Digit 2005-04 - Clevernotions.com

1. Maya’s IPR has
been improved.
You can now make
changes to lights and
even cameras, to
rotate the view and
still get IPR updates.
Combined with the
Preview Raytrace and
full-on Render Globals
IPR settings this is an
excellent interactive
previewer that rivals
that of XSI.
Maya 6.5
3D modelling, animation, and rendering software
format Irix 6.5.15, Mac OS X 10.3, Red Hat Linux 9.0, SuSe Linux 9.1,
Windows 2000/XP
price Complete £1,449 plus VAT, upgrade £659 plus VAT, Unlimited £4,899
plus VAT; upgrade £909 plus VAT
company Alias, www.alias.com
contact Alias, 01494 441 273
minimum specs Intel Pentium III/PowerPC G4, 512MB RAM, hardwareaccelerated
OpenGL graphics card, 450MB of hard disk space
pros Satellite rendering, better Final Gather performance and much
improved IPR, all-round performance gains. Better file referencing
implementation.
cons Interface can be slow at times – on OS X you have to restart
the program periodically to regain performance.
Digit Rating
Alternatives
★★★★★
3DS Max 7 LightWave 3D 8 Softimage|XSI 4.0
aya’s improvement continues
with this latest release from Alias,
M though this .5 update is short
of radical new features. Most of the
boosts are to speed and performance.
The most significant feature is the
inclusion of Mental Images’ MentalRay
3.4 rendering engine. Alias have
continued to refine the integration
of MentalRay with Maya, and while
it doesn’t quite match the synergy
Softimage|XSI has with MentalRay,
Alias has done a good job of getting the
two programs to work together tightly.
The most exciting new feature in
the new MentalRay implementation is
Satellite rendering. Not only does this
allow you to farm out a batch render to
multiple CPUs over a network, it offers
parallel processing of any MentalRay
rendering you do inside Maya itself.
As long as you have network render
nodes available, as soon as you do a
test render in Maya (including IPR) the
load is spread across the network and
delivered back to the Render View as
if it was a normal local render.
The implementation is seamless.
This is not farming out frames to
different CPUs, but ‘buckets’ within
a frame. Print designers using Maya for
huge resolution stills can at last benefit
from additional networked CPUs.
The number of CPUs that you can
use is limited though, dependent on
your license. Maya Complete comes with
MentalRay rendering licenses for four
local CPUs and two additional networked
CPUs, while Maya Unlimited users can
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