Join Date: May 2002
Nice Post philip !Originally posted by philip - liquid.arts
time to throw in my 2 cents I guess.
this kind of tool-loyality is pretty unique to 3D artists. I have never heard about 2 painters argumenting over the make of brushes they use like this. Looks like the companies behind those 3D apps did quite a good job at biasing their customers.
After all it's the artist not the tool that does great artwork.
I have seen crappy work done with 3dsmax and I have seen incredible work done with Blender.
That doesn't mean I don't have preferences. I certainly have.
When I started out with that whole 3D thing, I couldn't afford *any* of these packages, so I settled for Blender. Over 1 year I earned enough money doing 3D to pay for my rent, car and food and was finally able to purchase a more pro tool. But which one to go for? Maya Complete was 7500 USD back then, so it was clearly way out of my range. 3dsmax? Still pricey, but I played with a demo version and it was easy to set up a scene and render. I didn't even think of modeling anything though; too scary (all those panels and menus, Blender didn't have menus; I just memorized about 20 Hotkeys). Oh and that crappy Scanline renderer... So I wrote it off as an expensive plugin API. I was in need of a highend renderer; even with Blender I went for photorealism and had a tough time: no raytracing, shadowmaps limited to 2k and spots were the only lights that could cast shadows. Next was a demo of C4D. Oh boy, that GUI felt like a crappy plastic toy about to break. So I moved on to the LightWave galleries and got impressed real quick. I ordered my seat without even trying to model a thing in it; it didn't matter; that was the renderer I just plain *needed*. Full HDRI support, radiosity, 160 bit floating point render engine. Wow. And even the modeler worked for me. More than that; I fell in love with it almost immediately. Still the best poly modeler in my opinion (though Wings 3D looks impressive too). Notice that I skipped the part where I sat in front of my brand new LightWave for an hour, absolutely clueless. 2 different apps?? How do booleans work? Why can't I re-edit a curve after creation? But eventually I learned all of this. It's all about motivation, passion and commitment.
Anyway, I just recently added a seat of maya to my toolbox and am very impressed! The same day I finally received my serial number and authorization code, a|w announced to bundle mental ray for maya 1.5 with maya 4.5 for free. Wow. The way the maya interface can be customized and added to is unique. The ability to build shader networks in the Hypershade is incredibly useful. All in all maya feels like working very close to the code. Good thing. I'm still familiarizing with maya (due to time constraints) and am thinking up a "first project" but even so I feel it's easier to grasp than LW was when I started. I'm very eager to set it to work on something useful... will do it immediately after my next 2 or 3 gigs are finished. (oh, and a LW-maya-LW pipeline is pretty common in the indusry)
So, with this said, I believe max can't really keep up with these 2. The only advantage may be the availability of plugins and 3rd party renderers as I see it.
And there's more to a prog than just the code; the community. I still believe the LW community is very special and unique, but when I was so kindly invited to this board by Kevman I found out there's at least one very friendly and open minded isle in the sea of maya arrogance!
I posted a render done in LW in the forums and didn't get bashed. That's very special. I have seen maya boards where newbies get constantly flamed for asking "silly" questions. Lots of RTFM. They even advised newbies to search the web for 3 hours, read the manual, search the web again for 3 hours and only ask their question if they haven't come across the answer by then... excuse me your majesty, but what is a Q&A forums use then? If there are people experienced enough to just answer the question in a few seconds, why don't they do it? And if they don't bother to do so, why do they reply at all? Strange behaviour. I like to figure out by myself as much as I can, but I don't frequent forums where newbies are treated that way.
You have a very special place here. Don't break it.
(and forgive me for this lengthy post)
Join Date: May 2002
*edit* ok forget that question
anyone know how to install it? cos the instructions are confusing and I dont understand environment variables 
Last edited by Nem; 30-10-2002 at 08:30 PM.
Join Date: Jun 2002
Darkon
Red bellows of flame have blackened my stones
Convulsing my frame and cracking my bones
Hell's dragons of steel who roar in their chains
Crawl into my caves to suck out my veins.....
-The Mountain P.F.M.
