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Time to review the 500 ton gorilla on the market. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking Maya. You know the program, it's the one responsible for all of the "Maya has feature XYZ, is there any way we can put the same thing into (insert cheaper 3D program of choice)" complaints in art departments everywhere. That's all they were though, complaints, and hopes, because Maya was out of the price range of just about everyone except the highest of high end studios.
And then Alias/Wavefront went and slashed its price so it directly competed with all the other 3D programs on the market, and suddenly people were wondering whether to stick with their old 3D program and complain some more, or simply just jump ship. The flagship product of Alias, (formerly Alias/Wavefront). Maya is the 3D application that's used to benchmark all other competitors. Now at version 5, Maya reflects the sensibilities of two decades of research and development. New Features Dynamics have been improved in version 5. Alias claims an increase in dynamics calculation of 20-90% on Windows boxes. I cannot verify that claim as I do not have Maya 4.5 on hand to test it out on, but I can verify that the dynamics calculation is fast. Fast enough for it to do my simple test scene in realtime, with no precalculation time. Impressive enough for me, but it got better when I found I could zoom, pan, and orbit the scene and still have the dynamics simulation run in realtime, in shaded mode. Quite impressive. 
On the optimization front, Maya 5 comes with a better set of polygon reduction tools which now respect UV borders. You hear that? That's the game artists of the world who have to do multiple LOD models manually cheering loudly. You can also paint weights onto the model and have the poly reduction tool recognize it, so you can weight areas to retain their mesh density and set other parts to be optimized brutally. Especially useful for retaining a higher level of detail on heads while the rest of the body gets optimized. For animation, we see the very useful parent constraint function. The easiest way I can explain this is that is allows you to parent an object to another, so it inherits all translation and rotation values, without actually parenting the object to another. The most common use for this is prop management in character animation, which allows your character to pick up and drop objects. It also allows you set up pseudo circular hierarchies (Grandparent -> Parent -> Child -> Grandparent, consider a hierarchy of chains) much more easily. Because it's a constraint that turned on and off, you can set the object to become "parented" to different objects over time. IK/FK blending is now greatly simplified. As in, one button push simplified. I've never been fond of IK/FK blending despite the additional level of control simply because of the exercise required to set it up. That might change in the near future as I get used to the idea of one button push IK/FK setup. Maya 5 allows for constraint blending as well. This allows you to utilize constraint and keyframe animation simultaneously, and blend between various degrees of each. You can now use any nurbs surface as a sculpt deformer, which opens the door to all sort of deformations. The biggest criticism for Maya for a long time has been its renderer. That criticism is completely debunked now as Maya jumps on the Mental Ray bandwagon. Mental Ray is fully integrated within Maya, though you'll have to convert some items, such as paint effects, into polygons to render properly in Mental Ray. On top of Mental Ray, Maya now has a new vector render that does stylized renderings, like cell shades, line art, and wireframe. It offers several vector outputs for your convenience. Flash, Illustrator, Postscript, and scalable vector graphics (SVG) are all supported. And if that wasn't enough, Maya adds a new hardware renderer which uses your graphics card to render the image. The output is faster, and in some cases, the quality is high enough for final output. Bake sets allow you to bake shaders onto the model, or to a texture. It also allows you to bake multiple items in a scene at multiple resolutions. Paint effects comes with a smattering of new features. Most notably is the convert paint effects to polygons feature. Let me say up front, that as a new user to Maya, paint effects blows me away. The ability to paint trees that grow according to my stroke is incredible. The fact that it's not simple sprite imagery, and the fact that I can control all of the attributes boggles my mind just a bit. Now, you can convert your paint effects (spline data with a lot of fancy trimmings it looks to me) to polygons. You'll excuse me while I get a mop to collect the drool. Not only is it quite amazing to me, but I only understand how it's doing this magic in very vague terms. In any case, the ability to convert to polygons allows you to affect a polygonal field of grass with any tool you could affect polygons with. More importantly for this release however, is that you'll need to convert to polygons if you want Mental Ray to render it properly. A new thin line brush type is available in Maya 5, which renders large numbers of fine tubes much more quickly then the Paint Brush type, up to 100x faster. The tool creates anti-aliased lines instead of a series of brush stamps. This allows for much easier, and faster creation of hair. In line with this are new fur presets which come with new clumping features. This allows for a wet look to hair and fur, and was demonstrated to great effect at Siggraph 2003. On the fluid dynamics side the new pond and wake functionality is added. Pretty impressive, no more relying on animated displacement maps. Under the hood. With Maya, my tour of professional and amateur 3D programs is almost complete (look for my XSI review this month) so I've now got a comprehensive bar of features and paradigms to compare to. Here, I look at how Maya met expectations, and what particularly caught my eye while going through a basic workflow procedure. On the modeling front, Maya is a capable performer with excellent nurbs tools. The polygonal modeling tools are somewhat basic, but quite usable. Additional free downloads off the Maya site can expand the polygonal modeling functionality quite significantly. The UV manipulation tools are a well rounded set. The Layout UVs tool is particularly useful for separating overlapping UVs. My only qualm is that the relax UV tool seems to act inconsistently over a mesh, relaxing some parts, and others not at all, despite selection sets. 
If there is one thing that Maya excels at, is its user interface. It is an incredibly well designed and implemented user paradigm. The marker menu system is brilliant, to the point that you can see it being copied in other programs, even games. As a result, because the interface is so well designed, Maya provides one of the fastest production environments on the market. A secondary benefit to such a marvelously simple, elegant, and powerful interface, is that the program is remarkably simple to pick up and learn. Maya by far had the shortest learning curve of any 3D program I've ever utilized, including so called amateur 3D programs like Bryce and Poser. To complement this powerful user interface, is an extensive help system. Maya assumes nothing; you are given complete hand holding through the most basic 3D premises and led all the way to the top. The help system is the typical html reference, and has powerful search functions. An exhaustive set of tutorials will see you through all of the basic functionality. And to get you started in Maya as fast as possible, Maya opens to a set of basic navigation and utilization video tutorials which will get you up and running in Maya in no time flat. It is no wonder that Alias saw the Mac market as being receptive to Maya. The Mac market demands streamlined functionality that is presented elegantly and easily. Maya delivers, over and over again. The shader interface is powerful, though a bit confusing to work through at first. It uses a shader tree paradigm where you add and subtract shader attributes and link them together to create your final shader. On the character setup side of things, the toolset is amazingly simple. Getting characters rigged and setup has never been easier. Maya's mirror bones function is easy to use, and works appropriately. It also will do a search and rename function on the bones you mirror. It's easy to see why animators prefer Maya for character animation, the toolset simply makes the character setup process painless (dare I say fun?). 
Maya easily feels like the most mature 3D program I've ever touched. You get the feeling that several hundred programmers and artists have been over every aspect of Maya with a fine tooth comb. Putting in only what is absolutely needed, and making sure everything works the way it ought to. Indeed, Maya is also the most stable 3D app I've had the pleasure of working in, edging out even Cinema 4D, which used to be my standard for stability. So who needs to upgrade? Are you a game developer? A multimedia/web developer? An animator? Then you need Maya 5 in a bad way. The additional functionality Alias has put in for you is empowering. Oh yes, did I forget Mental Ray? That in itself is a reason to move to five. This is my first time around the block with Maya, and I've got to hand it to Alias, they've done an excellent job with this product. It's no wonder that almost every studio I ran into at Siggraph was enthusiastically touting Maya as their production software of choice. Alias
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Toronto, Ontario Canada M5A 1J7 www.alias.com |