Vincent, I don't know the pricing model for Maya, but I do know that porting Maya to NT will remove barriers to entry (ie. IRIX only) and increase volume as such. About Maya's TD orientation -- I think it probably the most consistant large product I've seen. A fairly small set of techniques used in most situations. Also the direct manipulation model (on screen manipulators) has been very popular with the rank and file users. Using a variety of techniques, the "pick/stroke" depth to each feature has been reduced to a nearly flat space -- with excellent "physical memory" reenforcement. As for "TD focus" -- this mean a TD (if they are smart) can configure Maya into a "task-specific" UI for the "sea-o-cubes" user. They see a simpler product, and get more animation done per man-hour. Yes that helps the big user more than the one man shop -- well, er, "show me the money" ;-). For the one man shop, to quoute the immortal Super-Chicken, "you knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred!" You want to do everything, go for it, you can! I think you'll find that pretty quickly, you'll started saying, "well I built some sliders, and dialogs for the high-level behaviors of the animation and ..."
BTW you can do some really cool stuff -- I've been doing a lot of user-level testing (hey, I'm paid to play!). Using the rigid body dynamics and the particles I built a non keyframed bottle rocket. The particles are emitted inside a combustion chamber in the direction I want the rocket to go. They bounce around inside and come out as exhaust, but the momentum transfer from the collision makes the rocket fly -- in a gravity field, the stick of the bottle rocket in stuck in a model of a coke bottle and guiding it through the lift off phase... launches into a beautiful arc. Real time playback, no precomputing. Very fun -- (Am I a propeller head or WHAT!) -- and I keep thinking to myself -- is this just an animation system?
Have you used the any of the Maya betas? How well do you know ScottD of MS3 fame? Don't spell it out in this forum, I don't want him mail bombed, okay? Ask him what he thinks, of Maya vs. MS3. (Sorry all for the inside reference.)
The steely-eyed missleman from Maya,
john |
