Maya: which version?

Hi there
I'm thinking of taking the leap and invest in Maya, however, there are two versions of it, with VERY different prices, and I need to know which one I need for making sculpties in SL

Maya Complete: about USD 3000
Maya Unlimited: about USD 7000

Obviously, I'm hoping the Complete will be enough but can anybody shed some light?

Thanks!
-Milla

Makes no difference at all for Second Life related content.

If your primary focus is SL and other realtime environments, go with Complete. The extra features in Unlimited are mainly for film. If you have use for them, they're fantastic, but they're certainly not worth the extra money if you don't.

Oh, and by the way, either you've got a couple of typos in your stated numbers, or you're dealing with the wrong retailer. Here are the latest prices from Autodesk:

Maya Complete 2009 - US$1995
Maya Unlimited 2009 - US$4995

You were off by over $1000 on Complete, and by over $2000 on Unlimited, assuming you're talking US dollars.

Hi Milla - I use Maya Complete for all my SL sculpties and love it. Have fun.

This is great! Exactly what I wanted to hear Thank you all for taking your time to reply.


I did a very rough exchange from Swedish krona to US dollars on the price I was quoted from the Swedish Autodesk rep -- it really sucks, but almost everything in Sweden (or even in the EU) is more expensive than in the US

Just wondering, but why Maya?

It's not the best suited program by a long way and if it's just for sculpties, it's a terrible waste of money and capability as you'll me using about 1/100th of it.

If you mean to learn it more completely with a view to getting more use out of it, then ignore me, but buying it just for sculpties would be insane.

Same thing you could say about photoshop, absolute insanity, so much money just for making textures worth a few L$? Geez.. You could just get Microsoft Paint to do the job really, but noo, people want the entire feature set at hand

You see, you need professional tools to make professional content.

Although, it'd be better to get 3Dsmax than Maya to be honest. Maya is aimed at films and video making. 3Dsmax is a pure modelling beast.

It's a very valid point, and it was how I myself reasoned up until recently. But I've come to realise that if I want to stay relevant as a content creator, I have to make sure my products are top-notch and professional looking, very much like Nexii says. And frankly, my current way of fiddling away in Blender just isn't enough.

For me personally, Maya seems like the top-contender now, simply because there is so much documentation, tutorials, local courses, and general resources readily available; which is crucial for somebody like me who is completely self-taught. I'm also pretty convinced that Maya will take me far into the future and support many, if not all, new features and technologies yet to be introduced into SL.

Also, it's a source of pleasure! I'm excited about the prospect of learning it!

I'd also recommend 3D Max over Maya if it's ready support you're after and excellent modeling, texturing and baking capabilities you need. There are a lot of other high-end programs which are arguably more suited for use with SL, Maya isn't the best for all round work, and your choice of application should be dependent entirely on what you want to create, not what you have been told is the best. Everyone's needs vary. I'd explore my options as completely as possible before committing to such an investment, especially as you're paying somewhat over the odds.

That said, it's down to preference and your workflow. Blender to Maya isn't such a big leap, you'll find it far easier to use in every way and get the same results, but you will be missing out on the added functionality that Domino's scripts provide. Actually everything is better than Blender in every regard but this, you'd be hard put to find anything remotely as unfriendly.

I am a maya user but I always use blender and Domino's scripts to make SL sculpties.

Which program is "best for sculpties" right now really depends on what kind of sculpties you're looking to make. For the organic and inorganic forms sculpties were intended for by their inventor (Qarl), there is no better tool to use than Maya. For the pseudo-mesh-substitutes they were forcibly evolved to become, I'd have to agree that Max or Blender would be better choices at present. Enterprising residents have done some truly amazing work with sculpty scripts for those two programs.

That doesn't mean Maya can't do all the same things. It certainly can. Technically, it can do literally almost anything a computer is capable of doing. It's almost an operating system in and of itself. It's just that no one has yet written sculpty scripts for Maya that are comparable to those that exist for Max and Blender.

Well, at least not for free, anyway. If you want to pay $1000 or more for SLTK, then Maya will do just about anything you could possibly think of for SL, including precision sculpties. I'd love to use SLTK, myself, but I've just always been leery of sending that kind of money to an overseas startup company, without knowing what kind of support I'll be able to get.

