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Alias Releases Maya PLE 6
Renderhead writes "Alias has released the free Personal Learning Edition of their Academy Award winning Maya software. This limited version of Maya Complete allows students, hobbyists, and professionals to learn and evaluate the $2,000(US) tool absolutely free. The catch: all rendered output will be imprinted with a 'Maya Personal Learning Edition' watermark. Although Maya version 6 has been out for some time now, the Personal Learning Edition was only available for version 5 until now."
Available for Maya 6 on the Windows® 2000/XP Professional and Mac® OS X operating systems.
When last I contacted them they refused to believe you might want to learn their product on Linux and thus if you want Maya on Linux be prepared to shell out the $$...
As a Maya user since version 3.5, the latest 6.0 release is dissappointing, mainly because it seems to be more of a PR release than a real finished release. If you are unaware, SGI recently sold AliasWavefront to a holding company who'll likely sell it to another company sometime in the future. Shortly after this holding company aquired AW, they released Maya 6.0 (previous version was 5.01) breaking their tradition of using the .5 release (in this case 5.5) for bug fixes & general feature additions.
Maya right now is in the position to either solidify their market hold (which is pretty good) or lose it to its competitors, 3D Studio Max and SoftImage XSI. As of right now there are many low level issues (not quite bugs) such as the export/import skin weighting being broken, a debatable method of storing vertice information which makes it difficult to correct these issues yourself, built in IK-FK blending is broken, and so on. In addition they changed the documentation around (like they do w/ every new release), only this time they altered it to the way it was catagorized during v4.0/4.5 which IMO (and to most people I've talked to) is inferior to the interface in 5.
This doesn't mean Maya is bad but youd think that the company would fix these issues which have existed since (in many cases) since the first version. While I think the ocean generator is awesome, the new hardware rendering tools very useful, as well as the inclusion of the built-in Mental Ray render engine, and so on, a higher priority should be attached to these baseline issues which affect Maya often on the lowest level. I hope Maya 6.5 offers some solutions to these issues and we don't get another PR release. If AW does this again for a v7 release, I think they can expect to start losing users as these are the most basic of issues.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
I can't stand to use Maya PLE because that watermark also appears in the smooth-shaded window as well! Annoying as hell to work with.
If the watermark was just on rendered output then I'd be fine with it but having it right in the perspective window? Hate it. Won't use it.
For those of us that can't afford to buy Maya (and no time to try), what does Maya do that Blender doesn't?
Discreet did the same sort of thing with GMax. The binary files created with GMax are not understood by Max and GMax can not load .MAX files. They restricted MaxScript in GMax to prevent the user from creating disk files and prohibit GMax from running plugins that are not digitally signed by Discreet.