Join Date: May 2002
ok, so its telling me I need to add a directory to some varibles
eg. IntstallationDirectory\mel to the MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH variable
but in the maya script path varialbe i already have something there, do i delete it and overwrite with a new one or something? one of them has a renderman path so i cant delete that if i want to b using renderman
Join Date: Jun 2002
I'm not gonna be home till the end of next week so I can't work with Liquid here. Now if you have to install the scripts into a different directory than Maya usually looks for them you have to edit that environment variable. You do that by opening the variable to edit, then add ";" (no quotes) followed by the path needed. That will tack on after the Renderman script path. I would try installing those scripts into a normal script directory first before editing the variable....less mess and fuss
Once you get this loaded you'll have to let me know how you like it
Darkon
P.S. If you screw up the path, you can always just delete the new part of the path and go back to the original by deleting from the ";" and on
Red bellows of flame have blackened my stones
Convulsing my frame and cracking my bones
Hell's dragons of steel who roar in their chains
Crawl into my caves to suck out my veins.....
-The Mountain P.F.M.
Join Date: May 2002
Join Date: Jun 2002
Darkon
Red bellows of flame have blackened my stones
Convulsing my frame and cracking my bones
Hell's dragons of steel who roar in their chains
Crawl into my caves to suck out my veins.....
-The Mountain P.F.M.
Join Date: May 2002
i just get really pissed off when i cant do something myself
Join Date: May 2002
Cuz as we all know the financial future of A/W and sgi isn't so terribly bright as it used to be
Join Date: Sep 2002
Man, I would surely want someone to enlighten me on all this A|W´s going down scenarios because this isn´t the only place I´ve read something about it.Originally posted by Silencer
Cuz as we all know the financial future of A/W and sgi isn't so terribly bright as it used to be
I mean, is it true? is it actually in a bad financial situation? I was under the impression that they not only selled their big VFX packet known as Maya, but also a great design tool StudioTools (which is slowly getting into all mayor cars companies), having said that, wouldn´t they profit from that? Almost all small VFX companies are migrating to Maya also, how is it possible they´re in a bad situation? ... my 2 cents are, they aren´t.
Having merged Alias, Wavefront and SGI back in 1995, with their software used in almost every blockbuster film (if not completely then at least parts of it), 27 field offices around the world, and their research department up (and running like crazy, testing new technologies like 2 handed modelling and shifting computer input paradigms) and actually looking for people (not laying them off -first sign something is wrong-) I find it hard to believe they´re doing bad.
Even Apple tried buying the company. They couldn´t.
(well, I guess so after seeing what they did with Shake)
I would certainly want to know though how they´re stock is doing, since I don´t have a clue ... perhaps we could better evaluate the company´s perfomance with it.
Bottom line is,
There´s still a lot of Maya in store for us in the future. (hell! I should get a tablet)
adldesigner
Caracas, Venezuela
Hell .. not gone perse, but with a certainly lower post count per day.
Last edited by adldesigner; 02-11-2002 at 08:43 PM.
Join Date: Aug 2002
Join Date: May 2002
Also, they slashed their prizes recently , and if they wanted to have the same business number as last year, the sales should rise with 400%, and i don't think maya has been sold that much this year...
But as mtmckinley said, it will never disappaer, but i know already one company who would get their hands on maya, and that's apple, who recently bought shake or another big compositing app.
sgi financial report
Join Date: Sep 2002
Well, I mean Apple can try but you do have to remember that A|W is a division of SG. If Apple does present such a terrible threat to SGI (I would think more of a threat all the incredibly cheap Windows workstations out there), they wouldn´t go crazy and sell A|W to Apple don´t you think? doing that would signify SG demise right? I mean, you wouldn´t actually sell your car knowing that the guy who you´re selling it too, will run over you as soon as he get´s the keys right?Originally posted by Silencer
But as mtmckinley said, it will never disappaer, but i know already one company who would get their hands on maya, and that's apple, who recently bought shake or another big compositing app.
sgi financial report
Hmm ... while writing this reply I found this link
I don´t know what to make out of this. Now.
<adldesigner goes into shortcircuit now>
I´m staying out of this thread for now, since I feel I might be trying to pursue a point of view which could be wrong. So, I´m going to investigate this a little further, I´ll tell you guys if I get a good grasp of whatever might be happening.
See you around people!
adldesigner
Caracas, Venezuela
Hell .. not gone perse, but with a certainly lower post count per day.
Join Date: May 2002
