Alias\Wavefront's Maya 5 Unlimited - Review

Post, July, 2003 by Tor Rolf Seemann

If you're like me and totally turned on by wet fur, then you'll want to read on... and maybe even take some notes. Last month, Alias\Wavefront released Version 5.0 of Maya in both the Complete" and the "Unlimited" packages (for those of you with unlimited budgets out there). Maya's user base has grown steadily since AJW clipped the price tag on the Complete edition (now $1,999). And directly from user requests from that emerging Maya community, many improvements have been implemented in this latest offering.

Perhaps the most stunning change to the total 3D workflow in Maya is its rendering pipeline. What the company has dubbed "unified render globals" really just means: all the previous render modules, hardware options and third-party software render engines have now been brought together in this application to facilitate a more streamlined render menu. Most notably, of course, is the addition of Mental Ray V3.2 being fully integrated within the Maya user interface. While it's been available in the past as an add-on, now Mental Ray is included in this 3D app with well-integrated code. Another anticipated addition is the ability to render vector-based art, which allows output to popular programs like Adobe Illustrator, GoLive and Macromedia Flash MX. Beyond that, hardware optimized renders can now take full advantage of the latest/greatest graphics cards on the market, like ATI's Fire GL XI and Nvidia's Quadro 4. Broadcast-quality renders can now be up to 20 percent faster, depending on which card is used.

UNLIMITED

The Unlimited bundle (limited to those with $7K) provides powerful tools for industry professionals, things like Maya Cloth, Live, Fluids and Fur (sounds like a party I went to last weekend). During my evaluation period I was trying to produce an animation that would incorporate all of these elements, but my girlfriend kept coming in the room and I got embarrassed. After all, a beaver wearing a monogrammed robe, sliding into a Jacuzz is a bit silly.

Toronto-based A\W has taken a bold leap forward with its Maya Paint Effects, included at both price points. Also, you can now draw with polygons, or even convert drawings to polygons. This allowed me to view my work up close, in high detail while editing with traditional polygon tools, and then output to other renderers, including Mental Ray and a variety of game engines.

A\W is clearly after the gaming market, providing short cut conversion diagrams for 3DS Max users to comfortably migrate to Maya hotkeys, and by improving its already renowned Artisan toolset. The Paint Vertex Color tool can now paint face vertices, and vertices -- which facilitates better color placement and control. I also found that Maya could now selectively darken and lighten vertices with its Opacity in Paint Vertex Color tool. For those of us out here who value screen real estate and have invested in multiple display monitors, in my case quad 21s, it would be nice if the GUI better accommodated several displays -- was disappointed over the struggle it took me to rearrange the interface.

According to A\W, Maya's dynamic modules for cloth and rigid body dynamics have been modified at the C code level to provide as much as a 90 percent speed increase over past Maya releases. The idea being that Maya can now better compete with new dynamic cloth simulators out there and help establish Maya as the first choice for major motion picture work It's already been used on Spider-man and The Lord of the Rings. Other new advancements in Maya 5 include new import/export options, including Flash and AutoCAD dwg/dxf support, a new parent constraint node, slightly expanded modeling tools for NURBS and polygons, character set-up enhancements, and a new fur attribute to allow for the clumping of fur, dirty fur or even excessive ear fur.

Maya Fluid Effects have also been enhanced so much so that previously impossible-to-simulate effects, including true dynamic computation of wakes and the accurate simulation of the sweat pool that forms in your belly button when you are sun bathing, are now easily achieved.

I found when working with forward and inverse kinematics (FK & IK) Version 5.0 allows for blending of joint movements with the keyframing of IK chains, The visible references to the full IK and FK positions during blending helped me scope out my animation timeline and create fluid animated transitions between movements.

PERSONAL LEARNING

For those of you new to Maya, A\W makes it quite simple to get started. They provide free CDs or downloads of their software titled the Personal Learning Edition, which is fully functional minus the fact that all renders get tagged with a watermark, "'rendering" it unusable for professional purposes -- that is if the audience objects to this watermark being part of the composition. Maybe it would be line for feature use -- after two hours sitting in a darkened theatre, who wouldn't forget about it? The A\W Web site (www.aliaswavefront.com/en/news/home.shtml) is chock full of resources for learning, with links, DVDs, seminars and regularly-scheduled classes coming to a neighborhood near you.