Maya 5 Rules the 3D Animation Roost

By David Em

September 29, 2003

(Maya 5 Rules the 3D Animation Roost :  Page 1 of 1 )

Here's the story of the origin of computer animation: Fade in to MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in 1963, where a young graduate student named Ivan Sutherland is demonstrating a program he's written called Sketchpad. Sketchpad generates 3D coordinates that show up as moving dots and lines on a screen. Computer graphics is born.

Sketchpad ran on a computer known as the TX-2 that filled up a good-sized room, sported 320 KB of RAM, and stored up to 8 MB of data on a magnetic tape. The TX-2 had no OS—users rolled their own.

Now flash forward to a recent afternoon at the BYTE Media Lab. Sitting on a desktop is a freshly minted HP wx8000 workstation with over 10,000 times as much raw compute power, RAM, and storage space as the TX-2. That's progress indeed.

The evolution of 3D animation software is equally amazing. No commercial application better illustrates how far 3D software's come since Sutherland's Sketchpad kicked off the industry 40 years ago than Maya 5 from Alias.

The 3D Universe

The 3D industry's rife with competition. Heavyweights such as Discreet and Avid as well as smaller firms such as Maxon, Electric Image, and Newtek all market extremely capable products. But the combination of Maya 5's price, performance, and ease-of-use adds up to the best deal ever offered in computer animation's history.

Compared to Sutherland's Sketchpad, Maya 5's capabilities are astonishing. Maya's been used in Hollywood movies, television commercials, and interactive games to animate everything from Spielberg's voracious dinosaurs to Cameron's sinking Titanic.

You can model anything from humans to Mech Warriors to multi-legged insects, animate them realistically, and place them in any imaginable terrain, complete with gravity, wind, growing plants, and changing weather. You can light them with simulated sunlight or with indoor lighting models that accurately simulate how light bounces off walls. Or you can render them to look like Disney cartoons or hand-drawn illustrations.

 Page 1 of 1