Maya V Max in game development
 

Hi all,
I'm sure that this subject has been covered many times before, but I want to hear from people who are developing into the games market.
I've been a illustrator for 10 years and have used maya for illustration for the last 3 years. But my company are now getting into the educational games market. The problem for me is not having any games development experience under my belt. I have produced all the game assets on a massive project with just another Maya artist. I didn't have a clue as to how I was going to supply all the models to the programers. The guys that were putting it all together in the game engine had a real big problem with it being created in Maya and that Max was the only tool the job.
Now there must be some way round this? I had to learn Max Basics only in order to complete the job putting in dummy objects ect.
I don't want to learn Max but it seems that my 4 years with Maya is at an end as all the game programmers want max files.
As I said I dont know enough about this field to ask the right questions, but I have got to learn fast on this.. So the questions are, are there many Maya Game developers out there, and how are the final assets supplied to the game programmer, and how is character animation exported.

Cheers all
steve

I'm sure there is a common file format e.g. obj 3ds that you can give a game developer. If they are short sighted enough to think that cause you use maya you wont be able to use max then it's probably not a company you want to work for ;)

wait for an answer from Mike he is the guru of all things games related here.

alan

Hi there,
I see what your saying but at the end of the day I have to fit in with their work flow. I supplied as 3ds but the character animation's couldn't export. I used Polytrans to export and this made thing worse. I very confidant at modling anything in Maya and animating it, but when it comes to handing it over for the games dudes all hell breaks loose. As Im the only Maya illustrator in the studio I got lumbered with this job, I'm not complaining this is great for me but the learning curve is vertical!!

you can get animations in 3ds but it's not ideal.

try

http://www.kaydara.com/downloads/other/index.php

they have a suite of tools you might be able to use. And it's free! :)

:ninja:

Alan

Yeah, animation can be a bugger to transfer.

The main thing is the programmers you're working with simply do not have the time or do not WANT to program an export tool for Maya. They more than likely already had one for Max, hence their feelings that Max needs to be used.

My situation at work is very similar. Our export tools are Max-based, yet all the artists are using Maya. What we pretty much do is model and texture in Maya, port as obj to Max, and animation in Max. Then export.

Because all of the artists are using Maya, we're probably going to have the programmers make a maya exporter for us.

If your team doesn't have the time to do that, you'll just have to fit in with their workflow.

Max was THE game developer choice for a long time, mostly because Maya had been so expensive for so long. When Maya Complete (all you really nead for games) dropped to $2k, making it cheaper than Max/Character Studio, it started getting integrated more.

I'd estimate that most major studios use Maya, while the medium/small studios are about 50/50. Just my estimate anyway.

So, yeah, it's not that Maya CAN'T do the work, it's just that the exporter is made for Max and they don't want to make a Maya one. :)