In any case, I have to reject as false the argument that Maya is somehow inferior to Max and other high end programs when it comes to modeling, texturing, baking, etc., or that Max is inferior when it comes to things like animation. Maya and Max both have very robust tool sets. They just work a bit differently from each other is all. I'm partial to Maya's style, myself, because that's what I was trained on. I love its totally node-based setup. (The Hypershade alone is easily worth the cost of the entire program.) Those who started with Max would likely see Maya as foreign and perhaps convoluted, though, which is sort of how I see Max, as much as I try not to. It's really a question of comfort zone and experience level.

The conventional wisdom, simply put, used to be "Maya is for film; Max is for games." But that doesn't really hold true anymore. These days, both programs are being used pretty widely for both purposes. A lot of PS3 game development, for example is done in Maya. In fact, if you want to develop for Playstation Home, the first thing Sony does is test your skill with Maya. (Yes, I've done a little work for that platform.)

One thing I do have to point out that puts Maya lightyears ahead, in my opinion, is Turtle. It's the only renderer on the market specifically designed from the ground up for baking (not that baking is all it can do), and it only works with Maya. It's one of those tools that once you use it, you wonder how you ever lived without it. For the novice, Turtle is great because it's super easy to set up and use, and it yields great looking results, even at default settings. For the professional, it's such an amazing time saver, it pays for itself in its first use. If there's a better baking tool out there, I've never seen or heard of it. Turtle rocks!


Anyway, Milla, I do have to agree that it's important to consider what you'll be making, and how you plan on making it, when choosing a platform. But it sounds like you're already thinking along those lines.

Before you make your purchase, I'd suggest you download the free Personal Learning Edition of Maya. Autodesk is no longer offering it, unfortunately, but you can still find it other places. Use it to learn the ins and outs of Maya. You won't be able to export sculpt maps from it, since it watermarks all renderings, but you'll be able to do everything else. Go through all the tutorials in the Help file, and then you'll have a solid understanding of how Maya works. From there, practice, practice, practice.

Once you're comfortable with Maya, you can download the fully functional 30-day trial, with which you WILL be able to export sculpt maps. After that, once you're sure Maya is for you, go ahead and whip out the credit card.

Max has no PLE, so if you want to learn it before paying for it, you'll be limited to 30 days. That's more than enough time to get the gist of it, if you use it every day, of course. It just requires a bit more instant commitment than a PLE would. You can't be quite as leisurely about it.

Assuming you do decide to go ahead with Maya, I'm sure you'll love it. But trying before buying is always wise, whenever possible, with anything.

Thank you so much Chosen, that was invaluable reading! I will most definitely think about all you have said and only buy when I'm truly ready.

I've found a RL course (with a teacher of flesh and blood) for Maya and I think I might start my education from there. Online videos and tutorials are fantastic and have indeed taken me to where I am today, but I feel like I'm at a stage where I need more intensive learning/teaching. So, I'll do that course and then see what to buy.

Thanks!
-Milla

If you google 3ds Max vs Maya, you will get tones of results although none relating to Second Life.

Everything chosen said is spot on.

It really does depend what you want to make.

I just hope someone will make a plugin so we can do less organic shapes soon.

Nobody said it was inferior, but there absolutely are better suited, faster and easier programs to create sculpties, albeit not inorganic/organic shapes both in one app, but then using Maya for sculpties is like cracking a nut with a planet.

My prefered combination after hammering away with everything from SoftImage XSI to Plopp is Zbrush and AC3D (no, seriously), which are poles appart in terms of modeling style, but compliment each other perfectly and allow me to create everything from simple organics to the most complex oblongs quickly and easily. I must admit to opening Maya up occassionally for a quick ambiant occlusion bake before texturing in 3D-Coat or CS4, but that's all the light it'll see in SL terms.

You make some good points, Ponk. I might suggest "better suited" isn't necessarily the most appropriate choice of words, though. Perhaps "more singularly purposed" might be more accurate?

As for what's "faster", that goes back to comfort and experience level. I've been using Maya every day for so long, modeling in it is practically second nature to me. Throw something like Wings in front of me, which is orders of magnitude simpler as a program, and it'll take me five times as long to make the same model. I'd be willing to bet that if you and I were to enter into a speed modeling contest, me using Maya, and you using whatever other program you want, we'd cross the finish line at roughly the same time. If you're comfortable with a certain tool, it's gold in your hands, and if you're not, it can be cumbersome as hell, no matter what it is.

