Why the Best Animations in the World are Made with Autodesk Maya

Why do the best studios and animators in the world use Autodesk Maya to create 3D animation?

Learn how award winning games, movies, and TV shows such as Spider-Verse, Arcane, God of War, Last of Us, and more utilize Autodesk Maya and industry workflows with keyframe animation, motion capture, rigging, and more!

Class Creative’s Maya for Beginners: Complete 3D Animation Masterclass | Comprehensive Foundational Guide!!

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Timestamps

00:01 Why Autodesk Maya is used by over 5,000 studios worldwide
00:47 How Autodesk Maya is used to create the best 3D animations, including Spider-Verse, Arcane, God of War, The Last of Us, and more
01:25 Blender vs Maya
01:56 Why major studios such as Disney, Sony Pictures Animation, Weta, ILM, Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica, and more use Autodesk Maya
02:50 Examples of how video reference and Maya are used in production
03:56 Class Creatives Masterclass Access
04:49 How Maya is used to revolutionize the motion capture process
05:26 Pixar and Disney: Why using Maya is important to them
06:18 How Maya's technical performance benefits large scale projects
06:56 Cached Playback in Animation Timeline
07:25 Animators most used interface: Graph Editor
08:29 Revolutionizing the look of 3D animation with custom Mel scripting and toolsets
09:12 How to attract the recruiters from the top studios using Maya on your demo reel
10:30 Conclusion

This video features the work from the following artists:

Learn everything necessary to learn Character Animation utilizing Autodesk Maya taught by a AAA game professional with university level accredited instruction! We will cover the basics starting with the Ball Bounce, Pendulum, and how to apply the 12 principles of animation to the human form. We will apply all fundamental aspects taught to create full in game polished animations of: Idle, Walk, Run, Jump and more.

In this foundation course we will be learning the fundamentals of Character Animation and game development. (specifically for the Unreal engine, but this method will also work for other game engines such as Unity).

Autodesk Maya is the industry standard 3D animation software, understanding the concepts in this course will help you land a job in the game, film, tv, or music industry. In this course you will learn how to animate your custom created character from scratch.

Over 15 hours of Animation instruction!

We’ll be utilizing the latest software packages that top tier gaming studios of today use to create all of your favorite titles!

Autodesk Maya, Unreal Engine’s Maya Animation Rigging Toolset (A.R.T. for short), and the Unreal game engine.

Why Learn From Class Creatives?

This course features an accredited university level animation instructor who has over 15 years of experience animating both keyframe, and motion capture for studios such as Naughty Dog (Uncharted Franchise), Insomniac (Ratchet and Clank Franchise), Guerilla Games (Killzone Franchise), Sucker Punch (Infamous Franchise), Google, Disney and more. Whether it be a complex hyper realistic animation or a cartoony stylized “Disney” character animation it ALL starts with the fundamentals which we cover in these lectures.

[jeromealday]

Blender users are so defensive. I'm a Blender user myself and I cringed while reading the comments. Chill out guys, Blender not being industry standard doesn't mean anything but the industry refusing to use new tools. That's it 😅

[nosirve]

just to clarify, Maya for animation is the goat, but doesn't mean other softwares like blender don't do the job or are not used professionally. Films like Unicorn Wars, Evangelion or I lost my Soul were made with Blender, only to name a few! In any case, I hope people show more support to blender so we can go in to a future of open source like the programming industry have

[MakotoIchinose]

Personally I'd use Blender for major modelling efforts, and Maya for rigging and animating. Blender is too finicky to get it play nice with Unreal Engine, while Maya just works out of the box for skeletal meshes. Meanwhile Blender has one of the most flexible modelling tools, perfect for static mesh and modelling passes.

[hummmmmm]

I love Maya for its wide range of animation tools, but it hard for me to bee creative in other fields in maya compared to other softwares (lack of community support makes creating something interesting a real scientific work with searching tutorials from 6 years ago and reading a bunch of blogs and support help )

[avtpro]

One other thing, Maya is great but Autodesk also own MotionBuilder which is also best in the business for Mocap. AVATAR was heavily dependent on Mobu. I use both Maya and Mobu for animation and Mocap.

