Rigging in Blender vs Maya - Which has Advantage?

[imacrabpinch]

Last night I spent a considerable amount of time trying to fix weighting issues in blender on a piece I made, and it still frustratingly isn't perfect, so it leads me to a general question for the crowd here. Does maya offer any advantages in rigging over blender? I have a student copy of maya, and I'm not sure if its worth learning.

Just for some further details, I usually don't have an issue fixing any problems I run into with blender, but I do tend to always run into "this or that" unexpectedly. Main examples include - the model distorting slightly when in world compared to the look in blender and the sticky pants issue (when transferring weights for anything on the thighs for most models, the pants stick together where I have to manually weight paint to fix - takes about 10 minutes extra per body). The sticky pants issue makes me dread getting to the rigging stage of any pants. I heard there was a data transfer way to do this, but I have read up and still haven't figured that one out.

Other issues I commonly work around - One of the popular dev kits I use always shifts upwards when I rig in blender version 2.79/avastar 2- so its common practice for me now to switch to an older version specifically for that one dev kit, then switch back. Also, manual weight smoothing (blur tool) doesn't work correctly in older versions of blender so I use the latest for smoothing. Then another issue is if I rig in an older version, I need to switch to the new version to export in A pose, things like this. What I'm trying to say is, I feel like I'm always switching back and forth versions, etc. I've heard of other people doing the same thing in blender, but I haven't heard of that for people using maya.

Someone also told me that in maya, you don't need to worry about the posing of the avatar before rigging. In blender, its a simple convert to bind pose button - but this is still one extra step.

A little rambling but I hope this makes sense. I'm 100% self taught so its always been a guess and test kind of mode I'm in.

So, is there any advantage to learn maya specifically for rigging? Like I said, I've always been able to figure out any issues, but if maya offers any advantage, I'd learn it.

Thank you!

[Erik Hugo]

Well, the least I can do is bump your post (new here, so not sure) but I'd love to know the same... I can get my stuff rigged, however problems are numerous and it kind of takes the fun out of the creation part. I'm not sure if you are going to get the answer here since most choose one tool and stick with it. 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I'm not sure what you mean about having to manually weight, that's a pretty normal step of modeling, weight transferi is merely a starting point.