Maya - reliable, or buggy?

[tk421storm]

Hey all -

I'm the technical director at a small agency with big aspirations. We're currently a C4D shop, and while cinema has some great features (mograph, xpresso) I find it wanting in a lot of areas, and I often feel like I'm part of their QA department with the number of bugs I discover and report.

My question to those of you who work with Maya regularly is: is Maya stable and reliable, or is buggy, inconsistent behavior what to expect from nearly any complicated 3d app? I've been dipping my toes into Maya, and did a year or two with it in college, but I don't want to recommend we upgrade without speaking to people who use it day-to-day.

Thanks!

-Mike

[Boris28]

Hardly you will find any super stable software, first time I tried to use Reaflow I crashed it. Autodesk puts new software so fast(every year) out that after first 3-4 months we "users" fix their bugs by sending requests and crash reports.

[bclark22]

I use Maya every day at work. We are a small studio of 2 full time generalists and 2 part time generalists. I am the lead and I prefer Maya over all other software. It can be buggy at times, but I've seen far worse software. Newtek's Lightwave is probably the one of the worst I have used. It crashes constantly, and has ridiculous little bugs here and there.

All the kids nowadays getting out of college are either going to know 3ds max, or Maya. I haven't seen any schools teaching Cinema 4D, Softimage, Lightwave, Modo, etc... I firmly believe there is a reason behind this, because 3ds Max and Maya are the most refined pieces of software for 3D work. I like Maya because everyone knows it out of college, and it is easier for us to expand our team by hiring new people.

Most of the issues I encounter with Maya are rendering with mental ray, or some texture based crashes. In any case, we work around the bugs by doing research and we have never really had an issue resolving a problem.