Re: maya future?
I just want to chime in and say that this thread goes to show the extreme fanatical Max people praying to kill off Maya ( in fear of Max's demise) and because they know Maya has the cross platform advantage. The discussions in this thread also show the mistrust of Autodesk and lack of a clear roadmap in Autodesk's product line.

Just remember what Autodesk said in their first announcement about acquiring Alias: "Autodesk will continue to use the Alias brand..." , of course they changed their statement once they changed the entire Alias corporate brand to Autodesk.

Q9: Is there an integration team in place? A9: Yes. An integration team is in place. It is comprised of key individuals from both Autodesk and Alias, includingemployees from Autodesk’s Manufacturing Solutions (MSD) and Media & Entertainment (M&E) divisions and Consulting organization.

If Maya is to remain cross platform and be integrated with Max, a new product will need to be engineered from the ground up, with cross platform interoperability and feature-overlap taken into consideration. I can assure you all, this process is all ready taking place and the outcome will be strictly guided by the powers within Autodesk. I don't work at Autodesk but I can imagine the political climate and the attitude of the Autodesk employees "We acquired you, Alias - not the other way around. What we say goes."

I am glad to see tools like zBrush and other innovative tools appearing on the Mac OS X platform. This community has turned entirely Max centric, with 3 of the top articles being only about 3D Studio Max.

I used to come to this site when it was Alias.com. I could find talented creations from top Maya artists in the community. Now I come here and the Max artists are the only ones featured. I wish they would have just kept the communities separate. That rendering of the troll and the robot is so lame, I have to look at it everytime I go to Alias.com ...

xsi باعتقادي يستعد لتصدر المستقبل.

و هل هية مصادفة ان الMaya 8.5 يحوي من Bugs اكثر من غابات الامازون؟

I'd be a lot happier if Autodesk fixed the massive bugs in their video card support. I mean really, they couldn't fix the problems with hardware shadows on the very expensive FX4500 video card? Hell, I bought a Quad G5 with an FX4500 just for Maya, and it never worked right. Other standard cards shipped by Apple have the same bug. Autodesk isn't even trying.

Overall, I like the advances in Maya 8.5, especially the Python and nCloth. However, as always, beware of jumping into new software when it just breaks out of the gate. I personally have been watching it implemented into a production pipeline with great interest. The bugs have already begun to rear their ugly heads -- Bugs significant enough that if not attended to, will cause the production to light in a different package while still animating in Maya 8.5