[rescue] Maya Personal Edition/Mac available

[Brian Hechinger]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 10:58:47PM -0500, Joshua D Boyd 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.  that's cool.  i will definitely be getting that.

> 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.

> 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?

> 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.

> 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 

i need to win the lotto just so i can buy software for this damn thing.

> 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.

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.

> 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. :)

-brian

-- 
"Oh, shut up Buddha."  -Jesus Christ (South Park)