[rescue] Maya Personal Edition/Mac available

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 11:03:00PM -0500, Brian Hechinger wrote:

> > This is a dual head onyx, right?  So, yeah, it would be pretty good at 
> > animation.
> 
> no, it's only single headed.  i won't be able to dual/triple head it until i
> get the third cardcage.

Well, with blender it doesn't matter.  Were you actually able to afford Maya, 
I'd have it licensed to the Octane for dual head action.  
 
> > It would be a pretty good setup for doing simulated animation,
> > which isn't something that Blender is very good at (well, nothing is by 
> > default, but Blender's plugin system isn't flexible enough for really excelent
> > physics plugins).
> 
> what is the best thing to do that with then?

Maya and/or 3DS Max seem to be the most flexible with plugins. Houdini might be
good.  It makes Maya look cheap though, so I don't know too much about it other
than it is popular for procedural work.  Despite some truly amazing plugins 
(character studio and hypermatter in particular), I really don't care for 3DS
Max all that much.  I love Softimage, but it doesn't have the greatest plugin
engine from what I saw.

For the physics stuff, it is possible to have it done by outside programs, and
either merge the two sets of animation together before handing to rendering,
or import the physics into maya, blender, whatever.  It just requires more 
planning.

>>The Challenge would be best for rendering, but with BMRT
>>and equivalent packages you can use the challenge, the octane, the onyx, and
>>many other machines you might have all at once.
> 
> BMRT will do distributed rendering?  that would rock.

Any decent rendering system will.  BMRT will even act as a ray serving plugin 
to PRMan, which is difficult to explain, but pretty cool (although, PRMan also
is extremely expensive for machines like your challenge).
 
>>If you are trying to do really high caliber animation you will want to render
>>in layers, then composite the results. The onyx would again be best for this,
>>but the free software available isnt going to take advantage of the video
>>hardware, and anything else is going to cost a lot.  I'm extremely slowly 
> 
> i need to win the lotto just so i can buy software for this damn thing.

As long as you are compositing animation layers, the compositing software isn't
too hard to write (good rendering software exports alpha layers and hopefully
also depth buffers).  I am far closer to being able to do this well than I am
to being able to composite complex live video and animation together.

But generally, the software is shockingly, appalingly expensive for these 
beasts.  It makes operating a J90 look cheap.  Great compositing packages 
like Inferno cost upwards of $1 million.  Piranha costs $50k.  Etc, etc, etc.
 
>>trying to do my part to fix it.  The thing that would help the most would be
>>for my school to resurect their onyx so that I would have a decent machine to
>>work on in my downtime between classes, although this would technically mean 
>>that the school would own any software I wrote.
> 
> you are more than welcome to time on mine.  I don't know if you need to be 
> able to sit in front of it or not, but if so, i'm not too terribly far from 
> you.

Sitting at the machine is kinda important for this (if the software was 
written and I was just porting, that would be a different matter).  I can work
on this on linux, it's just that the time I can spare these days for working 
on it is Tuesday and Thursday afternoons when I'm waiting around on campus
between classes.  Most evenings are spent on homework currently.
 
>>Either the onyx or the challenge would be good for laying stuff to tape (the 
>>sirius board will work in either machine).  If you are really serious, it 
>>could be worth buying a regular deskside Onyx for video processing so that 
>>you can more whole heartedly dedicate the other to 3D performance. Then, just
>>drop the Sirius board in that machine.
> 
> hmmmmm. i'll have to actually start using the stuff on a regular basis before
> i can even think about doing that. :)

True.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd