I just finished a contract with Hi-Sim for 422 in Bristol, producing an animation for the Madrid 2018 Ryder cup bid. The job was very much like a standard architectural visualisation job except I had the chance to brush up my Maya skills and learn some new tricks from some great CG guys.
I still feel that Max has a clear lead when it comes to architectural visualisation, but found that both Maya and Max talk together so easily that it’s easy to perform a task in one then jump over to the other.
I was disappointed to find that there’s no way to save a Maya MentalRay architectural shader to 3DS Max even though the options are the same. The MetalSL language is supposed to fix the problem but only exists with 3DS max at the moment; I intend to write a script that will save materials from one application to the other.
I spent most of my time modelling and getting my head around the Maya MR proxy system.