Speaking of cumbersome, since you mentioned Z-brush, I'll share my quick opinion of it. I love what it can do, and I have a lot of respect for it from that regard. It has contributed enormously to the evolution of 3D modeling. But I really, really, really hate using it. It's just not set up the way my brain wants it to work. Every so often, I do try to get back to it, thinking "this time I'll get it". And then I start tearing my hair out again. I keep hoping one day it will click, and then I'll look back on my previous attitude toward it and laugh. I'd love to be able to use it effectively.



Milla, I'm glad to hear you'll be taking a class. That's really the best thing to do, assuming you have a good instructor. Let us known how it goes.

Have you looked at "Introducing Zbrush" by Eric Keller? Going through that book really helped me with understanding the program. It also has a nice section on how to use Zbrush to create bumpmaps for export to Maya (or wherever).

Going off the boil here somewhat, but Zbrush takes a couple of weeks of constant use to get the dangle of, I thought it was the most ass-backward thing I'd ever seen when I started using it just behind Blender, but once it clicked, it was the best thing on my computer.

Mudbox 2009 is far more intuitive from a Maya users stance with the same camera controls and cleaner interface. While not as consistently solid as ZB's modeling methods (for example, poles get pulled appart far too easily), can easily get the same effect. It's got nothing on Zbrush's higher poly modeling capabilities, but it's perfect for organic models up to a couple of million polys, afterwhich it gets a bit slow and stodgy on higher subdivisions. It can paint textures directly onto the model easier than Zbrush too, with loads of excellent preset brushes and patterns.

Anyway, great points, Chosen. But when it comes to the relative simplicity of creating a model using the tiny mesh that we have with sculpties, it's massive overkill. You seem to say that it takes years to become proficient enough with it's modeling style to be quick with sculpties, which I'd agree with as I've been using it for quite a while as well and to get completely comfortable with it does indeed take a good amount of time. I just think it's a terrible shame to use $150~ worth of a $2000 program.

Thanks for the advice on Zbrush, guys. Ponk, I've been meaning to give Mudbox a try for some time now. Just never got around to it.

Let me address a couple of points you made, because I think you misunderstood me on some things:




I do agree with you that paying for Maya, and then using only a tiny fraction of it, is somewhat silly, if that's all one is going to do with it. To be clear, I don't necessarily recommend Maya if sculpties are the only goal in mind.

But that doesn't seem to be the case here. Unless I'm misinterpreting, the OP appears genuinely excited about diving in and learning to do a wide variety of things in Maya. SL was just the catalyst, from what I can tell.


There's also something to be said for the enjoyment factor. Different people do click better with different pieces of software than others. It's entirely possible that someone who finds they really like Maya's setup and style would go on to create enough attractive items for sale in SL that their cost for the program is paid back pretty quickly. That same person might not enjoy using a freebie like Blender, and then would nnever end up making those items. The net cost is exactly the same in either scenario, but the former yields countless intangible benefits (for the user and for his/her customers) that the latter does not.

Of course, the reverse could happen as well, but I think you get my point. Upfront purchase price isn't the only factor that needs to be weighed when determining total cost. For some people, Maya's price tag could be well worth it, even if sculpties are the only thing they're doing. I wouldn't say it would be the norm, of course, but I wouldn't call it unlikely either.




I'm not sure where you got that. I never said it would take years. In my experience, most people get proficient with it in a matter of just a few weeks.

I have to reject this notion that just because Maya is more complex as a whole than single-purpose programs that each equivalent part of it somehow must be harder learn than those individual programs are. Modeling tools are modeling tools. Except for the usual things that make any program unique in relation to any other, like UI setup, there's nothing all that different about Maya's modeling tools than those of any other traditional modeling program.

I see it kind of like swimming in the ocean. It might seem a little scary to ponder the fact that there are miles of water depth beneath you, but the actual act of swimming doesn't change in any way just because of that. If all you're using at the moment is the top 10 feet, what does it matter if the full depth is 11 feet or 11 miles? You're going to do the exact same thing either way.

Now, is it "wasting" the ocean to explore only its top 10 feet? Maybe. Valid arguments can be had on that subject. But there can be no argument that swimming in the ocean is inherently any harder than swimming in a pool, just because one happens to be deeper than the other.

