Alias Wavefront's Maya

Woebot · Mar 3, 2005

http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services/maya/index.shtml

I'm teaching myself this at the moment. Been wading through the Alias educational material and i'm attending a course on Saturdays. Does anyone here have experience with it or any other 3d software?

You could spin quite a theoretical web about Maya, but obv everyone tends to take a quite pragmatic/technical approach to it.

ome · Mar 3, 2005

wow.. mayas a heavy package second only in scaryness to xsi..

i've used max and 4d (not in great depth, but do use them regularly). Max is a great for architectural stuff & games and has a good community of sites & 3rd party tool but I find it a bit fiddley. 4d suites me more, its ui is friendly and quite unlike other 3d packages, it lends itself to working quickly, while not compromising on features. I'm not an animator or modeler but a 2d compositor, so 3d for me is for: pre-viz, particels, 2d/3d intergration tracking, titles, 3d warping, trippy visuals etc..

maya & shake are still the mainstay of soho for film pre-comping and 3d work, so you cant go wrong if your trying to raise your work cash cieling, or wanting to hang out with some people with serious unwritten knowledge.

xero · Mar 3, 2005

agree with ome's comments there re: other packages. I tried for quite a while to get to grips with maya but ultimately realised that it's just way beyond what I need in terms of functionality & therefore too complicated. I think unless you're doing character animation then other 3d apps have a much more approachable learning curve. Also I found it a bit buggy & slow on the mac. The mental ray rendering is awesome & very quick tho'. The modelling is also very powerful & has some really clever controls but I found it sometimes incredibly difficult to do some straightforward things that can be achieved very easily on other apps. Maybe it's just too difficult to teach yourself by going thru manuals etc. In the end I went back to cinema 4d

Matt, some time ago you posted a quicktime showreel but I find it won't open in the latest quicktime player - any idea why? was curious to have a look

Woebot · Mar 4, 2005

ome said:
wow.. mayas a heavy package second only in scaryness to xsi..

i did used to have an xsi license (which i convinced my former hosts to give to me. never found a way into it (though never took any time with it) and sold it for 2000 quid. smart move that was cos you can now pick it up for a song.

ome said:
i've used max and 4d (not in great depth, but do use them regularly). Max is a great for architectural stuff & games and has a good community of sites & 3rd party tool but I find it a bit fiddley. 4d suites me more, its ui is friendly and quite unlike other 3d packages, it lends itself to working quickly, while not compromising on features. I'm not an animator or modeler but a 2d compositor, so 3d for me is for: pre-viz, particels, 2d/3d intergration tracking, titles, 3d warping, trippy visuals etc..

Cinema 4D has a growing legion of fans ive noticed. what it has over lightwave is that it appears thoroughly logical. lightwave (which ive been using for 5 years now is just fucking eccentric. and it crashes ALL THE TIME. at least maya is totally logical. i reckon that is really important if you're trying to grasp a new software. same reason i reckon english must be a pig to learn.

ome said:
maya & shake are still the mainstay of soho for film pre-comping and 3d work, so you cant go wrong if your trying to raise your work cash cieling, or wanting to hang out with some people with serious unwritten knowledge.

yep. give me a year with maya and then i'm resolved to getting my head round shake.

Woebot · Mar 4, 2005

minusone said:
agree with ome's comments there re: other packages. I tried for quite a while to get to grips with maya but ultimately realised that it's just way beyond what I need in terms of functionality & therefore too complicated. I think unless you're doing character animation then other 3d apps have a much more approachable learning curve. Also I found it a bit buggy & slow on the mac. The mental ray rendering is awesome & very quick tho'. The modelling is also very powerful & has some really clever controls but I found it sometimes incredibly difficult to do some straightforward things that can be achieved very easily on other apps. Maybe it's just too difficult to teach yourself by going thru manuals etc. In the end I went back to cinema 4d

people do say that maya makes simple tasks impossible. the reason im trying to learn it is to use my character animation knowledge (i did the 2d character animation course at st martins a few years back). im doing the character animation 3d module there again at the moment.

vis a vis the modelling. i can see that (say) the lightwave polygon toolset is quite canny in comparison.

minusone said:
Matt, some time ago you posted a quicktime showreel but I find it won't open in the latest quicktime player - any idea why? was curious to have a look

(hmm, scratches head) some people have managed to get this work, but an equal amount have found it troublesome. it may be a prob with the pc implementation of quicktime. i'll look into it. maybe post an mpeg1.

-

anyone any philosphical thoughts about maya?

ome · Mar 4, 2005

WOEBOT said:
and then i'm resolved to getting my head round shake.

i think Shake is a red herring for many people..

apart from being really command line intuitive

i.e. nearly every other compositing app automatically does a unmult/mult if you do a colour correction with something that has a matte, but not shake.....

its great if you need a stable (100 layer 2k film comp) compositing & keying that renders like a bat out of hell. If you want a responsive preview, paint, text or roto tools that are really good, look else where.....

Shake & Maya excell in large teams where people are doing induvidual tasks within an application, so you end up with extreme Hi-Quality product.. The 'creative' pre-viz and final discisions are then done in different applications/enviroments.

I'm really warming to DigitalFusion 5: techy nodes like shake but previews like motion with 3d text and particles.. sadly no OSX support (only linux / XP).

Woebot · Jun 6, 2007

Really been loving this software. Seem to be using it on every job these days.

Are there any other regular Maya users out here? Of course (as per the threads title) it's Autodesk's Maya these days.....

Woebot · Jun 6, 2007

ome said:
i think Shake is a red herring for many people..

i've done a couple of passes on the shake learning material, but still not mastered it (er at all) even though they've pulled the app i'm still determined to get the hang of it.

i'm sure the core principles/tools will resurface in apple's phenomenon app. and operators are still in demand.

Edward · Jun 6, 2007

Sorry to derail but I;ve got this amazing book about all the latest 3d mdelling techniques and computer graphics in general.
It was published in 1983 and it's pretty mindblowing to hear you talking about doing this stuff by yourself when it's not that long since it was a team of 5 people and a computer the size of a £200000 flat (and costing millions)

Look at this, lots of videos you can watch of ancient computer 3d....
http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/lesson4.html#de

swears · Jun 6, 2007

Remember the fad for pixel art in graphic design a few years back? Well I reckon crude early 3D rendering is next...

Woebot · Jun 7, 2007

Edward said:
Sorry to derail but I;ve got this amazing book about all the latest 3d mdelling techniques and computer graphics in general.
It was published in 1983 and it's pretty mindblowing to hear you talking about doing this stuff by yourself when it's not that long since it was a team of 5 people and a computer the size of a £200000 flat (and costing millions)

Look at this, lots of videos you can watch of ancient computer 3d....
http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/lesson4.html#de

love those old compuetr graphics books. have a mini collection of them.

Alias Wavefront's Maya

Woebot

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ome

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xero

was minusone

Woebot

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Woebot

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ome

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Woebot

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Woebot

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Edward

+

swears

preppy-kei

Woebot

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