Animation/rigging tools seem particularly lacking to me. For example, a "set driven key" in maya is simple, very common action. You can do the same thing in blender, but it takes more steps and seems kind of obscure.
Blender often has trouble dealing with scenes at production scale. Not that it can't do it (as the blender movie projects prove) but generally you have to know the strengths and weakness of it well to set up a scene at production scale. And to be honest, the scale of the blender shorts is pretty small compared to a typical maya production scene.
It's getting better with every release though. A lot of the tools, for example the texture painting and matchmoving tools, are already better than maya. Render layers have recently caught up.
I think maya still has an edge in production use, but we're starting to see blender being used in real production situations. If you look at the trajectories of development of both programs, blender is moving fast and maya is more or less sitting still.
Blender often has trouble dealing with scenes at production scale. Not that it can't do it (as the blender movie projects prove) but generally you have to know the strengths and weakness of it well to set up a scene at production scale. And to be honest, the scale of the blender shorts is pretty small compared to a typical maya production scene.
It's getting better with every release though. A lot of the tools, for example the texture painting and matchmoving tools, are already better than maya. Render layers have recently caught up.
I think maya still has an edge in production use, but we're starting to see blender being used in real production situations. If you look at the trajectories of development of both programs, blender is moving fast and maya is more or less sitting still.