EXCLUSIVES

Maya Complete 5.0
Words by Trey Yancy
March 2004

It has been two years since the Macintosh® debut of Maya Complete; and a year and a half since the 70% price cut that repositioned it as a mass-market application.

Maya's Mac sales have since gone through the roof, accounting for approximately 25% of sales in the U.S. and some 20% of all Maya sales worldwide. While its $2000 price tag may not seem cheap to the average Mac user, there are few 3-D applications that provide more bang for the buck. Now at Version 5, the bang continues to reverberate.

New Features

Improvements are found throughout Version 5 of Maya Complete, including tweaks and new additions in such areas as modeling, animation, character setup, rendering, painting, and the help system. There are far too many new features to mention, but here are a few.

Modeling enhancements include the ability to extrude edges or faces along a curved path as well as extruding and chamfering vertices. The reduction of faces in polygons has also been improved, including reducing paint amounts and live updating. There is now a UV texture editor toolbar that displays UV subsets, allows you to copy UVs to another UV set, and provides you with the ability to smooth UVs while retaining texture placement.

As for animation, you can mute selected channels. Clip snapping has also been improved, and there are several improvements with ghosting as well, including local and selective ghosting not to mention a change in a ghost's color value as determined by the distance from the object. You can now move along rotation axes too.

Character setup now supports a variety of new constraints, the blending of IK and FK animation on the same skeleton, the ability to apply keyframe animation and constraints to the same object, and the ability to use a NURBS object as a sculpting tool.

Rendering improvements include the incorporation of the mental ray renderer into the application along with the integration of bake-sets, and a new hardware renderer with a level of image quality that in some cases can provide final delivery output.

Also new is a vector renderer that can generate stylized renderings such as line art and tonal art. In addition, there is now a unified render globals settings window consolidating global settings for the hardware, software, mental ray, and vector renderers.

Paint tools have been improved in ways too many to mention; but a sampling includes a new paint effects shelf; the ability to apply multiple strokes with the same brush; convert paint effects to polygons; a paint effects mesh quality window; assorted brushes including thin, line, and mesh; improvements in brush attributes including curl, bend, and twist.

There is also support for subdivision surface rendering, support for particle types, and extended support for IFF image format. There are new options for QuickTime® output and improved algorithms for IPR default light and texture to depth map shadow conversions.

The help system has also been improved and is now provided via a dedicated web server that ships with the application. It is dramatically faster and includes better search tools than with the previous help system.

Observations

The many improvements in Version 5 range from the mundane to the inspirational and veteran users will be eager to dive in with both feet. If current sales figures are an indication, however, most buyers of Maya Complete 5 will probably be new users - a group that will benefit from the following general observations.

The heads-up-style hot box and marking menus provide an elegant solution for accessing both standard and customized menu items; but this does not reduce the underlying complexity of the application. The capabilities of Maya are vast and so is the interface, which, thanks to the integrated API, can be expanded by developing specialized and extremely sophisticated tools.

Maya can be used in a jack-of-all-trades mode, but as the capabilities of the application easily exceed the skills of most users, true mastery of every aspect of the application is rare. As such it is most commonly used in a group environment populated by specialists who enjoy the ability to turn off irrelevant interface elements. The downside is that a novice can easily turn off something, such as a certain UV display mode, and then be unable to figure out how to turn it back onÑthis is largely due to the fact that many menu items do not toggle.

Whether you have a one-person operation or not, if you expect to get up to speed fast with Maya it is strongly recommended that you take one or more training courses. Maya's help system has been greatly improved and the application comes with hundreds of pages of PDF documentation; but there is a great deal more educational material available from Alias®, as well as boot camps, master seminars, and college coursework. There are also several third party manuals available from various publishers. If you are new to Maya or 3D in general, I suggest that you factor in the extra cost of supplemental training and/or materials.

Maya is also an application that requires serious processing power. Your three-year-old G4 may zip right a long with Photoshop®, but start drawing objects with Maya's Artisan painting tools and your former speed demon may come to a near standstill. If you want to do more than modeling and simple animation, you need a powerful machine.

As for the down side, there isn't much to say. Other than the above-mentioned turn-off problem, the only bug I encountered with Maya Complete 5 was an occasional problem with a blank channels window that was cured by a quick minimize/restore.

One last observation of Maya Complete is that it leaves the user hungry for the hair, cloth, and fluid effects features of Maya Unlimited^TM - a product that is available for Windows®, IRIX®, and Linux® but not the OS X flavor of UNIX®. Now that the G5 is here one can't help wondering when MU will appear on the Mac®.

Conclusion

Maya Complete is an extremely sophisticated application for creating animating and rendering 3-D content. It offers an integrated combination of capabilities unmatched by any application other than its $6,000 non-Macintosh big brother, Maya Unlimited.

Version 5 brings a number of important new features along with a virtual flood of tweaks and improvements that make it a must-have upgrade for existing users and make it all the more compelling to newcomers.

Maya Complete 5 for OS X > Pros: New and improved tools, interface tweaks Cons: Huge learning curve for 3D novices From: Alias Systems