This is a gross misunderstanding of everything in the industry.

Maya is far, far from being on life support. There are hundreds of studios around the world that use it, and autodesk do substantial development in Maya till date including updated adding USD, Bifrost and parallel graph evaluation.

The fact that Pixar have their own animation package (Presto) has nothing to do with Maya whatsoever.

The first ancestor to Presto effectively predates Maya. They've developed a lot of custom tooling and workflows around it for animation. They still use Maya for many aspects outside animation like modelling etc...

Similarly DreamWorks and rhythm and hues also had their own proprietary animation software (premo and voodoo) for similar reasons but still use Maya for other purposes.

Your comment is completely off base.

Autodesk laid off the entire R&D staff of Maya (outside of Bifrost, which was an acquisition a few years ago and is now a one person show, mainly) and transferred ownership to their maintenance engineering division, if that isn’t life support I don’t know what is.

Funny how they're actively hiring Maya developers now then right?

This is clearly some made up FUD

I think saying it's far from being on life support is really pushing it...

Maya's USD support so far is effectively just Animal Logic's open source stuff bundled with Maya, Bifrost is indeed the one place they're actually still doing development (as they still have that R&D team), Parallel graph evaluation in 2019 and 2020 are really just riding the coattails of work they did a few years ago. Improvements to rendering infrastructure (Arnold) are orthogonal as far as I'm concerned as it's done by the SolidAngle team they acquired a few year ago.

They're effective keeping it running (moving to newer Qt versions and the future Python 3 version for VFX platforms in line with other DCCs) as far as many people are concerned, which at a stretch could be construed as "on life support".

> Cost isn’t the issue, it’s mainly the fact that Autodesk effectively put Maya on life support.

Maya isn't on life support, it's simply that so many studios augment Maya with their own tools & pipeline that it's not necessary for Autodesk to update it with the same frequency that Alias did. It's effectively an OS for 3D content creation for some of the larger shops.

An interesting point of view, which entails an important question: in which ways is Maya superior to Blender in such a platform role? Is Blender going to catch up?

If Maya is only adopted because of habits and ongoing projects, investment in training and customization, and network effects it has no future.

If Maya is on life support, then is 3ds Max the only actual product Autodesk intend to develop?

Autodesk is doubling down on CAD and engineering (their leadership has even said so publicly) — VFX and animation is just a much smaller market. I personally think this is very short sighted.

If it allows blender a foothold, I’m for it.

Don't listen to the person you replied to. They're completely full of it.

Pixar have always developed and used their own in-house animation tools, it's a big part of their culture. I seriously doubt they'd be using Maya (or anything else) regardless of how advanced it was.

Maya is indeed used at Pixar, as is just about every other package out there. Their pipeline is set up to allow work to be done in a variety of tools.

Maya is still used in Pixar’s characters department for modeling, I believe, and maybe a few shading-related (UV layout?) tasks here or there.

You'll find it anywhere someone wants to use it. Some effects people still love doing quick simulations with nCloth, for example.

Very cool! Glad to see Nucleus still getting some love, Jos would be happy — I was talking to a Pixar effects fellow at SIGGRAPH and was under the impression that Houdini’s constraint solver thing had spread like wildfire in that department.