Maya For Animation?

[whitedragon101]

I work for a (non profit) science research laboratory in image analysis and 3D data visualisation. Someone from the particle physics department wants someone to produce a 3D animation which will track particles flying from ground level earth into the solar system and back. The particles will be characters which will each have personalities and speak. It has fallen to me to do this as it seems my skills are the closest match. However, in truth I know animation is really a completely different skill and therefore I am a complete newbee to it. So my questions are:

Is Maya the right software for this task?
Will I be able to do it exclusively in maya, from making the models to doing the animation?
Exactly how hard is this going to be to learn Maya and make an animation like this?
Which version should I get?

Many thanks

[fortner_mike]

Yes, maya is the perfect tool for this i think. And yes you will be able to do all this in maya, but of course photoshop and something for post production would be useful as well.

How hard?..hmm..not verry hard...but time consuming..people say that you need around a year or two to get good at maya. But Since you can concentrate on just those aspects that you need, you should do much faster, few weeks maybe....

If you have 64 bit then get maya 8, otherwise i'd say get maya 7, as i heard rumors that it is better for animators then maya 8(the problem is that its 32 bit), and besides that maya 8 has very few new functions, and even fewer are really useful, and not super-advanced-hardcore users will most likely never use these functions anyway.

[joojaa]

Hmm not the 64 bit version is a bit unstable (mainly because the 64 bit drivers are not mature enough). Other then that maya 8 is definitively better than maya 7 in many areas. A bit unstabler on certain things than the 0.01 patch release of maya 7 but otherwise quite at par. But also linearly faster on multi core machines.

Mya 8 best features are invisible but fuilly multi threading gui is actually BEST possible upgrade to this date (why would i want gimics when i can get raw power, you hardly use gimics anyway, also the view ports are MUCH better with cgfx). Even max didn't have this yet and quite frankly its very significant step. Now my mayas directly about 40% faster over board. I mean without multitherading gui all the investment in new machines is vain.

Theres one or 2 features that are a bit usntable yes. But mayas now again very picky about harware some hardware mayas shaking like a leaf on others rock solid. (for example with the same driver as im supposed to use maya 7 maya 8 crashes every second but with the one that your supposed to run it does not crash noticeably often) Tough i dont model primarily anymore so the modelling part might be unstable not that i have noticed tough.

Then theres the small fact that you cant get maya 7.