Max vs Maya – The war rages on

History:
Max represents history in their Modifier Stack paradigm. Deformers, unwraps, and other modifiers can be stacked on top of each other and are easily viewable in a simple table. Maya on the other hand uses the node structure to represent dependencies and related modifiers for a certain object. The clear cut winner in my mind, as far as simplicity and user interface is Max. Just look at the screenshot. Maya’s highlighted arrow doesn’t even tell you where you’re going to to end up when you click it. It’s like a mystery wheel! Or you can brave the depths of the hypergraph to see your node graph. Eww.
Winner: Max

Material Editor:
Maya has a well laid out material editor called the Hypershade. Create a new blinn, assign some properties. It’s very simple to use and you can see all of your materials at a glance. One downfall is that the default way to assign a material to an object is to middle click drag the material into the scene. This is far from the best approach. I am aware of the right click -> Assign material to selection but it should be much simpler. Another problem with Maya’s material editor stems back to the original node based decision for the whole basis of the program. In order to, for example, delete a file node that is linked in your bump channel, you cannot just hit delete or unassign a texture. It seems that the quickest way is to go into the hypergraph view and delete the actual file node that was created when you assigned a texture to that slot. Messy. On the other hand, Max’s material editor uses a confusing slot system that to me seems counterintuitive. When I look at a material editor, I feel like I should be able to see all of the materials in a list. Max instead chooses to represent materials on arbitrary material slot nodes, so if you see 4 textured preview spheres, it does not mean that there are 4 materials in the scene, but that you have created pointers to four existing materials and there may be more or less. You can even clear out all of the material slots and then are forced to use the eyedropper tool to load a material into the slot. Horrible.
Winner: Maya

Interface:
Both Max and Maya have highly customizable interfaces with great context sensitive radial right click menus (or quad menus as Max calls them and marking menus as Maya calls them), customizable top menus, toolbars, custom actions or script buttons, etc etc. Both have more than adequate modeling tools, especially with Max2010′s graphite modeling suite, there’s a plethora of modeling tools available to use for any task. Max still hasn’t moved from the separate Editable Mesh / Editable Poly paradigm, which i feel is a weakness from a scripting and usability standpoint. At some point you need to ditch the backwards compatibility and put the best tools into one combined mesh interface. Max fails miserably at alphabetizing their modifier list, and that list has gotten WAY too long to keep in a linear pulldown menu. Shame on you Max. Then again, Maya’s interface looks like a bad Java app or a linux GUI… so there’s not much beauty to go around in this fight.


Winner: Tie

Scripting:
Despite what pretty much everyone else says, Maxscript seems equally as powerful as Mel so far, as I haven’t come across many things you can’t do in Maxscript, yet. That yet is a pretty big yet, and as time goes on and I develop more and more Maxscripts, I might need to revisit this section, possibly with a deep hatred for Maxscript. One thing to point out is that all of Maya’s commands are completely written in MEL and are available to browse, so ANYTHING can be scripted in Maya. Plus the addition of Python seems pretty huge for both Max and Maya, so there’s also no clear winner in this category.
Winner: Tie

Other:
Maya is cross platform. This is a huge plus for Maya that pretty much pushes it into the ‘extreme win’ category for me and thousands of other Linux and Mac users. Even though Autodesk owns both, I can say with reasonable confidence that Max will NEVER be ported to any other platforms. Also, the community is huge for both Max and Maya, and fanboys will continue to strangle each other over their favorite DCC app. One thing I would love to see to unify Max and Maya (come on Autodesk!) would be to help ease the pain of switching between Maya and Max. This could be helped by combining the documentation in a way that search terms for one app’s features will show up in the equivalent function of the other app. For example, a search for merge vertices will bring you to the editable poly/mesh docs for Max and show you the Max equivalent weld verts command. This type of guide already exists for Maxscript/MEL, located here.

Final Verdict: