn't what its capable of, the issue is the defaults settings are terrible. I do highly agree with you on gizmos, blender users are really sleeping on them. There are many cases where they are far superior to blender's hotkey based system.

The way you change the 'gizmo size' in blender is just to zoom in/out which makes the gizmo larger/smaller and the movements more/less aggressive. Not exactly what you're looking for...but it does work.

The NLA editor in blender is huge. You kinda forgot to really give it the attention it deserves. It is really messy if you've never used it before but once you get used to it it's great! Also the pose library...

You forgot to comment on how much of an eyesore maya's interface is compared to blender 2.8. Blender 2.79 and below had a horrid interface but ever since 2.8 it has had the most crisp/clean interface of any modeling/animation/sculpting software out there. The User Interface designers did an amazing job w/ 2.8

Yeah but once you get used to the hoy keys you don't have to look at them for me anyway I can travel across the whole keyboard and hit the right key easily. I actually don't even think in quick keys my hand just does it I need this hand moves without any conscious decisions being made.

I never hear about it much, but the Transform tool in Blender is actually really helpful. It has all the Rotate, Move and Scale manipulators in one. So when doing something that requires a lot of small tweaks, it saves time having to switch tools.

Also, you can change the universal size of the manipulator in Preferences. Not sure if it changes sensitivity, but I don't think you can do it on the fly. Holding shift while dragging a manipulator (holding shift after clicking and dragging) makes it move slower. Holding Ctrl snaps the movement and Shift+Ctrl snaps to smaller increments.

For the graph editor, you can select a keyframe and hit G to move it anywhere, S to increase the handles, R to Rotate handles. So you don't have to do the targeted switch.

You can check the property to view only keyframes from selected curve )View>Only Selected View Keyframes) to only be able to grab a specific keyframe if they overlay. But you have to select the curve from the left panel, no click and drag select.

Feature request sounds great! The Pose Library in Blender lets you make a pose and save it for later use (like a fist, or full body pose) It isn't perfect, but has some benefits.