What that means in English is that it has every feature you can think of for an animation package and then some.Īs commercial software for professional animators, Maya is priced accordingly. New character animation features include switching between forward kinematics and inversion kinematics, quaternion-based IK, motion trails, ghosting and a jiggle deformer to wobble character muscles. Enhancements to the Maya nonlinear, motion-editing technology include time warping, character merging, drag-and-drop, and character set editing. Changes were made to rendering, character animation, brush-and-paint tools, and games-related functionality. Improvements in Maya 4 include enhancements, optimizations and bugfixes. Building and installing 4.1.0 with the accelerated RADEON driver is a story of its own-to be covered next month.įrom Steven Stahlberg's Animation Short Ariana For graphics we're running XFree86 4.1.0 with its accelerated open-source DRI driver on an ATI ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON. My hardware configuration is a homebrew Athlon 1.2GHZ, ASUS A7A266 motherboard, 256MB DDR, with 100GB of 7,200RPM IDE disk drives. My installation won't be on the typical Red Hat but rather on Debian Woody with kernel 2.4.7. Maya for Windows NT2000 first appeared in 1999, and the first Linux version was Maya 3, released in March with support for Red Hat Linux. In fact, Alias|Wavefront is a division of SGI. Maya 1 was first released in 1998 on SGI IRIX, where it is considered a killer application. Visible motion blur is a deliberate effect generated during rendering. Linus Torvalds described Maya 3 as ``the most complex and powerful 3-D graphics application ever to run on Linux.'' In this article, I review installing and using Linux Maya 4, point out resources on the Web of interest to Maya animators and interview the team who ported Maya to Linux.Įnemy Stuka from Universal Pictures' Captain Corelli's Mandolin. In the film industry, Maya is used for everything from photorealistic effects including Columbia Pictures' Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within to classic cel animation including DreamWorks SKG's The Road to Eldorado and The Prince of Egypt. Maya is a professional 3-D software package for creating digital content for movies, television and computer games. The Stukas flying in both of these summer movies are the creations of 3-D animators using Linux and Alias|Wavefront Maya at Double Negative, a division of Universal in London. Universal Pictures' Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Paramount Pictures' Enemy at the Gates both feature combat scenes with Stuka dive bombers, despite there being no flying Stukas in the world today. The high-end graphics application used by animators in recent films has a new Linux offering.
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