[rescue] Maya Personal Edition/Mac available

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 08:51:47PM -0500, George Adkins wrote:

> > You could try Blender on it.  
> Yes, but to my knowledge, Blender doesn't even use the video hardware in the 
> machine.  I have other machines with faster cpu's and more memory which would 
> work better for Blender's all-cpu bound rendering.

OK, there are two types of rendering.  Real-time (or near real-time) previews 
and final images.  Both Blender and Maya use OpenGL for realtime previews.
Now, here is where there is a lot of mis-information.  Neither program uses
OpenGL for final rendering.  They just don't do it.  Not one bit, not at all.
I suppose they could, but the benifit would be so extremely minute that they
just don't bother.

So, while Blender isn't as nice as Maya (I'm taking that on faith since I 
haven't used Maya), it more or less takes the same advantage of that hardware
as Maya would (well, maybe it isn't as efficient with threads, I have no 
idea).  Only a really crappy programming would use OpenGL completely for final
output at this point in time.

> > You could put OpenDX on it. 
> What is OpenDX?  is this something I can do the same kind of animation with 
> that I could do with Maya or Blender? (guess I better Google it...)

OpenDX is very high end visualization software from IBM, available under the 
GPL.  This is the stuff used to make sense of the gigs of data pumped out by
things like finite element analysis (used for weather and crash testing), 
geo-seismic exploration, etc.  
 
-- 
Joshua D. Boyd