How's the Maya plugin looking these days? Tweet

[leehenshall]

I purchased the Maya plugin a few months before the dev team was improved a couple of years ago and I have to say I've never felt more disappointed with purchase and more ripped off in my life. This is in no way designed to cast aspersions on the guys who have been working incredibly hard on improving the Maya plugin. I'm no developer but I can understand that you can only work with what you inherited and that takes time. I even upgraded to v3 in blind hope that things would improve.

Since then Octane has been sat on the shelf basically unused. I occasionally check back in to see what's happening in the forums only to read more moans and groans which is enough for me to leave it abit longer. I even went as far as to buy the C4d plugin just to see what Octane was like in a mature stable plugin. Theres loads of great work on Behance using Octane for c4d....but it's not feasible to switch my pipeline to C4D just for rendering.

Octane standalone is awesome though and really shows that Octane core is probably one of the fastest and easiest to use GPU core renders out there. I'm still waiting for some news on the HDR Light Studio plugin in development for standalone....that could be amazing for high res print work.

I've since been using V-Ray GPU which is for the most part nearly production ready these days apart from a few quirks. Credit to the V-Ray guys they get problems fixed quickly and have been making ground on other GPU renderers very quickly since I've been in touch with the developers. I do still hold a torch for Octane though as it's just so interactive (standalone) It feels like working in a photography studio it's so fast.

So do I think Octane is a tool for a large company with a vfx pipline.....probably not at least from what I've seen over the past few years. But I do think Octane has the potential to be one of the best stills and print applications out there if the Maya plugin was made flawless and fully implemented with all Mayas core rendering and setup features with good stability.

Octane standalone almost feels like a photography simulator to me and less like a rendering application...sounds weird but it's just really nice that you can change a setting and it updates instantly.....no scene rebuilds/recompiling and a very seamless undersampling system to keep the viewport active at all time. I've not used the Maya plugin in a long time but my experience of it was the opposite of this....lots of scene recompiling and it wasn't very "live". I remember putting a large car model in the plugin with millions of polygons and tens of thousands of objects. When i discovered that everytime i changed a material or moved something i might need to refresh the ipr which would take about 2-5 mins with a heavy file was just too much of a disconnect with the standalone experience for me. I'm aware you can change an object to movable proxy but I suppose my main point is that i lost so much faith in the plugin I decided it wasn't even worth my time to optimize and test until it was vastly improved. Around the point of my despair with the Maya plugin the new dev team started work on the plugin and now here we are.

So what do people think about Mayas plugin at the moment and is it usable for production?

Take my opinions with a pinch of salt I know everyone's experience is somewhat relative and subjective but I thought i'd see what the vibe was like anyway.

[leehenshall]

As an extension to what I wrote I am also taking some time to test the plugin to see how usable it is a year or so on from when i last checked it. My initial first impression is that there are some good improvements to interactivity. I'll continue to test and see how it goes but It would be great to gain some perspective from other more active users.

[calus]

I agree Octane Standalone is amazing,
and Octane For Maya has been improved.
The Maya plugin had the potential to become the better production (GPU)renderer for Maya,
but after 5 years of development it's still very very far from that and still look like a beta,
check the status here : viewtopic.php?f=28&t=61075#p312501

I use the plugin for animation production,
what I feel is a mix between the pleasure to work with Octane Core features, and the frustration coming from the plugin limitations, bad integration and clunky-ness.

Also using Maya for still image doesn't make any sens for me as Maya is all about animation.

[Goldorak]

I'm hoping that 3.07 can expose all the features that you like from Standalone.

[leehenshall]

Thanks for your responses guys. I know this sort of conversation has probably been had many times over the years but I only bring it up again because I really do like using Octane and want it to get better in combination with Maya....Not to mention it would be great nearly 3 years from purchase to actually use mysoftware to improve my businesses capability which is why most companies buy software in the first place

I think there is hope that I may be able to start using Octane regularly in my live work pipeline with the improvements that have been made and with the potential of an HDR Light Studio bridge with Octane standalone. I think for stills Octane standalone has it all really if you include the ability to light something from within the application.

The Maya plugin looked promising when they were looking to split everything into proper nodes like standalone and use the node editor as the main work space...unfortunately from what I can remember that got put on hold and we are now using an improved form of the old plugin where most of the main setting are stored in just one node.

I think for me I would really like Maya and standalone to have a solid bridge to each other. The ability to send scenes from Maya to Standalone then back to Maya again would be a very powerful workflow. Then in away it sort of removes a lot of the frustrations in trying to make the plugin just as good. I bet behind the scenes it's difficult to do if you don't have like for like nodes in Maya. Maybe just a solid geometry bridge that can remember material assignment would be enough for most situations.

Personally I much prefer to work in Standalone It makes more sense to create render layers with nodes. It reminds me of building 3d scenes in nuke and removes some of the slow downs and frustrations that are part of Mayas design flaws. However there's always some things that you really just need a full dcc application for though however nice Standalone is.

I'm not saying don't make the plugin better, of course that is a priority but there could be ways of allowing users to enjoy the best of both worlds with a better forwards and backwards bridge between the two workspaces.