Digit 2005-04 - Clevernotions.com

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render on up to eight additional CPUs.
So if you are a Maya Complete user with
a few spare PCs or Macs lying about you
can call them into service and potentially
double your rendering speed.
Installation and set-up of Satellite
is simple. You need to install and run
the Maya Satellite service on each
networked machine and be able to
connect to them from the main machine
on which Maya is running. A special
configuration file named maya.rayhosts
is placed in Maya’s preferences folder
with the names (or IP addresses) and
port numbers of the render slaves.
When you initiate a render, Maya
sends a request to the awaiting slaves
who churn through the data and pass
it back to the master machine. It’s
a fantastic addition to the package.
Data slaves
More improvements come in the form
of speed enhancements to various
areas, such as Artisan and 3D painting,
and various polygon operations including
poly reduction. Soften/Harden polygons
is still desperately slow, though, when
compared to other 3D programs. Obj
importing on Windows and saving of
.mb files over a network is now faster.
The latter will be especially important to
teams collaborating using Maya’s object
referencing. This has been enhanced in
Maya 6.5. The new system is more robust
and less prone to problems when making
or loading/unloading edits to complex
referenced hierarchies.
The new system introduces proxies.
This allows you to swap low-resolution
proxy files that you associate with each
referenced file. Proxies are easily loaded
and unloaded to allow you to optimize
the current scene for the job at hand.
Scene management can become
problematic when working with very
large data sets, so some kind of proxy
system becomes essential. However,
the Reference manager window could
be easier to use, since it puts the
load/unload commands in sub-menus
when a simple check-box button would
have been more direct.
Despite the countless speed-ups
and improvements, which seem to be
the main thrust of this upgrade, Maya’s
general interface operations can still
be on the slow side. Changing interface
layouts tends to be sluggish, as does
accessing marking menus and the
hotbox. It’s only a second or so delay
but when these operations occur many
times in a session it becomes frustrating.
Similarly, loading data into the
Attribute Editor can take a second or
two, and this is a pain. The issue of a
general slowdown during a session on
Mac OS X remains. The workaround is
to save, quit and restart Maya.
Generally though Maya 6.5 is
a decent – if not earth-shattering
– upgrade. For many users there
will be some bugs crushed or an
improvement in performance that
makes the 6.5 upgrade worthwhile,
but apart from the referencing and
Satellite rendering features don’t expect
a whole lot of new goodies to play with.
Simon Danaher
2. Maya 6.5 features built-in FBX support for
transferring animated characters between
it and MotionBuilder, or indeed any program
that supports the FBX format.
3. File Referencing has been improved together
and a new Proxy system introduced to allow
low-resolution substitutions to be made in
complex scenes.
4. Final Gathering has been improved in 6.5
so that you need only 1/10th of the FinalGather
samples that you previously required in order
to get the same quality results.