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Build your virtual world with Maya
TALK about Hollywood block busters, electronic entertainment or professional designing, 3D animation today has captured the imagination of viewers and developers alike. It has not only opened the gateway to express creativity beyond the imagination of computer artists but has also given visual media a new spice — yes we are talking about Maya!
Not every professional software designer has the ability to make a tool versatile and effective enough to conjure up a 3D work that meets the requirement of the thriving industries. There are only a few tools that dominate the developers. 3D Studio Max monopolized the market till Maya made its appearance. In only six years time, Maya has captured 50 per cent of the market with increase in its professional boundaries year by year. Its low price strategy has made it an affordable tool with a strong command over manipulating 3D graphics.
Features
Maya is a tool with immense power and is detailed right down to the core. Yet it has an award winning user interface which is highly customizable. It is designed for professional graphic design, and thus is not by reputation, a piece of cake. The level of complexity is acceptable for software that is so flexible. To make things easy for users, its package include a sample videos that guides you through the very basics of the tool. It has a very intricate modelling tool that allows the user to create and modify objects with ease and efficiency.
Designing in 3D with extravagant artistic look is very well done with the brush tools that allow you to actually paint in elaborate patterns, such as cloud, grass, fire or smoke in the 3D work space. It just takes you to choose a brush stroke which has various designs collections, available such as animal fur, clouds, electrical, glass, metal and a lot more. You can then design 3D objects by colouring the lines in. It also provides you with an option to dynamically simulate the most difficult yet most common objects to animate, such as liquids, furs and cloth. The features are specifically designed for real-time effects based on the physics that you wish to apply on these materials.
Cloth: Maya allows you to design your own cloth and garment specifying the physical attributes, such as texture and flexibility. This determines how the cloth will move as a whole garment under the influence of physical interactions with the body movement or wind. The cloth will gather, bend and twitch based on what material is simulated whether its raw silk, thick cotton blanket, woolen sweater or plain cotton drapery.
Fluids: You can also design fluids by giving them the level of viscosity, which determines how thick the fluid is. Viscosity and the volume of the fluid determine its motion under any force applied. You can then easily apply any oceanic skin to it. You can add ripples and bubbles to the liquid, or throw things in the liquid and make them bob up and down, all automated in Maya. Fluids include atmospheric gases, steam, waters in the form of calm oceans, rough oceans and foam, pyrotechnics such as fire, explosions and fluids with high viscosity such as molten lava or mud.
Furs: This category include hairs, furs, or likewise materials. You can give life to hair by specifying the degree of curliness, clumping, texture, thickness and all other attributes associated. Realistic looking effects are automated according to the specs given. You can make grass sway to and fro, curls bounce in the sunlight or watch thick fur part in high winds.
Wonders
Animators can thus add realism to their animations via the mathematics that create the animation be it the turbulence in the oceans, or the flow of silky hair in the breeze, without the effort that 2D animators had to go through in the early years of animation.
The rendering capabilities of Maya are not much to boast about. Realizing this, Maya provides a copy of “Mental Ray” (rendering tool) along with its own software. Another rendering tool “Renderman,” developed and used by Pixar animation studios (creators of Monster Inc. and Finding Nemo) makes a dynamic combo with Maya.
Maya is used in various professional environments. The gaming industry though dominated by Studio Max is slowly realizing the potential of Maya which has an open architecture API and Maya Embedded Language (MEL) which is a powerful scripting language. It can be used to direct figures associated with models and animation manually. Gaming icons such as Grand Turismo 3 and Final Fantasy series which is reputed to have produced one of the best in computer graphic cinematography, have borrowed the power of Maya to materialize their concepts.
Star Wars Bounty Hunter designed by Lucas Arts is the first game designed in Maya. The movie uses Maya software exclusively for the development of the character design, animation and the scenarios.
The multi-million dollar film industry relies on special effects that provide thrills to the cinema audience. Maya has proven itself to be the soul of special effects in Hollywood. One of the most realistic animations of our times can be seen in the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It is very difficult to make out whether the performance is camera recorded or machine rendered. And all this is done using Maya. The graphic works of Titanic, The Perfect Storm and Men in Black also owe their sinking ships and gooey extraterrestrials to Maya. Even Stuart Little was brought to life right here, and so were Hollowman and Spiderman. That's not all. The Oscar-winning computer graphics of Lord of the Rings and the highly appreciated Ice Age were also designed using you-know-what. The latest additions to the success are The Hulk and Terminator 3. There are a lot more block-busters that have used Maya but I'm sure by now that you should have fully comprehended the power of this amazing tool.
Before a car is made or a piece of machine is produced in bulk, a prototype of the deign is created. Previously, cars were carved out in clay or were hand drawn and painted from various angles. Now you can visualize what a car just like it will be when it is made. The graphics produced are so realistic that you can't differentiate between the real car from the computer designed model. The designers and engineers can materialize their concepts in 3D space and present them as high rendered images or full-motion animation. Maya gives a lot of support to designers for complex parts designs.
Maya is just not about big sized animations. You can export it in Shockwave to add 3D animations to your website giving them a cool and outstanding look.
The latest version available is Maya 5 which can be installed on Windows 2000 Professional (does not work on NT) or Windows XP, Linux and Iris. It requires a minimum 200MHz processor, and 256MB of RAM, however a minimum of 512 MB is recommended. A good graphics card with Open GL is also required.
On March 1st 2003 Maya was given an Oscar for scientific and technical achievement by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It is tools like Maya that will continue to revolutionize the world of entertainment and we will definitely see a lot more magic courtesy of AliasWavefront who have proven themselves to be the pioneers of 3D graphics technology.
The writer
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