By the same token, modeling in Maya isn't any harder than modeling in, say, AC3D or Wings or Rhino or any other dedicated modeling app. Maya just happens to offer a lot of other abilities in addition to only modeling. Whether one chooses to use those other functions or not, the modeling itself is still just modeling.

I agree... after having a chat with Milla on Plurk. I think its a great option Maya Complete.
Also I think it is great to see people actually investing in the software rather than obtaining it illegally. So many complaints of content theft when half of it is created with ripped software does not quite gel does it?.

I agree with Chosen and others that if it is purely SL based then Maya really is a crazy option ( but in saying that I agree with Chosen with skill you can easily gain your ROI).

Modo 302 and soon to be 401 coming out this year is another fantastic option at half the price also... animation is limited but as a modeling, texturing and rendering is excellent.

But like all good things they usually cost money and in terms of 3D it is a never ending learning process which makes it so exciting!

So good luck Milla with your Maya purchase and I really think investing real dollars does make you feel more obligated to learn it and hopefully conquer it!

This just isn't true though. All the apps you mention have a different modeling style, some more intuitive and faster than another. For example, AC3D and Rhino are excellent at moving and manipulating selections because of their handled selection boxes and less fiddly vert selection. In AC3D, Pinching a row of verts to 0 is a case of dragging one of the handles which will stop dead rather than turning it inside out. Maya isn't as specialised for such tight and fast vert work. A case in point where zeroing a loop of verts is essential - the precision required to get really good complex oblong sculpties, like 1 prim chains, chairs or even something relatively simple like stairs or shelving is draining and time consuming by comparison. Even Blender is a huge improvement over it for this type of work.

I'm perhaps taking it taking it to an extreme, but when it comes to sculpties, Maya has no advantage, modeling-wise over any other program and has it's share of downfalls.

Watch a Maya demo reel filled with Hollywood blockbusters and bear in mind anything more organic than a building, car or robot was modeled in Zbrush and augmented and animated with maya. Maya's an amazing program that isn't the industry standard for no reason, but it's modeling capabilities are not the best and don't adequately cover all the bases. Infact yeah, I'll go as far as saying it's inferior for sculpties due to their nature, although using it for sculpties full stop is bordering on offensive. If you get it, Milla, don't get it for sculpties, get it to learn it all and move onto bigger and better things as I have little doubt that Chosen has already done (or he probably wouldn't be singing it's praises quite so ardently ).

Ok, so much new excellent reading! I have to say that I was completely convinced just a minute ago but now have a little doubt. I guess big questions for me are:

Do you think that Maya will likely be able to support new and future features in Second Life?
Will I have to get Z brush too?
What about other Virtual Worlds and Games -- can I use Maya to create content everywhere? (similar to how PS works everywhere)

These might be difficult questions to answer but any kind of input would be very valuable to me

As for ROI, as mentioned by both Chosen and Truth, I'm sure I would earn the money back, in fact, I would be buying it for monies already earned in-world

It's worth remembering that Maya is the benchmark, it'll support everything and will always be supported. Although so will everything else.

I do think that you should set your sights a little lower and get something that is geared more directly at what you want to produce. Having an entire 3D software suite at your fingertips is tempting, but if it's just for sculpties, it's like buying Adobe CS4 Enterprise edition just to open jpegs and draw a mustache on them before saving them as bitmaps.

Sure it is. It's just a question of learning the ins and outs of the various tools and their options.


Different styles, yes, but not substantially different capabilities.


This is where we seem to keep differing. Which program is more "intuitive" or "faster" is a matter of individual perspective. As I said, it all depends what you're used to.



I'm not sure how you're defining "fiddly". Please explain. I always thought vertex selection in Maya was pretty straight forward.


Again, it's a question of knowing the tools. If you want to snap a loop of vertices to zero (or to anything else) in Maya, simply enable snapping, and move them. They'll instantly all snap to the same point. It takes literally about 1/10 of one second.

Argue all you want about whether it's more intuitive to scale to a stopping point, or move to a snapping point, but there can be no argument that one is necessarily faster or slower than the other. They both boil down to a matter of one click, and a very tiny mouse drag.



The hotkeys for the various snapping modes are really easy to remember, by the way. They fall right across the bottom of the keyboard, in the same order as their buttons appear in the GUI. It's x, c, v, and b, for snapping to grid, curve, point, and plane, respectively. This is super handy, because they're within easy reach if your left hand is parked at or near the Alt key, which is where most people have it most of the time, for camera control. It habitualizes for most people within just a few hours of first use, provided they're aware of it.

