Maya has been my very good friend since my school days. I use it to model characters for Unity 3D game engine. With patience and determination you can push through the steep learning curve and get a good mastery of Maya. What Maya offers is far greater than the difficulties faced while learning it. I always advice beginners not to rush it and take their time to better understand it. But it quite easy for people already familiar with other modeling and animation software to use Maya.

Maya is all in one 3D design software. From designing of complex models to detailed texturing then to rigging and animation, Maya is a richly packaged software to satisfy its users. The yearly update always introduces new feature to make usage easy. Also, the ability to export modeled character directly to Unity 3D for game and virtual reality development makes Maya my choice of game character development software. Models designed in Maya is supported by most gaming and texturing software. For beginners, there are enough tutorials to get you started at least for basic modeling and animation, and there is a large support community in case you run into any technical problem.

Maya is a robust software which makes it hard to wrap your mind around it within a short period of time especially for beginners. It took me years to learn, and as a matter of fact, there are still some functions that I'm yet to master. So it takes time to have a mastery of Maya because of how robust it is. Also, it is heavy in size and it eat up all the storage space and also there is a need for  good graphics card to run it well on your PC. Cant be used on most low end PC.

The ability to bring 3d animation projects to completion, from the first modeling stages to the final render. Maya can handle lots of things : heavy geometry, lots of caches, animation and motion capture data, lots of textures. It gets better as your company grows in size.

The most useful thing about Maya is how effective it is to use it into my animation studio pipeline. The reference system is by far my favorite from any other package I have seen, this is not random that every major visual effect studio uses Maya as primary 3d software.

The only downfall that I personally face using Maya is the spline system which is not as flexible and updatable as say 3dsmax. I think autodesk should look into merging the 3dsmax spline system.

I love that you can create and build 3D models and make animations. It's easy to make animations with the automatic in-between keys that Maya puts in.

Maya freezes a lot and uses up too much memory on my laptop. It heats up my laptop and has unexpected crashes. Sometimes something wrong goes with the model and I can never fix it again. Other times the model stops working and I have to open a whole new file to copy and paste the model in to reanimate it.

Best value for for the money, a full featured piece of software

-one program from modeling texturing rendering animation -new features added every year to make the creative process more user friendly -excellent control over every aspect of creation -able to create custom controls,scrips,nodes -hot keys make finding what you need very convienient -this is the software the pros use -excellent product for the price

-extremely daunting to get started -will take many years to master -can be frustrating when something goes wrong, you will need patience and good problem solving skills to master -Can be hard on system resources with complex scenes

With Maya, you get a full range of tools and the ability to create anything your heart desires. From my experience, rendering doesn't take as long in Maya than it can in other programs.

Why settle for anything less? Maya has everything you need for 3D animation and more. I have even produced motion graphics with it. This is the most versatile and user-friendly program out there for 3D animation.

Maya is incredibly expensive if you are not a student. The price alone is something of a deterrent, but don't let that stop you because it is well worth the price.