[bsavage]

because its been the industry standard for longer than I can remember. I started on Maya and ended up on Blender later because I could run it on a Linux machine that I was using at the time.

[gabic]

03:38 Seeing Kratos smile like that 😂😂

[gabrieljreed]

As someone who works in the industry on the tech side, I was pleasantly surprised to see that you actually hit the nail right on the head. It’s too expensive and just doesn’t make sense to switch to another software when everything at the studio is built around Maya. It’s not like picking Google Docs over Word where you can just easily switch, huge production pipelines and artist tools have been crafted at studios over years of work, you can’t just port it all to Blender and expect it to work.

Additionally, because Maya is enterprise software, large studios get support directly from Autodesk devs. Blender unfortunately doesn’t provide that, since it’s FOSS.

[scottriddell]

I’m designing characters and I love to see maya get those ideas and I’m such a big fan of animation

[AnimatorsJourney]

Great perspectives. Many new and younger animators just don't realize how prevalent Maya is in the industry because the people using it are too busy working in the industry, using Maya, to combat the Blender misinformation out there. It's not about whether Blender is "good" or "bad" which is the strawman argument many young Blender users try to turn the conversation into. Blender is great, it's just not what is used widely in the industry at mid-large studios, period. Above all it's about the skills and stacking the deck in your favor if you want to work in the industry, so why not do it learning the software most places use for the rigging->animation pipeline.

[kyrohowey]

I’ll start my animation college tomorrow! I’ll use this app and others like Toon Boon and I’m so excited!!

[TheStrangerMan]

Here are the major softwares that excel in particular tasks.

1. Sculpting - Zbrush / Blender
2. Modelling - 3ds Max / Blender
3. Texturing and Baking - Substance Painter / Mari / Marmoset
4. Rigging and Animation - Maya
5. Simulations - Houdini
6. Motion Graphics - C4D
7. Compositing - Nuke

Each of the artist who ends up in studios are trained with best tools for that particular task. So Maya is the clear winner if one is considering rigging and animation. You can use Blender too if it is not affecting the pipeline in a major way.

[swancoffeehouse]

I have a feeling this video will not bode well with other communities. I will repeat what John Kratos said once:
"They are tools, they serve a purpose. Having favorites is meaningless" - John Kratos (The God of War, Ragnarok)

[SahilBhagat]

Autodesk Maya 🔥, user friendly interface and their tools which helps a lot in our animation work process, obviously it is professional software

[dennispena]

I'm amused you used my Kratos heart anim in your video. Thanks!

[tbnprathades]

for animation, I still think Maya is better than other software. It's because it was designed for animation, this is also why most mocap ended up using Maya humanik as their base. While this does not mean maya is the best at everything, for example I sometime use blender autorig to help me reduce time from skinning the whole rig manually.

[animprops]

Maya is the best out there and with Maya Indie you can have an accessible license by every artist!

[fabianogama]

I agree that the main reason Maya is standart in industry is because the studios have already built all of their pipeline around it and there is no reason for them to go through the process of switching to Blender just because it's as good as the softare they already use.I would just add the important fct that although it's hard for companies to go through an adaptation like that, it's much easier for individual artists like us. I'm an animator and every time I have learned another software I spent hours learning the tools and a few days to get used to it. What takes time is to learn the craft of animation itself, not the tool you are going to use. That's why I think that for a beginner learning Blender may be the best option because it's, keeping in mind that later on they would need to learn a new tool and it will be easy and as fast as a week. Deppending on the studio this new tool may not even be Maya, but a proprietary tool.

[enaya]

I wanna get into animation because the the spiderverse sequel so when I finish my GCSEs I’m gonna really try learning about blender and maya

[demianpelos]

Because was the only thing outthere. There are only 5 programs out there. Blender, max, maya, houdini. Well modo. (After all the new tools with Houdini and the lack of updates on maya Autodesk (after they killed xsi) studios are slowly moving to Houdini)