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."

Comments

Re:But if your using Linux your outta luck

[NanoGator]

"The first point is that there is a lot of 3D done in maya under linux."

Sort of. It's used in studios a lot. That's not the same as saying that all those artists run Linux at home, which is coincidently where PLE would mostly be run.

" The other point is that maya ple is a response to max equivalent edition and not an effort to develop a new user base."

It's not to develop a new user base? Untrue. If you're an aspiring artist, you're not going to be able to drop thousands of dollars on something like Maya just to figure out if it's what you want to do. Your only practical resort is to use pirated versions of the software. The companies aren't big on this sort of thing, so they make the learning version to alleviate demand for their warez. It is very much a 'broaden user base' tool. It isn't very practical as much else considering the watermarking that is involved.

"Your point about cost is of course part of the situation but is not worth much if you don't put it in perspective with those 2 others."

No, sorry, you haven't defeated my point at all.

"So i guess you werent that realistic in your comment either."

Wrong. I'm very active in the 3D art community. There's been little to no mention of the lack of a Linux version of PLE. The simple reason is few people are even running Linux at home. There's barely any excitement over Lightwave getting ported to Linux. It falls under a 'would be nice' type of thing, but most of those people are thinking about render farm units that are $300 cheaper sans Windows. Don't need a PLE of either app for that.

Re:Blender

[zarthrag]

Being an industry standard for the most part helps. But I think the fact that it's a several thousand dollar piece of software helps.

But seriously, Maya is much more widely known than Blender. More importanly, It has a VERY large market share and a community to go with it. Head over to 3DBuzz and check out all of the FREE training videos you can get, which I watch religously. (Then look for the blender section.) Living out in the middle of nowhere, I can't get easy access to blender training materials terribly easy, or Maya either, for that matter. Being in a 5 person development studio doesn't give me time to learn 5 envrionments - I'm just a programmer! (Albeit a programmer who isn't afraid to trace..err...draw sometimes.)

As it was said earlier, if you're serious about 3D you have to go with at least one big name renderer sometime - especially in a career.