[rescue] Maya Personal Edition/Mac available

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 10:17:24PM -0500, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> first of all, what is this BMRT of which you speak?  details man!

http://www.exluna.com/products/bmrt/

Renderman compliant renderer, available for free.  It was used on A Bug's 
Life, Stuart Little, The Cell, Hollow Man, and Woman on Top.  
 
>ok, so the best route then would to be to use the Onyx for the actual creation
>of the animation and use the Challenge for the rendering.  ok, cool.  so now
>the thing to do would be to get BMRT on the Challenge and just shoot 
>everything over to it for the final render.  nice.  now i need to get that 
>setup.

This is a dual head onyx, right?  So, yeah, it would be pretty good at 
animation.  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).  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.

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 only free software available isn't going to take advantage of the video
hardware, and anything else is going to cost a lot.  I'm extremely slowly 
trying to do my part to fix it.  The thing that would help the most would be
for my school to resurrect 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.

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.


-- 
Joshua D. Boyd