Also, just to be thorough, whenever this subject comes up, somebody sooner or later asks "What if I want to move the whole selection of vertices, without snapping them all individually to a single point? What if I just want to snap the center of the selection to a point, and have all the verts retain their spacing, relative to each other?" Well, that's simply a matter of enabling one more option. Double-click the Move tool to bring up its attributes, and then check the box for Retain Component Spacing, under where it says Move Snap Settings. Now the selected verts will act as one unit when snapping, instead of acting as a bunch of individual points.



Whatever you want to do, the options are all there, and in 99.99% of cases, they're only one or two clicks or keystrokes away from wherever you are now. If by some freakish chance, an option you need does not exist, then it's almost certain you can find a plugin that adds it. If your needs are so truly bizarre that there's no pre-existing tool to be found, you can always invent your own (assuming you're good with MEL). It's exactly this kind of flexibility that launched Maya into the dominant position in the industry it has occupied for the past decade or two.



For just the modeling of a single sculpty, I'll agree that Maya doesn't necessarily have any advantage over any other modeling program, other than personal taste. But I can't agree that it has any "downfalls" whatsoever. As I keep saying, it's just a question of comfort level. Clearly you're more comfortable with the programs you mentioned, such as AC3D. I happen to be more comfortable with Maya. Again, I have full confidence we'd end in a tie, were we to engage in a speed test, me using Maya, and you using whatever else you want.



That's not necessarily true. Zbrush has only existed in earnest for about four or five years now. They were making movies with Maya, and with its predecessor, Alias Studio, long before Zbrush was yet a figment of its inventors' imaginations. Maya has been used as the primary modeling tool for a lot of movies.



Again, I agree with the first part of that statement, but I can't agree at all with the second part.



Sorry, Ponk, but I can't help but point out the irony of that statement, with respect to your choice of wording. The "nature" of sculpties is not what "pixel pushers" (Qarl's term, meant affectionately and respectfully) like Domino have twisted them to become. They were invented first and foremost for Maya, as a way to bring NURBS-like functionality into SL. For that "natural" purpose, there's still no better tool available than Maya.

Not long after sculpties first were released, certain (clever) residents, who had long since grown tired of waiting for LL to implement mesh support, realized pretty quickly that sculpties could be bastardized to mimic arbitrary meshes, in certain limited ways. The result is the scripts that now exist for Blender, Max, Wings, and so many other modeling programs. These polygon-sourced sculpty tools have come to outnumber the NURBS-based ones to such a degree that any relative newcomer would almost certainly assume that that's what sculpties were always meant to be. But the truth is it's not.

The incredible amount of creativity and skill that went into the creation of such tools cannot be denied. But they can hardly be described in any way as part of the "nature" of sculpties. They are decidedly "unnatural", a deliberate rejection of what sculpties were intended to be.



Now you've lost me. How is it "offensive" to use Maya for sculpties?


Well, I've been using Maya since long before sculpties ever came along. It is one of the tools with which I make my living, and has been for a good while now.

Again, I have to take small issue with your choice of wording. By saying "move on to bigger and better things", you make it sound like the approach you're suggesting is to learn sculpties in the very beginning, and then learn other things afterwards. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that that's the exact opposite of the direction anyone in their right mind should try to go. The right thing to do is to learn those "bigger and better things" first, and then you'll already know everything you need in order to make sculpties. As I so often say, don't put the cart before the horse. Trying to learn Maya (or just about any other modeling program) with sculpties as step 1, is a recipe for disaster.

Sculpties are downright weird. They're an exception to a lot of established conventions of how models are supposed to be made. You have to learn the rules before you learn how to break them.

It's a bit like learning to compose music. You don't start out with Jazz. Jazz deliberately breaks the rules. You start out learning Baroque, and then Classical. Once you've mastered that, then you go on to shake it up with Jazz.

Learn to model in traditional ways first. Once you're good at that sculpties will be easy. Try to do sculpties first, and they could poison your point of view. For best success, always develop the most universally applicable habits first; specialize later. I hope that makes sense.

I'm not sure "support" is the right word to use. Maya is simply a platform. Asking if Maya will support features of SL is like asking if MS Word will support writing your next novel in Greek. If you happen to speak Greek, then you can use Word, or any other comparable tool you want, to type in that language. If you don't, then you can't.

