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Review
Installation & Documentation
Ease of use
Value for money
Price approx.	Free/USD $2000
Operating System	Mac OS X 10.2.4+
Available from	Alias|Wavefront

Every day we experience life in full-colour, multi frame-per-second, 3D animation. The highly capable processors in our head do a fine job of rendering what we see and translating it into meaningful information. Recreating the effect for others to see and interact with often involves whole teams of people such as film crews or 3D animators.

Lumps of plasticine can be brought to life with a bit of imagination and a stack of single-frame exposures. This approach, however, is limited in its ability to create complex scenes and interaction between objects in a scene. How do many of the computer-generated scenes we now take for granted find their way onto our screens in movies and video games?

Enter Maya
Alias|Wavefront, the producers of Maya, are not a household name when it comes to computer software. They do, however, have an enormous effect on our everyday life. Another of their masterpieces, StudioTools, is used by virtually every car maker worldwide and many other industrial designers to create designs for cars, shoes, vacuum cleaners and all manner of objects about our homes and workplaces. Maya is having a similar effect in the worlds of movie making and 3D animation.

Maya was put to good use throughout The Lord of the Rings alongside in-house software. The pod race scenes in Star Wars: Episode One were created using Maya. Pods were made up of hundreds of different elements that would break apart and interact individually with their environment during a crash. Stuart Little brought to life a four-inch, furry, computer-generated mouse with his own digital wardrobe that was animated to match Stuart's movements.

Seeing the results would suggest that using 3D animation software was easy. Far from it! This is one of those situations where computers complicate matters. Plasticine can be modelled quite simply - but try and create the same model on a computer and you will run into more than a few complexities. Like any software package, musical instrument or tool there is a learning curve and in the case of Maya, it is a fairly steep one. Obviously, to create a complex animation you are going to need some powerful tools at your disposal - Maya handles this extremely well.

Tool time
Toolbars and menus are customisable so only tools you require are available. Often-used functions can be recorded as editable scripts and called upon as needed. These scripts can be modified to suit different purposes. Not only are standard toolbars and menus available - there is a customisable toolbar (the Hotbox) that appears on demand at the cursor position. The required tool can be quickly selected, vastly reducing mouse travel and saving time. The Hotbox also allows you to turn off other toolbars creating more usable screen space.
Getting started in Maya is fairly straightforward. The desktop is clear, yet powerful and, of course, can be modified to suit your purposes. 3D animation involves a large amount of creativity and technicality. Maya's creative interface allows you to use visual tools to create your masterpiece. Alternatively, you can work in a technical interface with numerical colour values, xyz co-ordinates, scripting and programming. The final result will be a combination of the two.

Anyone new to 3D modeling and animation will find a large number of concepts and tools to get to grips with. Even if you are a seasoned veteran you may be surprised at how advanced this software package has become. Alias|Wavefront produce a book to accompany the software containing over 200 pages. It is not a 'how to' book, rather a guide on the basic principles of 3D modelling and animation and what can be achieved. It only covers a fraction of Maya's full capabilities but is still more than enough for most budding modellers and animators.

As you would expect, Maya is a hungry beast. Included are integrated tools for 3D modeling, animation, texturing, dynamics, lighting and rendering so you are going to need a fairly high-spec system to cope with the demands. The installer took a quick look at my G3 Powerbook and laughed. I felt quite inadequate.

Future proofing built in
It seems that Alias|Wavefront have considered every requirement for 3D animation and ensured Maya is capable of dealing with it. When it comes to gaming, we are still at a stage where the software is more capable than the hardware. Maya has this under control and can model accordingly. As the hardware becomes more capable, Maya can produce animations with higher polygon counts and now, Bezier and subdivision surfaces to provide smooth surfaces. (Of course, as we have seen on the big screen, Maya is fully capable of high-resolution, full frame rate animation.)

Most users will find Maya Complete more than capable for their requirements and only the more advanced users and film studios will need to plump for Maya Unlimited (that's where the small truckload of cash comes in). If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download Maya Complete from the website www.aliaswavefront.com for free.

Maya is an extremely powerful set of tools that is at least keeping up with animation demands and often leading the way. Stunning effects can be created reasonably simply and complex animations require only imagination and time. If you are serious about 3D animation, take a look at Maya before you make any decisions. It's not cheap, but there are no compromises on what it can do.

© Parkside Media 2003
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