I have around seven years of experience with Cinema 4D, and four with 3DS Max. I’d say I know them both pretty well, but I’m just getting started in Maya. To help me out, I’ve purchased a couple books – both of which look promising. The first is Learning Autodesk Maya 2008, and the second is Advanced Maya Texturing and Lighting – both of which are published through Autodesk Maya Press. I’m about 200 pages into the first book, and I have yet to seriously crack the pages of the second.
Overall, my initial impressions of Maya are mixed. There are a few parts to the application I like, and a lot that I do not like. The modeling workflow is extremely frustrating to me. I find the way they have handled subdivision proxy and sub-d modeling to be somewhat awkward. I especially do not like my base cage in sub-d only showing as wireframe. I want it to be like Max, where I can quickly toggle between smoothed and unsmoothed geometry. Also, creating symmetrical models has a bit too many steps for my liking. I do like the symmetrical options on some of the tools, though. That makes me happy. Hopefully, Cinema 4D will implement a tool like that soon,
In the meantime, I’m diverging from the books a bit to try some of my own models. The first is a replication of my razor – a Gillette Mach3. I’m doing this via polygonal modeling with subdivide proxy. Here are some screengrabs of the WIP base mesh. These are just the beginning stages of the modeling process.
Technical Repository 