A review of Alias Maya 6.0
Maya, a meshers wet dream. When i first saw the tutorials for Maya i couldn't wait. Then i saw the price and realized i had no choice :). Alias Maya also grew up in Canada, right down the road from Kinetix. Maya later merged with Alias Wavefront, several companied jumped into the same boat and Alias Maya was born. Hugely loyal, Maya has a lot of followers. Plus some big movie titles behind their belt.
Maya comes in three varieties. Firstly, the learning edition, Maya PLE. You can download it right now from http://alias.com. The package is free and will let you use the application, but you can't render it. You can but it's got a watermark. PLE does a great job of hooking you in and my hat's off to Alias for really coming through on some solid well-conceived training videos and tutorials. Maya wants to be learned!
After being firmly sick of the watermark, i set my eyes on the next Maya package, Maya Complete. Don't let the name full you. Maya Complete really means, Maya Uncomplete. You give alias.com $2000.00 and they will not let you do something as simple as a boolean substraction(*) on two objects. If i am wrong, please someone tell me i am!!! I was so bummed. Maya Complete let's you find out just how many features are NOT in it. First off, Maya is rather vague about which features you get and which you don't on their website. I still like Maya the program, if it weren't for the major missing pieces i'd probably stay in Maya forever. But without Maya unlimited, taint gonna happen.
Homer has donuts, i have Maya Unlimited. This baby's got it all! Did you know a program exists out there which will let you animated a screaming chicken through a school hallway! Best off all you the feathers actually react to the chicken running, pieces of clucky chickeness bounce off the walls and settle to the floor, only to have the Chicken come by and rustle them up again the next round! Maya Unlimited truly is an unlimited application. I wish i could say more about it. But i don't have it. According to all the things Maya Complete can't do, it must be great though. Maya Unlimited sells for $7000.00 at the time of this writing.
In closing, if you actually read this, and the Max review, you may be stuck with an impending money wallet vortex thing. Welcome to the club! Till you strike gold, consider the other applications out there. If nothing else, it shows you how much had to go into the top of the line 3d programs out there.
Update, Antonol was nice enough to correct me on a few things. You can do boolen operations in Maya Complete, they are placed in the "Polygon" tab (and no you cannot do booleans with NURBS, there are other tools though). Maya Complete lacks Fluids, Fur/Hair, Clothes and Maya Live. All the other modelling, rendering and animation functions are virtually the same. Infact as you might have noticed Maya Complete and Unlimited install from the same files and the only thing that dertermines what you get is the License key.
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