By the same token, if you know how to create the kinds of things SL can use, then you can use Maya, or any other comparable tool, to make them.



That depends on what your goal is. If you want to do the kinds of things Zbrush is good at doing, then it's a good tool to have. You don't necessarily "need" it, though.



Yes and no.

I'll take the no part first. Some games, and even some VW's, use proprietary formats, which require specialty software. Maya can usually still be useful in a peripheral way in those cases, but there's no getting around whatever hoops you need to jump through for the main bulk of the creation process.

To use your Photoshop analogy, here's an example of how PS might work peripherally, but not directly, for texturing. Nextgen games don't use the kind of painted textures we're used to in SL. They'll combine several elements in real time, to create the apparent texture you see on the screen. Normal maps, lighting maps, specularity maps, etc., will all be employed. Could you create each of those maps individually in Photoshop? Almost certainly. But that might or might not be the best way to go about it, depending on the specific requirements of the project you're working on.

The same holds true with Maya. For a certain game, you might want to do part of the work in Maya, for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean you'll get to do the whole thing from start to finish in ONLY Maya. You might well have to employ other tools as well, or you might not get to use Maya at all, again depending on the specifics of the project.

For the majority of projects, though, you'll find there's almost nothing for which Maya won't be suitable.

Invented for Maya? NURBS like functionality and "nature"? Bastardized to mimic meshes? Really Chosen? No offense to you personally sir, but these notions are a load of bunk.

Stating they are "Invented for Maya" is a bit nonsensical. Even Invented BY USING Maya is a stretch unless you consider LL to be the inventor of meshes and 3d displacement. "Developed for Second Life using Maya" would be the most accurate in my view.

Qarl was comfortable with Maya so that's what was used for development. It wouldn't make sense to develop in Blender or Max if he wasn't as comfortable with them. Beyond that there is nothing intrinsically Maya like about sculpties at all.

Any application capable of manipulating a 3d surface and reading surface position, or even just manipulating RGB channels can be used to make a map to displace a sculptie in SL. I've used straight Photoshop to accomplish tasks that Maya and Max couldn't do for me. And, as Chosen has admitted in other threads, using the Linden Labs MEL script in Maya for sculpty generation results in maps that are not as accurate compared to the vertex based methods.

Here's the deal: Everything you see, including Sculpties, are meshes inside SL. Suggesting sculpties are "NURBS like" isn't true. There's nothing spline like about them at all. Don't make the mistake of equating the NURBS surface used to generate the map to the actual surface the map influences in SL. Sculpties have all the qualities of an arbitrary mesh except for two functions - The actual mesh UV coordinates are untouchable and vertex count is invariable for a given type. They have none of the qualities of NURBS save the locked UVs and it there isn't any rule that meshes can't have that, it's just that NURBS patches absolutely REQUIRE this. So actually sculptie "nature" (funny tag for something in a virtual world) is mesh like. The stated intent or grand vision of the developer doesn't affect this.

If Chosen thinks that staying true to the sculptie faith means using them as they were truly, righteously intended requires using NURBS surfaces as the proxy for map creation that's his prerogative. But I think he does everyone, especially people new to, or curious about, 3D a disservice with these explanations of why he does this. Again, no offense meant to him, he's helped lots of folks over the years, but sometimes he seems to veer into dogma rather than objective information when discussing his personal workflow.

Related to the topic is the fact that the polygon is currently the industry standard 3D standard modeling tool for games and real time 3D. Heck 95% (an approximate number pulled outta my ass, but if anything I'm low-balling it) of the work outside SL you are going to do as a 3D developer requires understanding how to create, manipulate and texture meshes. Most people who come to SL with 3D experience seek out and support polygon based tools because of this. This is why there are so many polygon based sculpty creation tools.

Don't misunderstand me, NURBS are used and can be used to great effect in SL and out. I'm sure there are jobs where that's all that they use to model out there, but they really are a niche application any more. If you are worried about it learn them both. Maya is a great application for that.

Personally I'm glad that folks like Domino and Omei committed heresy and perverted Qarl's vision. You don't HAVE to bend, fold and mutilate or otherwise commit scultpy apostasy, but it's nice to be able to produce something with one sculpted prim that would waste multiple traditional prims or imprecise sculpties when you want to.