[rescue] Maya Personal Edition/Mac available

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, George Adkins wrote:

> > 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.
> >
> Hmm, OK.  So Maya is no better than Blender in this regard?
> So that means I might as well just give up on Maya altogether, and running 
> Blender on this Onyx perhaps isn't a total waste after all? (someone reminded 
> me of the value of fast video when working with complex models...)

Blender is a pretty dencent package for learning comp. animation, although
the gui for it sucks a bit. But you can not beat the price! And it is good
enough for most amateurish 3d work.

Basically the creation of a computer generated animation involves 2 steps:

a) Modelling: This is where the gfx hardware is used (i.e. the RE2), where
you get to design the objects in the scene and assign properties to them.
I.e. materials, sources of light, motion, etc. The HW pretty much is used
to give a quick preview using OpenGL so you can create the scene in a more
or less interactive fashion. 

b) Rendering: Once the scene is defined, you can render the final image.
This process is more CPU intensive, since it is usually physically based
(i.e. modelling light rays and their interaction with the scene elements).
For very complex scenes you might spend a few hours per frame in the
rendering process... 


Hope this helps....