Talented artists used the software of their choosing. Then internal tools converted their output into a game specific format.

Game studios do not allow this, even if they are using a commercial engine such as Unity 3D which can convert from any tool to their own format.
The reason being that assets need to be shared between artists and it doesn’t make sense for half of them to be in 3D Studio Max and the other half in Maya. Every artist is required to stick to the same tool.

In the case of non-commercial in-house engines this is even more strict, since allowing artists to use whatever they want means the in-house R&D team must make plug-ins for all software the artists will be using.
Instead of taking the time and money to do this, it is more cost-effective and time-efficient to just tell the artists, “Our in-house tools/plug-ins work with Maya—if you don’t have Maya skills then we won’t hire you.”


In my experience, Maya is the most commonly used among games. I have always used it, my company (tri-Ace) uses it, Square Enix uses it, DICE uses it, etc.
The genre has no meaning—FPS, RPG, Action, whatever. It has nothing to do with the genre and likely everything to do with the ease in creating plug-ins and exporters, an area where Maya is known to trump 3D Studio Max.
I have heard numerous first-hand testimonials from people who started with 3D Studio Max and switched to Maya about how much easier it is to develop plug-ins and exporters.
It may also be related to licensing prices.



L. Spiro

Spiro, many artists on boards full of them talk about having all the major programs installed (since they are all owned by Autodesk now), and being able to use whatever they like.

No one hates 3DS Max as much as 3DS Max users. There has been a huge backlash against them for being stagnant since they started acquiring all their competitors. Many prefer to start their models in dedicated modeling programs like Rhino, Modo, and Silo3D, and then import the finished mesh into their program of choice via OBJ to finish it up.

Anything good in 3DS Max tends to be a third party plugin.

I never said artists don’t use whatever they want—in their spare time.

This topic is about what happens inside game companies (implicitly—read every other reply as well, most of which are assuming the context to be inside studios), in which case what I said is exactly correct—no game company is going to allow its artists to use just whatever they want.


L. Spiro

Game studios do not allow this, even if they are using a commercial engine such as Unity 3D which can convert from any tool to their own format.
The reason being that assets need to be shared between artists and it doesn’t make sense for half of them to be in 3D Studio Max and the other half in Maya. Every artist is required to stick to the same tool.

many artists on boards full of them talk about having all the major programs installed (since they are all owned by Autodesk now), and being able to use whatever they like

I went to a conference talk by one of Epic's character artists, and he spoke of having the choice of using Max/Maya/Mudbox/ZBrush in his work, and how different staff did use different tools on the same project.

Yes, it's common for a company to mandate either Max or Maya for efficiency's sake, but there are also companies that do give their artists the choice.

When I worked at a very large developer, we used Max, Maya and even XSI, but the choice was made per-project by the lead artist. Some projects were done in Max and others were done in Maya. Of course with a system this flexible, there were exceptions to this rule, such as when you re-used assets from other teams, or borrowed a staff member from another team to help out for a few days -- meaning that even on the "Max projects" there were still some Maya assets, etc...

N.B. there's still always small exceptions, e.g. at the above company, even on a "Max only project", there was still a small amount of work done in XSI because it was better suited. Or, at my last job, the whole company was "Maya only", but a few small bits of isolated work were done in Blender. Also, at that "maya only" company, most of the artists really resented the fact that they had been forced to switch from Max, which they liked better (a decision made by an incompetent manager), so there's no real objectively better tool.

On my current project, I'm only supporting XSI at the moment, because my artist prefers it over Max/Maya, and when I get time I might add support for Blender, for modders.

The inefficiency with allowing multiple DCC tools is mainly just that your engine department has to maintain more plugins/tools... but if you're making a huge engine that you want to be able to sell to a diverse range of customers, like Epic, you need to do that work anyway. In my case, our engine-staff were subsidised by tax-breaks, while game-staff weren't, so we had an absolutely massive engine team
In a lot of games, sharing of assets between artists doesn't happen that often -- if someone is assigned to create a character, then they're the only one that needs to edit the source file.
[edit] to clarify, the large company I worked for always planned to license their massive engine, like Epic does (but never actually did), so they did have a reason to go through that trouble [/edit]

I've heard of some larger studios using multiple packages, but I wasn't under the impression that it was common. At my current job our tech very tightly integrated with Maya, to the point that the idea of supporting another package would sound like crazy talk. Every once in a while we get an artist that's used to Max, and they just learn to use Maya. Frankly I have a hard time understanding the rationale behind having an engine team that supports more than once package, unless you're licensing your tech.