[rescue] Maya Personal Edition/Mac available

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 01:05:01AM -0500, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 11:53:00PM -0500, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > 
> > 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.  
> 
> except that RE2 would probably stomp SI right?  also, i'd rather have a dual
> headed Onyx. :)  i really wish i could find one of those damn cardcages.

Well, if you are displaying images faster than the maximum refresh rate, what
is the point of being faster?

Seriously though, from an artistic point, the idea is to make your image with
the fewest control points possible.  So, NURBS are better than polygons (well,
kind of) and Subdivision surfaces are better still, and you have to be doing
extremely complex animation to make a good impact machine stutter.  Either 
that, or the software is badly written.

I've worked with 20meg models, which is extremely complex on max impacts with
out trouble.  I suspect that a lot of those polygons were hidden probably 
helped, but that is going to be the case with most redicoulously large models.
In that case, the model was from point data taken from scanning cryosections
(the model was aquired from Visible Productions who made it from a 
cryosectioned human).

But, if you have an Onyx, might as well use it, even if the boost is wasted
a lot of the time.
 
>so i could do all my work on the Onyx then click render and have the Onyx just
>use the Challenge automatically for rendering as well as itself.  nice. i like
>that a LOT.

Err, it would take a little scripting to make it work like that.  I'd recommend
doing it by hand initially.  Depends on the system you are using though.  If
you purchase Maya and are using MTOR (I don't remeber if that is free or not, 
but it connects Maya to Renderman compliant renderers) it will be a lot 
smoother than Blender would be.
 
> why couldn't i pick a cheap hobby?  :)

Cheap hobbies are boring.  Besides, there is a lot that can be done on the 
cheap.
 
>>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 even so, i'm not writing anything.  so what would my options be?

Well, then your only real option is Imagemagick and composite (included with
BMRT).  You might be able to script the gimp to do it, come to think of it.
Especially with the acid-gimp system...
 
>>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.
> 
> that's rediculous.  oh well.  life sucks sometimes.

Just need to find someone with a copy, and someone else who knows MIPS 
assembler really well.
 
>>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.
> 
> hmmm.  well the offer still stand if you are interested.

I'm sure I'll take you up on it sometime.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd