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

But if your using Linux your outta luck

[Ryquir]

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 $$...

Re:But if your using Linux your outta luck

[NanoGator]

"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 $$..."

Refused to believe one would want to learn on Linux, or wasn't convinced enough people were running exclusively Linux for it to be cost effective to make PLE available?

I know it's fun to aim our pitchforks at people for not supporting Linux, but be realistic.

Re:yes yes, but to the important question allready

[NanoGator]

"Then Blender has to do, for 'US' ... I guess ...."

Blender != Maya. If you're just interested in tinkering with it, then that's a fine solution. If you're actually interested in developing a career, then you're far better off just dual booting into Windows and running Maya PLE. Frankly, the OS doesn't matter a whole hell of a lot when doing this stuff for a living. It's the wrong place to cross your arms and say "It's Linux or nothin!"

Maya 6 is a bit dissappointing

[quantax]

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.

BAH!

[escher]

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.

Blender

[craigmarshall]

For those of us that can't afford to buy Maya (and no time to try), what does Maya do that Blender doesn't?

Re:Blender

[black mariah]

Practically everything. Far better modeling, texturing, and animation tools. Import/export without the use of incredibly cumbersome scripts. No reliance upon scripts to do simple as fuck tasks (see aforementioned import/export). Hair, GOOD particles, excellent physics... there's a LOT. Anyone that tries to tell you Blender is even in the same league as Maya has never used Maya or any other high-end 3d app. Period. Blender is total shit compared to those programs.

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.

Re:Development machines?

[Quarters]

MayaPLE (at least v5) can not read files created with Maya (V5 or earlier). I would assume that this still the case in 6 and that Maya can not read PLE files. Additionally, there are probably restrictions in the EULA to prevent you from using PLE for commercial purposes.

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.