Artists who say they like using Maya have merely had the will to enjoy their work beaten out of them by it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I haven't met a Maya fan I cannot make cry using 3DSMax.

Modifier stacks. They are magic.

I was a 3DSMax evangelist for Autodesk back when it was Discreet. I used to go around being payed to make Maya users cry.

I cry when I have to use Maya.

On my first day at Ubisoft I showed the POP team how to generate uv mapped dungeons from a spline using referenced modifiers.

I had to show them three times because they would get exicited, run off to get some other artists and get me to do it again, they couldn't believe it.

Maya just can't do that. It's fundamentally set up in a jank way under the hood.

Maya is order based, and the wiring quickly gets messy. Max keeps everything in discreet modifiers that can pass selections and their result up to the next modifier in the stack. You are not locked in time, you can change that data flow at any stage with a few clicks.

The other thing about Max is that it forces manifold geometry in edit poly mode. You cannot fuck up and make lamina faces, for example. Maya is crazy wild with introducing topology errors It will fuck shit up quick as a blink.

In other words, it makes geo that causes other programs to explode unless you are super careful about cleaning up. It is exhausting.

All that and selections are a nightmare of redundancy from NURBS. Switching to vertex means you can still select objects behind unless you specifically tell maya not to each time (component mask). It is tiresome as hell to keep having to do. And vertex/UV in uv edit? Fuuuuck.

You know what is fucked up about Max vs. Maya? Autodesk seem determined to push Maya on game devs, when it is actually Max which is the better tool. We don't get LT licenses of max. We have to fork out stupid dollars for it. So we use Maya or Blender instead.

Pure madness.