This morning I installed Maya Personal Learning Edition to my computer. If you’ve seen Lord Of The Rings, or Harry Potter, or numerous other films and even games, then you’ll have seen the end result of the kind of 3D awesomeness you can do in Maya. It’s loved by moviemakers because of its stunning realism, and by game makers because it makes it so easy to work stuff into their games.
It’s all very good and very expensive. So Alias, the makers, release a free version. Yes, they really did. It’s got a few things disabled that most people won’t use and the final rendered image has a watermark over it, but basically you have the power here to build all the orcs and wizards you like (if you’re that good). I’m sure it’s very good for Alias in the long run as it gets everybody obssessed with the program so they have to buy it. I took this as the perfect opportunity to get good at 3D modelling without having to resort to piracy (or Blender; seriously, if a program doesn’t use left-click to select objects, there’s something very wrong with it!).
Usually the hardest part of starting on a 3D program is answering the questions “How do I move around? How do I make a sphere/cube/teapot? How do I move that around? Where’s me washboard?”. Fortunately the program starts up with a menu of short movies, which show you how to get going with all the basics, which was very lovely. It was fairly intuitive, and the manipulation stuff would be familiar to anyone else who has tried 3D Studio Max.
I made a face! And I can only continue to improve (I seriously hope so judging by that crappy face)
P.S. I don’t get paid to rave about Maya, I just like it.
What a beautiful face! :)
Nice face! Will we see it be updated with radiosity diffuse shading, normal mapped textures and a nose?
Blender, eh? I remember trying to learn what on Earth that was trying to do. Well, not so much learning it as trying to sneak up on it and catch it off-guard… Does Maya have Blender’s Original Flickering Interface Buttons that never display the same icon twice?
Welcome Steve!
It does come with Mental Ray which is capable of some pretty fancy stuff, so I might attempt the most elaborate rendering of a smiley ever, with radiosity, area shadows and reflection caustics!
Maya’s interface is happily a bit more intuitive than Blender’s, but I’m still getting my head round how to do simple stuff.