Slashdot Mirror
Maya now Free for Personal Use
TeknoBilim writes "Alias
announced today that their leading software, Maya has become a free download for non-commercial applications. Thanks a lot, Alias. Now I can record the video for my next game. :)" This makes me wish I had talent. At least now I (and many like me) won't have to pay any money just to dabble with Maya.
Alias has offered this personal learning edition version of Maya for years now; they're just announcing that the latest release of Maya, 5.0, is also available in the PLE form.
Don't get me wrong--it's great that they do this. There's just no real news here.
The PLE version has a few limitations compared to the version you pay for, but they're really amazingly small in the grand scheme of things.
It watermarks all your images, and even some of the UI panels, making it next to useless.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Apparently they are only giving the Windows and OSX versions away, even though linux versions exist.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
At least several months ago, I downloaded Maya PLE... the free version, for those who want to learn how to use this powerful tool. Basically, the only thing that has changed in the past several months - aside from the upgrade from 4.5 to 5.0 - is that there's a neato newspaper article about it!
:D
Strangely enough, I downloaded v5.0 last night from the kind folks at Alias... no slashdot effect for me
-agent oranje.
It's not the full version of their software that's free, just the Personal Learning Esition of the software that they've been giving away since Feb. of 2002
Slashdot's already been there, in fact
You're looking in the wrong place. Maya 5.0 for Linux is available right here.
Bizarrely it was only this morning that I thought, I wish there was a free or cut-down version of Maya available. It would be a huge help for a small, non-commercial game that I'm working on as a hobby. And now my hopes have been answered! Sort of...
The trouble is that it's so cut-down that it can't really be described as "free for personal use". The watermarks prevent you from doing anything useful with what you create, even non-commercially. The lack of SDK and plug-in support prevent it from being used for non-commercial game development. It even uses a different, non-standard file format.
In my opinion, this is nothing more than an advert for the full version. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but please let's not give credit where it isn't due. There's no community spirit here. No generosity for non-commercial game developers who could really benefit from a free version of Maya. This is a 133Mb advert and the download is even set-up in such a way that you can't use a download manager without some tweaking.
Could have been great. Isn't.
Linux is primarily used on headless RENDER FARMS, clustered or network computers that simply do the number crunching. The editing/compositing is still usually done on an OS X or Windows platform (or, less often, Sun or SGI).
That isn't to say that Maya, which is available for Linux as a complete compositing workstation, isn't available for Linux -- it is. But, as a percentage of licenses, Maya for Linux is probably tiny. It doesn't make sense for them to develop the PLE version for Linux as well.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
Glad to hear a friendly voice.
e =documentation&file=index
Although Blender was always available zero-cost, it only became Free Software in September 2002. Since then, the new developer community have improved the documentation along with the code.
The interface is indeed quite unusual, but when you get used to it, it's very efficient with key bindings for most tasks.
You'll what you're looking for at:
http://www.blender3d.org/Education/
And there's more tutorials, articles, and docs linked from:
http://www.blender.org/modules.php?op=modload&nam
Ciaran O'Riordan
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Trust me, they don't. I bought 3 licenses for Maya 5. and had a ton of work done in PLE. I spent 3 days trying to get them to convert them for me. I'd have paid a lot for that, but no dice...
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